Project Management for Humans

Brush Up Your Facilitation Skills

What does it take to be a great project facilitator while also being a project manager? In a perfect world, you would have a person who could act as just a facilitator—looking from the outside in to ask questions, challenge ideas, resolve disagreements, and generally help the team progress. In reality, that work typically falls on the shoulders of the project manager. And it’s no easy feat. Do you have what it takes to do the job? Sure you do, especially if you think about it in terms of what a facilitator might do. For instance, you might have to do the following:

• Understand your team, their relationships, and the way they work together.
• Keep an eye on project goals and how decisions being made might meet them.
• Analyze and understand team issues and conflicts.
• Recommend techniques or tools to sustain project momentum.
• Manage team meetings effectively.
• Ensure that the team is always making the best use of time.
• Champion effective communications.

That’s a lot to keep an eye on, particularly when you’re also responsible for managing the process, to-do lists, a budget, scope, and maybe even project stakeholders. No matter what you do, it will be difficult to manage your own time and the project, its process, the team, and its decisions. Think you’re up to it? Yes, you are. If you’re feeling hesitant, or even a little confused, here are some core values to guide you when taking on the facilitation role.

Be Neutral

You want to deliver a successful project, and to you, success is rooted in meeting project goals. Don’t get wrapped up in the end result. We’ve all got opinions, particularly when it comes to how something looks. But that is not your role on the project. Put your personal opinion aside and focus on what will get you to the desired result rather than the result itself.

Keep Planning

Project plans are great because they show you the long-term trajectory of a project. But you should know that every decision, meeting, or task might require its own plan to ensure success. As a PM facilitator, you’ve got to have a plan for how your team will arrive most effectively at a conversation, decision, or deliverable. It’s your job to plan that.

Be Energetic

The best way to lead teams to decisions is by motivating them with an energy that inspires a positive outcome. If you’re sitting on the sidelines just watching or keeping quiet, then you’re doing it incorrectly. When you put a plan in place and you have faith in it, you can facilitate with an energy that will inspire action. It’s one of those magical parts of great project management that is truly hard to define. If you just be yourself and do everything you can to motivate a team, you will absolutely see results—and people will see that you helped in a major way.

Be a Great Communicator

Not to beat a dead horse, but a good PM doesn’t happen without great communication skills, and good facilitation can’t exist without effective communications. As a project facilitator, you will contribute to your team reaching mutual understanding of project goals and the best path to meet them. How do you do that? You pay special attention to each individual and how they are contributing to the process and the project, and make sure that their opinion is not only heard, but valued. When times are difficult, you do everything you can to understand each point of view and ensure that all options are being considered. Sometimes, you’ll act as a translator; sometimes, you’ll be a mediator; and at all times, you’ll be a friend and confidant to the whole team.

Be an Authority

Someone on the team has to set the boundaries for how you will work, how long something should take, and when a conversation has to stop. You’ll find yourself in conversations that go round and round, and it feels like there is no end. As a facilitator, you need to step in, set or even reset boundaries, and do everything in your power to get a conversation back on track. Remember, keep the goals in mind, and you’ll have a great filter for how to resolve any scenario.

Facilitation Techniques

Anyone can host a meeting, run a brainstorming session, or collect ideas from a team, but not everyone can do it efficiently. It takes the right balance and knowledge of project goals, team expertise, timing, tools, and you guessed it, facilitation skills. Before you jump in to a meeting, be sure to think about what will make for a great session:

Be Prepared

If you want to get the most out of your session, then prepare yourself and your team for the session. This might mean that you have to spend some time thinking about how the meeting will flow, what you will present, or what questions you will ask the team in order to ignite conversation and debate. Alternately, if you need someone else on the team to take some responsibility, make sure that you give that person time to prepare as well. After all, there is nothing worse than attending a meeting that feels disorganized.

Create the Right Environment

Meeting space comes at a premium in many offices. In order to run an effective session, make sure that the work you do will be accommodated by the space you have. Think about it. Will you need the following?

• whiteboards
• group seating
• wall space
• flip charts, sticky notes, markers
• technology set up for remote attendees to see and participate
• round tables with seats
• one large table

The more you have prepared in terms of space and materials, the better the environment will be. And the more excited your team will be to participate.

