Tips for a great inclusive facilitation - Part 3

4 min readOct 25, 2019

Most successful meetings and workshops are the ones where the participants look forward to and leave afterwards feeling good about the time they spent there. Participants should be there because they want to contribute, and as a facilitator, you have the ability and responsibility to ensure that and secure the inclusivity of the dialogue.

It all starts from the minute you begin thinking about running that session and who should be there (see Part One), going through the first few minutes of your session and how dynamics can be shaped at that point (see Part Two).

In this last part, I will cover how you can maintain an inclusive dynamic and dialogue.

Seats, physical and virtual

Actual seats in the room are not to be taken lightly. Hence, make sure that people are balanced around the room and the table, also that you have the right mix of team members in different groups if need be. However, with more and more businesses promoting working remotely, you need to be careful that these physical seats don’t overtake the virtual ones. One way to ensure equal voice and opportunity is, where and when possible, to try to have everyone dialling remotely if some team members are doing so.

💡 Be more proactive in giving the remote participants their chance to contribute by engaging them with sentences such as “What do you think, Matt!”, “Let’s hear from Matt, what do you think?”.

Control the control-freaks

Control the action in the room (without imposing yourself) by calling on dominant players or making sure that the people who are remote had the chance to express themselves.

Give people the benefit of the doubt but gently point out their dominant behaviour if it is repeated, after the session or during a break. You will be surprised how often people don’t notice how they have been behaving.

💡Intervene with interruptions and encourage others to do the same; use sentences like: “Excuse me Jamie, just a sec — I just want to make sure that I fully understood Clara’s point before we add on it or move on”.

Keep the dom(s) busy

If you know or you notice that someone is a dominant participant, task them with something like taking notes or being on the whiteboard. This will provide more room for the more introverted participants to contribute.

Acknowledgement

Another tip to empower and motivate people to speak is to iterate on people’s ideas giving them the credit, this would also prevent anyone from seizing those ideas for themselves.

The loud silence

Silence has great power if harnessed properly. However, it is very important for a facilitator to be comfortable with silence first. Often than not “awkward” silence is good in team activities, it gives a window of opportunity for those who need it the most, it allows people to reflect, and it gives a breather for the information to sink in. In such moments, you need to remember that you could be the subject-matter-expert but your place is not to intervene and break the silence.

💡Artificially introduced silence is great as well. For instance, put a question to the team and ask them to write their answers down before reading them out. This will allow people to reflect but also introverts will love you for doing this.

Milestones

Depends on the length of your session, it is usually worth using the agenda items as milestones. Stop, reflect on the covered items, confirm the team’s agreement and move forward.

Don’t tell people what to do

Don’t try to force involvement and openness out of your participants, instead, you need to create a feeling of relaxation and ease in the room.

💡Move away from sentences like “I want you to” and use things like “I would like to invite you to” instead.

Mind your inner ego

Don’t run the workshop with the aim to see the results you wish for. Most people would say “of course not!” but in reality, our inner ego silently keeps pushing to control the processes and the flow of the discussion within the session in order to get its desired results and outcomes.

End on high

Try to always leave a couple of minutes for a quick one or two sentences to summaries, and thank the participants for their presence and contribution.

Remember to assign action points owners if relevant and let everyone know what is next and how to follow-up.

Facilitation is not facili but it can sure be more successful and enjoyable for the facilitator and the participants alike by applying some if not all the tips that I have highlighted over these three parts. With the increase of the awareness around diversity and inclusivity in our workplaces and the growing remote-working culture, I think it is essential to create and maintain an inclusive approach to the way that we run our meetings and sessions.

In Part One, I flagged the importance of proper planning beforehand, how to prepare yourself and your invitees to the what is about to happen. While in Part Two and in this part, we dived deeper in the session itself from the minute you say Hello to how you can manage the dynamics in the room. By applying these tips you will surely be a great inclusive facilitator.