Welcome -- Let's VENT

Welcome fellow meeting facilitators!!!

Some of you have been leading meetings forever - others are new to facilitation - still others have been facilitating for awhile but don't really know it! This blog is for all of us who struggle to effectively lead, manage, or facilitate meetings. My hope is that we can share the good, the bad, and the ugly to help us all improve our meetings.

I promise that this blog will NOT be focused on me. Instead, it will focus on you - your challenges, questions, pain areas, frustrations....and more importantly, your suggestions, ideas, tips, tricks, and solutions! However, to kick things off I would like to share just a bit about my background to provide context for future blogs....As a management consultant for years, I spent most of my time facilitating meetings, workshops, strategy sessions, etc. with clients and internal colleagues. Over time, I began to note just how much time I spent facilitating (helping the group move towards their defined objective) and how little training there was in that area!!! It was also glaringly obvious that most people didn't even recognize the need for facilitation during their meetings and instead wallowed in meeting hell - a kind of quicksand where they kept talking about the same things over and over and nothing really gets done (but they pretend that they accomplished something because...they had a meeting :-) Somewhere along the way, I decided...NO MORE and became something of a "facilitation evangelist" - dedicated to helping people improve their meetings.

To kick things off, let's begin at the beginning by venting a bit. My question to the group is this...what's wrong with your meetings (whether you're facilitating or not)? What is your biggest pet peeve? (In future posts, we can discuss possible solutions). For now, let's vent...you're among friends :-)

My #1 pet peeve....people who say they'll do something in the meeting but don't follow up.

Dana...the "Meeting Genie"