Ensure That the Expected Outcomes or Objectives Are Clear

Set an agenda that includes a statement of meeting goals. At the top of the meeting, be sure to review these goals with the group. You may even want to discuss what meeting these goals will mean to the rest of the project. Setting context can help to keep everyone on track.

Establish Expectations

Your agenda and meeting goals will set expectations for the meetings. At the same time, try to set some ground rules for your meeting. For instance, if you have limited time, you might agree that any mention of an outside topic will be shut down by the facilitator and added to a list of things to discuss later.

Do What Works

Your facilitation style needs to meet the needs of the group and the goals for the meeting. For example, you may want to facilitate by stepping back and letting conversation take place so that you can witness interactions and record decisions. Or you may lead a group exercise to see outcomes and discuss them as a group. No matter what, you have to recognize that a “one-size-fits-all” approach to facilitating meetings does not work.

Helpful Facilitation Tools

There are plenty of ways to engage a team, lead them to healthy conversation, and even make decisions. Some are simple conversational tactics, while others are interactive activities. You’ll do what feels right based on the goals and people involved. Here are a few that can help you.

Gate Keeping

The loudest voice can’t win! Everyone on a project should have equal footing when it comes to collaboration and discussion. With gate keeping, all participants have an equal opportunity to influence the decision to be made. As a facilitator, you can help make this happen by gate opening and gate closing.

• gate opening—There’s always a quiet team member who tends to sit back and speak less or not speak at all. The problem is, that person may have information and thoughts that can impact decisions, or better yet, help make them. As the facilitator, it’s your job to get those people talking. Open the gate by asking direct questions of that person. Engage them with the group. You might be putting them on the spot, but it’s important to do when you want a well-rounded, inclusive conversation.
• gate closing—Don’t let one person dominate a conversation or meeting, because when you do, you will end up with annoyed team members who are less motivated to act on ideas. It’s simple: inclusion builds trust, motivates teams, and helps decisions to be made. So, if John is dominating a meeting, simply interrupt him and ask if anyone else has a perspective to add. It might feel awkward, but your team will thank you for it later—and, you’ll get a better conversation going.

Use Flip Charts, Post-it Notes, and Sharpies

Sounds like an endorsement of specific merchandise in office-supply stores, huh? Well, it kind of is! As you can see in Figure 11.2, ironically, the digital industry seems to be keeping 3M in business. It’s amazing how much our highly technical teams use paper to generate ideas and consensus. But providing a hands-on experience allows all participants to provide ideas or input—bonus points for those shy people who’d rather write than speak—discuss them, merge them, and even come up with visual ways to represent complex ideas.

Brainstorm

We all conduct brainstorming sessions with the intent of generating as many ideas as possible, but are they always effective? Probably not. If you’re going to conduct a brainstorming session, you should structure that meeting and set some basic ground rules. If you truly want to create an environment that is accepting, open, and ready to truly be creative, remind everyone of the following tenets:

• There is no such thing as a bad idea.
• Good ideas can come from anyone on a team.
• The goal of the meeting is to get as many ideas out as possible.
• You’ll discuss the merits of all ideas as a group.
• You’ll refine the list of ideas and remove the ones that just won’t work.
• There are no hard feelings if your idea is not selected.
• You will end the session with at least one final idea.

Clustering

Need to get an answer to a complex question or gain consensus on a topic or issue? You can quickly get your team to come to a decision with a clustering exercise. There are a number of ways to do this, but you can start with this technique.

Pose the question/topic/scenario and have each attendee record their responses on Post-it notes—one response per note. Then have meeting participants quickly place the stickies into groups. Again, they make the decision and do the work. You can step back to facilitate the process, watch for emergent themes/outcomes, and then question the final results. This approach should lead to productive conversation with the goal of making a decision. This kind of exercise can be very helpful when you’re trying to diagnose an issue or a pain point, generate ideas, gain feedback, and much more. Plus, it’s a quick and easy way to get anything and everything on the table or wall.

