Engagement and collaboration in workshops

Q: "I would like to become a better facilitator of project workshops. What tips do you have for engaging people and making sure my sessions offer the opportunity for collaboration?"
 
Susanne Madsen’s answer

A growing number of project managers ask me how they can become better at facilitating project-definition workshops, kick-off meetings, requirements-gathering workshops and lessons-learned sessions. This is great, as it shows project managers are adapting to the need for more collaborative and engaging ways of working.

You don’t need to know it all

My first tip is to avoid putting undue pressure on yourself by feeling that, to run a workshop, you need to have all the answers and know the subject matter in great depth. 

This expectation makes you nervous and holds you back. It is true that, as the facilitator, you need to have some understanding of the subject matter, as it will help you to summarise, ask clarifying questions and draw conclusions. But it is not the facilitator’s role to provide the answers and come up with the solution. Your role is to facilitate the process and draw out the answers from the participants. 

A great facilitator can admit that he or she doesn’t know what the outcome or decisions from the workshop will be, and is able to guide the group by being present and engaging people. It’s a bit like coaching, where the coach doesn’t provide the solution, but asks the right questions, and thereby helps elicit the answer. 

To do that, you need to have a clear purpose for the workshop, make each participant feel at ease, ask great questions and use collaborative methods that enable everyone to contribute. 

Play the host

As people arrive at the workshop, make an effort to connect with each person. Act as if you were hosting a dinner party. Greet people, make them feel relaxed and ensure that everyone is introduced by asking them to ‘check in’ at the beginning of the workshop. Get each person to share their purpose for being there and explain the outcomes they seek. At the end, ask people to ‘check out’ and say if their purpose was met.

Facilitation techniques

During the workshop itself, make sure that real work gets completed, as opposed to just having a long discussion without any conclusion. Have flip charts and sticky notes available, and divide people into discussion groups. 

If you’re running a project-definition or planning workshop, you can brainstorm scope, tasks, milestones or risks, and create a collaborative work-breakdown structure. If you’re facilitating a requirements-definition workshop, you can have a joint purpose of drawing out the current- and future-state process flows on a whiteboard. If the team has never met before, run an icebreaker exercise, such as the ‘marshmallow challenge’, whereby the team has to build a free-standing tower with only spaghetti, string, tape and a marshmallow.

Throughout the workshop, ask lots of open questions: what ground rules shall we work to? How shall we track and report progress? What could go wrong and what shall we do about it? What steps does the current business flow consist of? What does the future business operating model look like? What are the business benefits and how will we measure them? 

As you move through the session, remember to frequently clarify and summarise what is being said. Finally, just before people check out, set time aside to recap conclusions, actions and next steps. Good luck!

Do you have a question for Susanne to answer? Please email her at mail@susannemadsen.com.

Susanne Madsen is an internationally recognised project leadership coach, trainer and consultant. She is the author of The Project Management Coaching Workbook and The Power of Project Leadership. For more information, see www.susannemadsen.com.