How to – Take the Right Role When Leading Your Meeting The skills you need to accomplish meeting objectives in a minimum amount of time and with a maximum interaction and creativity are quite diverse. You must develop ways of promoting more effective interactions among meeting participants, while getting the results you want.

Your personal process capabilities may not be up to the task. It’s critical to identify behaviors that are likely to result in facilitator derailment, and build a base from which to you can support your team members. For greater freedom to understand, access, enjoy and use the creativity of your team, be clear about what role you need to take on and when..

Lead - One that directs by influence; to be the head of
Leader -The person who manages the team: calling and facilitating meetings, handling or assigning administrative details, orchestrating all team activities, and overseeing preparations for reports and presentations.

The team leader should be interested in solving the problems that prompted this project and be reasonably good at working with individuals and groups. Ultimately it is the leader's responsibility to create and maintain channels that enable team members to do their job.

Effective leaders share their responsibilities with other team members and trust their groups to arrive at the best answer, giving team members a chance to succeed or make mistakes on their own. They understand that the lessons members learn from the experience are stronger and last longer than those from having the leader telling them what to do.

Advise: To give advice; to counsel; to inform
Advisor - Like team leaders, advisors will ordinarily have more expertise than the team members. Their job is to help members discover for themselves what the answers are, not dictate answers to the rest of the team.

Advisors are neither leaders nor members. They are "outsiders" to the group in many ways, and can maintain a neutral position. One of the most important aspects of this role that arises from this neutrality is to observe the team's progress, evaluating how the team functions, and use these observations to help the team improve its process.

An advisor's second focus is instructing team members in the technical tools and helping to guide the team's effort when technical expertise is needed.

Advisors rarely, if ever, run meetings, handle administrative or logistical details, or carry out between-meeting assignments such as data gathering. Advisors work primarily work before and after team meetings in conference with the team leader. That is when the two discuss the team's progress and try to find ways to improve the processes by which the team works.

Advisors are well versed in the tolls of and concepts of the issue at hand, including approaches that help a team have effective, productive meetings. They do not participate directly in the team's activities.

Facilitate: To make easy or easier
Facilitator - Psychiatrist Dr. Carl Rogers outlines a different theory of learning, placing greater emphasis on the learner's involvement in the process, and identifying the relationship between facilitator and learner as the primary ingredient in the process. The instructor is a facilitator rather than a stimulator or controller of the learning process.

Facilitators are:

* Less protective of their own constructs and beliefs than other "instructors",
* More able to listen to participants,
* Able to accept "troublesome, innovative, creative ideas which emerge in participants.

Facilitation allows participants to make responsible choices about the direction of learning, which means living with mistaken choices as well as correct ones. That is part of the learning process.

When we have clearly identified to participants, the goals that will produce "approval", then you can function, not as a showman who goes to great limits to attract and maintain attention, not as policeman who hands out tickets to transgressing participants - but as a facilitator who leads adults to pleasant acquisition of new ideas or skills.


A nationally recognized management development training consultant, speaker and author, Joni Daniels is Principal of Daniels & Associates, provides solutions to training needs and conducts programs on personal and professional development. As a Consultant to Fortune 500 companies, she has successfully addressed a variety of audiences, written a wide range of articles on professional issues, serves as a resource for business publications, TV, and radio. Joni is frequently quoted on management topics and is the author of “POWER TOOLS FOR WOMEN®: Plugging into the Essential Skills for Life and Work,” (Three Rivers Press, 02/02) and, Reach her at www.jonidaniels.com

Labels: faciliate, leadership, objectives

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