"Good management is the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them." Paul Hawkin
Getting the best out of your meetings or workshops can often mean having an experienced facilitator to help plan the agenda, set the goals of the meeting and tie all the threads together. My aim in facilitation is to help groups of people achieve what they want from their meeting. Results.
I do not subscribe to the view that a successful outcome is merely to have everybody feel warm and fuzzy about each other, or for participants to have plumbed the depths of their personal psyches. For most small to medium organisations, there simply isn't the time.
The key is in good preparation, a focussed agenda and participants willing to say what they think but still working towards agreement. Having an external, unbiased facilitator can give you the best chance of success - whatever success is for your organisation or particular circumstances.
And guess what? Having had a productive meeting and achieved the results you were looking for you're pretty likely to have a warm inner glow of satisfaction and feel fairly warm and fuzzy about your fellow achievers in any case. Call me.
