Everyone had the best experience at the meeting management training. This was not like your usual training, people participated much more actively and much more relaxed - definitely would book her again! The course was a very well presented and interesting course too. Gave great grounding in all the important topic to consider and offered a wide range of topics to think on. The success of the meeting management training is built up on its two main areas: management skills and leadership skills. To improve your overall skill set, participants are taught how to plan an effective meeting, how to deal with team members effectively, and how to make decisions. How to make a decision? What are 50 activities that need to be planned? These are some of the main issues covered during the meeting management skills part of the course. Facilitation is also addressed. What is facilitation? Facilitation is the art of getting people to work together for a common goal - to achieve productivity. So, if you improve your meeting management skills, facilitation skills will improve. Another aspect covered is electronic options. Some meetings do now have electronic options available, so that all the members can attend them online. This has been very useful for small teams and individuals who might otherwise struggle to keep up with other larger groups. Electronic options are just one part of the whole course, but it does show what is possible. The importance of working electronically can't be over emphasised - it was very noticeable that the participants in the meeting management training were far more able to participate as a group and contribute when they had the electronic options available to them. Then there's the question of agenda setting. When people get together to solve a problem, they naturally want to put forward their ideas and suggestions on what to do. But they can't do this if they don't know where the good ideas lie, how to find them and how to persuade their colleagues that their idea is worth pursuing. That's where agenda items come into play. You can't achieve a fully comprehensive agenda unless you consider all three dimensions of meeting management; brainstorming, productive time, and effective communication. When you consider the process of brainstorming, you will notice that it involves some degree of facilitation. Sometimes this happens automatically as we are simply talking to each other, but it can occur only with some careful planning or pre-planned initiatives. For example, if a group of people have been invited to review the way they are doing work, and someone suggests that they should make an effort to think more creatively, everyone will benefit from this. If the meeting management skills of the host is good, the entire meeting may go smoothly, and when it does, everyone will take part in the brainstorming session, and come up with innovative solutions to problems. In other cases, when we plan our activities effectively, we will be able to implement better facilitation skills, and we may come up with original ideas that the others hadn't thought of. Facilitation is a critical aspect of meeting management because it ensures that the agendas of the participants are set, the meetings move smoothly and there is an element of interaction at every level of the meeting. The first item we need to look at is the quality of the information that is shared. This is where the facilitator really helps out. They can walk the groups through the different steps that they should follow when they are presenting and sharing information. This includes asking clarifying questions, encouraging participants to ask questions of their own, offering neutral guidance such as listening to answers, and then helping the participants to outline the issues that they would like to bring up, as well as the solutions that they have. Another key component of meeting management training is how to hold these meetings and keep them interesting and productive. Facilitators need to provide a venue in which the meeting participants can participate productively. This could be a physical venue such as a room where everyone can come and sit, or it could be an online meeting where the attendees can log on and share what they have to say. There are many leaders who believe that a combination of these three elements is the best way for meeting participants to interact, communicate, and solve problems.