One of my favorite things to do is facilitate a small or large group meeting. I know it may sound completely crazy to some, but I am totally energized by active discussions and participations, “aha” moments and seeing a group move to collective action and a plan forward. While these skills are also important in […]
Facilitating Online Meetings: How are they different? Read More »
The past two weeks we have discussed some ways to simply, efficiently and effectively evaluate your coalition. The first evaluation post focused primarily on reflection and the second evaluation post, we highlighted who to ask. This week we are focused on three of my favorite questions to ask when evaluating a coalition. These questions can
Coalition Building: Evaluating your progress Part 3 Read More »
How many times have you been part of a coalition and you struggled with actually getting anything accomplished? Conversely, how many times have you been part of a coalition that was able to follow-through with commitments and keep the group moving toward common objectives? While there are many factors that can influence these situations, one
Coalition Building: Staff vs. Volunteers Read More »
Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success Henry Ford Leading and managing a coalition, partnership, consortium or any other kind of organization where individuals or people representing organizations come together to coordinate efforts and achieve shared goals is not easy. And, it’s not a one-time task – it
Guest Blog: Nine Habits of Successful Comprehensive Cancer Control Coalitions Read More »
As coalition leaders, we can become concerned that we are leaving people out and have a tendency to want to invite everyone to every meeting. While this may be important if the primary purpose of your meeting is networking and coordination, this can be really challenging if the purpose is more narrowly defined. How do
Effective meetings: The People Read More »
We have spent the last 15 weeks on facilitation and are transitioning for the next four weeks to “effective meetings”. Facilitation and effective meetings are very linked. As a matter of fact, in order to have an effective meeting, you must have effective facilitation. However, facilitation alone will not make your meeting effective. This week
Effective meetings: The purpose Read More »
As I mentioned last week, every group has dominators and quiet voices. As important as it is to pull out quiet voices, it’s also very important to address the dominators with grace. They are dominators for a reason. They may be particularly passionate about a topic, highly extroverted, very engaged and wanting to contribute or
Facilitation: Addressing dominators with grace Read More »
Every group has dominators as well quiet voices, and as a facilitator, it is important for you to find ways to pull out quiet voices. This isn’t always easy! There may be power dynamics (position, gender, race, education and more), new members who aren’t yet comfortable sharing their perspective, introverted members who would rather not
Facilitation: Pulling out quiet voices Read More »
If you have been meeting with one of your teams, workgroups or committees for a while, there is a good chance the group has become weary and may also be experiencing burnout. This can be true even if you have had some great successes as a group! If you are having lower attendance than usual,
Facilitation: Group that is weary and experiencing burnout Read More »
Facilitating groups can be extremely rewarding but they can also be extremely exhausting. One of the situations that makes facilitation particularly exhausting is when there is a lack of trust among group members. This may be trust among just a couple of group members between one another or it may be a lack of trust
Facilitation: Lack of trust Read More »