How To Facilitate Tricky Meetings
Rabbit holes, interruptions, emotional outbursts. The meeting you're leading is not going well -- what to do?
We’ve all been there — it’s an important decision meeting, or it was simply supposed to be an “FYI we’re starting to look into this” conversation — yet 15 minutes in, the conversation is not going as planned. We feel ourselves getting nervous and frustrated and fear slowly creeping in. You just want to curl up and disappear. Or shout at specific individuals to calm down. Your mind draws a blank on what to say next and it takes almost all your control just to try and keep your tone even.
What to do now? How can you bring everyone back on track and finish strong? Is it a lost cause?
Let’s dive into the increasing levels of intensity to address meetings gone awry. We start with trying to facilitate and mediate, move on to taking a pause, and lastly, simply end the meeting early and regroup later.
Level 1 chaos: Facilitate.
As the conversation begins to take a wrong turn, the first tool to try is active facilitation to bring it back to the topic or decision at hand. A simple facilitation framework has three parts: acknowledging and naming the disruption, kindly deferring the distraction for a future conversation, and then explicitly moving the group back towards the state topic or goal. Here’s how you might respond to some common derailments:
Example: A few people begin to go down a rabbit hole on an unrelated or lower priority topic:
“That is an interesting point, [name], I’d like to come back to it after we’ve made a decision on X if we have time. Regarding [topic or decision], does anyone have further input?”
“Yes, I agree that X is an issue we need to discuss. However, it’s unrelated to (or lower priority) than resolving X. Let’s park it for now and revisit it later.”
“Hey [name], sorry to interrupt the side conversation. Agree X is an issue. Let’s get back to the topic at hand so we can wrap up on time. ”
Example: A participant is constantly interrupting you (or others) in a way that is unproductive.
“[Interruptor], I hear your point. However, I don’t think it affect the current decision. I will note it for future consideration. Let’s move on as a group to the next topic. "