Facilitation for Leaders and Managers

This workshop is designed to give participants the skills and tools necessary to create and facilitate meetings or sessions which are engaging, effective, and results driven. This is an intermediate course which focuses on understanding the core elements of facilitation, development of a session, and hands-on exercises.

Why is this Workshop Different?

Have you ever attended a meeting (workshop, session, tag-up, etc) and thought, "what a waste of time - we got nowhere" or "not sure why I was invited"? Conversely, have you ever attended a meeting where you left feeling motivated and energized? The difference - likely - was the effective facilitation by the leader. This workshop gives you specific tools and exercises to use during your meetings to promote successful outcomes. This course is highly experiential, requiring participants to apply the skills and best practices during hands on exercises and role plays. In fact, participants are encouraged to bring real-work examples from their own experience.

Who Should Attend?

This highly experiential seminar is designed for Leaders & Managers responsible for getting individuals, teams and organizations: focused, creating, agreeing, deciding, achieving, or just plain - together. Leaders & Managers of varying responsibility and level would benefit from gaining skills necessary to create a positive, productive environment for their team. This seminar will help in facilitating groups of any size or composition. Ideal candidates include:

• Project Managers... who are required to manage personnel, schedules, expectations, and results
• Proposal Managers... who are counted upon to manage a diverse team, operate with a high degree of efficiency, and deliver critical new business
• Department Heads... who must adeptly lead personnel, drive organizational objectives, reduce cost, and mitigate risk in a dynamic business environment

Why Should You Attend?

Effective meetings rely on diligent planning, clearly defined focus/goals, and efficient facilitation. The seminar is grounded in the fact that effective preparation and facilitation ensures that mission-focused results are attained. It provides Leaders & Managers in both the commercial and Government sectors a foundation of: facilitation best practices and skills, a toolkit of effective methods and exercises, and a clearly defined process to follow. If you would like to run more efficient, dynamic sessions or meetings, this is the course for you.

What to Bring/Prepare:

• A laptop with Office 2007 (or later).
  
• Before arriving at the course, make note of two to three real-work examples of meeting types you facilitate, challenging experiences you've had, or sessions you have been to that could have been better facilitated.

Workshop Description:
The primary focus of the training is to understand and learn basic concepts, skills and processes first. Those skills and knowledge are then applied to various types of meetings, seminars, interviews, one-on-ones, and the like. And finally, participants are given the opportunity to apply their newly honed skills and techniques on their REAL WORK.

The four themes throughout the one day session are:

1. Understanding what facilitation really is and what facilitation can accomplish (training, consensus, meeting, teamwork)
2. Emersion in the theory behind successful engagement (individual and group behavior, dynamics, concepts, how people learn)
3. Application of facilitation skills (developing the session design, refining personal meeting style, recognizing patterns, etc.)
4. Creation of experience (energy management, leveraging exercises, understanding what makes information "sticky")

Contents covered - click here.