When you’re facilitating a meeting or a workshop, you have to be adaptable. There is no single approach that works every time. It depends on the group and their character. Even the same group on a different day (or a different hour!) can behave very differently because of their energy levels, priorities or motivation.
When the group behaves differently, or when they have different goals, you have to adjust how you behave. There is no single right way to handle a quiet group, for instance. But there are some common challenges you might face, and some ways to handle them that you can try.
This resource gives you some situations, and some approaches that you can try to move the group forward. Some of the ideas contradict one another! One group might respond best to one approach and another group the opposite approach.
Group needs to explore ideas
- Sit back
- Stay seated
- Be quiet
- Leave the room
- Ask for clarifications and definitions
- Take the group for a walk
- Ask small groups to each explore the same idea and then compare them
- Brainstorm
- Take one idea and keep generating more and more detail
- Call the group back to their purpose or goal, ask them how what they’re exploring relates to that
- Guide the group out of their old patterns, ways of thinking and what they’ve done before
- Offer a “prize” for the craziest, physically possible solution
- Offer a “prize” for the solution that is most different to the way they currently do things (they vote)
- Present a different model or approach
- If you start discussing options, ask “why?” and “why not?”
Group needs to choose one idea
- Define who actually chooses – if it’s the group, great, if it’s not, don’t get into a fake choice for appearance’s sake
- Ask for lots of ideas
- Discuss the criteria – what makes a good idea? (new product, new project, etc)
- Discipline the group – “look, you have to make a choice here!”
- Be firm on the timeline and need to get the decision made
- Build trust to allow members to express their real opinions on the ideas
- Push them to choose
- Double-check and demand clarity over the choice that’s taken
- Challenge silence and don’t take it as agreement or assent – agreement must be positively shown
- Voice fears or dissent that are not being raised
- Actively lead the discussion
Group is not functioning well
- Return to easy, lower risk, trust-building activities
- Revert to pairs or small group discussions
- Build up to bigger activities, if absolutely required (often they are not)
- Ask the group to identify the big issues that are not being discussed (elephants in the room) and then discuss them – often plenary is best to make it transparent, but brings timing challenge
- Call it out
- State what is not functioning
- State the likely consequences (immediate ones for the goals of the meeting, generally avoid dramatic longer-term ones)
- Show your frustration, disappointment or other appropriate emotion. These emotions are occasionally appropriate and useful as a facilitator – “I’m kind of ticked off with you as a group right now, because you’re not respecting each other’s points of view”
Group is going round in circles
- Refocus the group on the goal
- If an issue has been discussed for some time and no solution is forthcoming, suggest a separate meeting just on that (could be over lunch, could be a different day or event entirely)
- Ask how this contributes to achieving the meeting objectives
- Suggest a line-up, thermometer or sticker voting approach to gauge group sentiment/agreement
- Stand in the middle of the room (if not doing so) to draw the group’s attention and state that it looks like they are going round in circles and they need to resolve the issue and move on
- Ask questions like – if we needed to solve this issue right this second, what would we do?
- State to the group what is being lost from the rest of the agenda by spending extra time on this.
- Invite final comments and just move it on, saying that you will discuss and decide how to handle it with the team later
- Alternatively, ask the group if they really want to continue this discussion given what they are not covering
- Take a vote if needed
- If they want to continue, ask them how much more time they want to spend on it and hold them to that
- Remember, it is their meeting, and you are helping them to achieve their aims. A big part of that is reminding them of what they wanted before the meeting started and what they need to do to achieve that. But if that changes, that is their choice!
One or two group members are dominating a discussion
- Split up into small groups or pairs
- If you have two dominant people, but them both in the same group
- Ask the dominant person to act as a resource or observer and then ask them for their comments towards the end of a session or debate
- Ask the person to be a co-lead or facilitator
- On one hand this makes them feel listened to and important, which is often one of the big drives for this behaviour
- On the other, you’re also making them responsible for group functioning, not just expressing their views, so they are pushed to stepping back and getting the group to function
- Compliment and flatter the person
- Speak to them at a break and specifically ask them to reduce their contributions
- Probably in combination with compliments
- Move to a method that doesn’t just involve discussion, like writing ideas on post-it notes and then sorting them
- Restructure the whole workshop to have parallel sessions or discussions, so that only one is dominated by the person in question (as above, if you have two people who are dominating, put them in the same group)
