Conversational Meeting Facilitation Techniques
As Project Manager, you’re accountable for the project work getting done. How do you facilitate the murky offline work via meetings and notes?
Project meetings are messy and often,
- You may know less about the technical work than the project team,
- virtual meetings mean participants are multitasking,
- there are standstills for tasks that can’t be completed right this moment but that are critical to start soon,
- you need to manage the meeting time and deadlock questions of do we do this this way or that way chew up time.
- It’s essential for the PM to provide a shared project vision.
These steps will help you successfully facilitate the conversation, achieve project goals and provide a shared vision with the team.
1. Prepare Your Notes.
At the very least, you should start the meeting with notes that help you capture and lead the discussion. Project notes need designated sections for the meeting Agenda, Action Items (that you want to cover in the meeting), Discussion, and Next Steps.
If you have your Agenda and Action Items, they can provide the skeleton of the discussion. Even more, it can be helpful to use those to write out direct questions that you want to ask in the meeting. If you don’t have an “assignee” in mind for the answer, ask who would know the answer — who here can tell me about …… ?— then record it in the notes with the answer. Based on the information offered up, you can ask that person or the rest of the group, what are the next steps then?
2. Ask and Listen.
Sometimes you ask a question and no one answers. Wait a moment for the question to simmer, even if it’s awkward. Then rephrase the question, making it simpler if you can. There needs to be questions from the facilitator, but you must give space for the answers to emerge.
I’ve caught myself struggling with phrasing my questions before — A lot of things make sense in my Kentucky brain that are lost on the people I work with. Take it slow and try to get the question right so that your team knows what you need.
Sometimes PMs don’t ask the right question and that’s an opportunity to ask the team. If I’m not asking the right question, what do we need? or Given what we know, what’s next?
If your questions are still not moving the discussion, you can either ask them to validate what you’ve written in your notes or mark the question to check in on later. This is where sharing your screen to show your notes is key. People get lost even if you’re facilitating well — give them something to look at together as an activity.
But consider it a goal to always do something with a topic, even if it’s logging it for later.
3. Keep Decision and RAID Logs.
What do you do with questions or issues that can’t or don’t need to be resolved right this moment? Add them to the Decision Log or RAID Log. I would say you probably need one or the other and it may be the thing that moves the project along because it takes something complicated and reorganizes it as something that’s basically binary.
So let’s say that the project team needs to decide to keep Current Software A or migrate to New Software B. The effective way to park this question for a later meeting is to log it with other important questions in a Decision Log.
That can be a designated Excel sheet or table in MS Word with columns for the Decision Name, some notes about our options, a Due Date, an Owner for that decision (assign these to someone if you can), and Decision Status (Not Started, In Progress, On Hold/Stopped, Completed).
Depending on your project, you can add a column for outcomes or whatever else helps define the decision outcome.
When you start a project at zero, Project Plans emerge from my meeting notes because once open questions become logged decisions with a due date, those can be sequenced out as milestones in the project plan.
- Remember: a deliverable can be a decision or a result, not just a product or service.
RAID Logs can be used similarly, but are often kept more to the chest of the Project Manager. RAID stands for Risk, Assumption, Issues, Dependencies. You can break down decisions or considerations as the RAID categories, but the point is definitely to have a column for the decision or action in this case.
4. Use Mediation Skills.
Project Meetings should be a safe space to get topics out in the open and determine meaningful action as a team. The important word is team. That means there’s a group of people which means consensus is hard.
To reduce friction, you can always log decisions for a later time as I mentioned above. You can both put a pin in the argument and move toward constructive conversation at the same time. Passion means that people care about their work. Instead of diminishing someone’s opinion, diffuse the tension by capturing it and then opening the discourse up to other people. Is this an issue that other teams are affected by? Who else has experienced this issue? Were we able to resolve that in the past?
Guide the team toward collaboration despite their differences by asking them to help you as facilitator put together a chart showing the considerations for the different options (a column for option A and for option B).
I can see this is an ongoing conversation. Let me just make sure I got the main ideas. Here is what I have for Option A and here is what I have for Option B. Does anyone think I should add anything?
Also, if things are getting heated between warring factions, you can end it by saying when do we need to come to an agreement about this? and then to further diffuse, ask that they keep you honest in the notes.
5. Rely on the Notes. Again.
This is actually really important. When you finish a meeting, review and revise your notes to make them useful to the team and managing the project overall. If you still have a question after the meeting, use the notes as a reason to engage someone from the project team to get clarity.
This isn’t just helpful as a meeting recap, but it gives me comfort during the meeting. I know that even if I mess up or don’t think of something while I’m on camera, the notes can keep the progress going. The project doesn’t rest solely on my performance in the meeting and my facilitation skills don’t end there. How I package everything for the team and continue to be of service to their work is just as important.
