Facilitation means ‘to make easy’. If you want a bit more color on that, here’s how we currently think about it…
Your Questions
How do you make quiet people feel safe to share? Those people who avoid talking and even if I ask them, they always say pass?
Jenna - Agile Scrum Master
There’s nothing quite as bad as ‘enforced participation’. Forcing quiet people to speak up against their will is something inexperienced facilitators sometimes do in a naive attempt to tick the ‘everyone contributed so I must be doing a good job’ checkbox.
When thinking about quiet people in meetings, it’s important to ask some fundamental questions…
Are they getting value from the meeting simply by listening? I.e. who gets to define whether the meeting is valuable for them or not?
If shyness / fear is an obstacle to contributing, what is the source of that fear?
Are there tools missing that would allow them to feel safer in contributing (perhaps they need more thinking time or to have access to the meeting materials before the meeting)?
Is a meeting the best medium to help them express their thinking? Would they be better off writing up their thoughts or making an audio / video recording?
If brainstorming, is there a solo step that carves out space for individual creativity? Not everyone learns interactively.
Any simple tips to start changing old school meeting culture of large meetings and all decisions by committee?
Claire - VP of HR
What’s most interesting about this question is how the two ideas are related. An outbreak of ‘meeting bloat’ (where more and more people show up for more and more meetings) is often found in organizations that also suffer from decisions-by-committee.
When accountability is unclear (and the culture is instead one of collective responsibility), people feel like they need to understand and weigh in on every decision. Meeting ownership tends to be weak in these circumstances as conveners don’t feel accountable for (and therefore authorized to) dictate the scope, agenda and attendance of gatherings.
Transforming such a culture often involves very deep work with leaders to reset the culture back to one of clear accountability. That said, there are few simple things that can be done to help nudge things back in that direction…
Characterize meetings of more than three people as broken if they don’t have an agenda published in advance. Broken meetings should be fixed or killed.
Every meeting should have a meeting owner (facilitator) who keeps the meeting well-paced, on topic and ensures there is a written followup (even if they’re not the ones doing the writing). Everyone should work hard to support their role.
If there are decisions to be made in a meeting, make it clear who’s ultimately accountable for that decision before discussion ensues. Timebox that discussion.
Periodically ask for feedback as a meeting owner. Questions like “how might we replace this meeting with an email / doc?” are especially useful.
If you’d like to learn more about good meeting culture and facilitation skills, check out our Fix Your Meetings program.