The T

The T is a focusing technique that can put an end to what may feel like a never-ending unstructured debate. At the same time, it can help your team come to a decision with confidence and ease.

Here’s what to do: Draw a T for each item under debate on a whiteboard or flipchart; then have the group brainstorm and record the pros and cons—again, one point per sticky note. When they are done recording, they will place their points on the T From there, you will begin to see emergent themes, which will show consensus or allow for further debate, which is a discussion that you will facilitate.

Use the T when you need to get consensus—or discussion about issues—quickly. You can write directly on a board, as shown in Figure 11.3, or have participants write responses on sticky notes and then cluster them. This exercise is really great for figuring out issues or discussion points that stand in the way of a decision.

Beat Meeting Fatigue

Every project manager’s day is filled with meetings. These can be meetings about projects, meetings with clients, ad hoc team gatherings, internal and client status meetings, and so on. The list of possibilities for work gatherings seems endless. That can be a problem! Too many meetings can mean lower team productivity, and too few meetings can cause strains in team communication and gaps in knowledge. There’s certainly a tricky balance to find the right amount of meeting time, and it’s tough to ensure that each one will be productive.

Finding the right balance and offering the team value in each and every meeting often lies on a project manager’s shoulders. But don’t worry, you can become a PM meeting master by finding the balance between the art of communicating a meeting’s importance and the science of how it’s best managed.

First Step: Determine Meeting Value

Of course, there is no mystery in what makes a meeting successful or abysmally bad. Just scheduling a meeting can be difficult, what with ensuring timeliness of the discussion, navigating the issues at hand, and coordinating people—and their busy schedules. Plus, you have to deal with internal factors. For instance, in some organizational cultures, meetings are seen as unnecessary or bad. In others, they are healthy places to exchange ideas, or even to get work done. Whether you think they’re good or a hassle, you should know that you, the project manager, can help determine the time, length, agenda, and value of a meeting.

Before you throw something on the calendar, it’s best to think strategically about your meeting. Part of the reason many professionals sigh or grunt at the thought of a meeting is because it could be seen as an interruption in their day. Think about it—if you’re working with a team who is making a product, they need a good amount of time to sit down and focus on what they’re making. A meeting about something peripheral to the project can throw their concentration off very quickly. So how can you determine if a meeting is actually needed? Follow these guidelines:

1. Be clear about the meeting’s goals. It may seem silly, but going into a meeting knowing what you want to get out of it will help you make decisions on who should be there, when it should happen, and how long it might take. Before you schedule anything, ask yourself, “What is the goal of this meeting?” and “Do we actually need a meeting to hit this goal?”
2. Who needs to be in this meeting? Look back at that goal. Is it something that your entire team should be involved in? Be sure to protect your time as well as your team’s time. The last thing you want to do is pull people into a meeting if they are not needed. Think about it this way: “Will this person talk in the meeting?” If the answer is no, he is off the hook.
3. What is needed to make this meeting a success? Give attendees everything they will need for this meeting in advance. Your best bet is to attach the information to the meeting invitation. This could include advance notes, handouts, documents for review, and so on. The more prep you can provide, the more productive the meeting will be.
4. Does this meeting have to happen today, tomorrow, or even next week? Think back to that meeting goal. How will it impact your project, decisions that are being made, the people in the meeting—and the work they have going on—your clients, your budget, and timeline? There’s a lot in play there! Project managers often think every issue is the most important, but when it comes to determining the best timing—or if a meeting can wait—take the time to think through those impacts and create priorities.
5. How much time do we need? Again, protect that time! If you only need 15 minutes, take it. If you need an hour and a half, that’s OK, too. Be sure to communicate the intent and value of the meeting to attendees so they come into it knowing that you’re not wasting their time. Remember, you are the PM, and you control the calendar. If a meeting will stress your calendar or your team’s, you can take responsibility for finding a better time.
6. What is the agenda? Always create a meeting agenda, even for the shortest meetings. Be sure to include the meeting agenda in the meeting invitation and add names next to conversation or presentation points so that attendees know their responsibility for the meeting. Having an agenda will help you stick to the meeting goals, formulate what potential to-do items could be, and keep the conversation on track.