When conflict arises in work and life, it can seem easier to ignore or divert, but finding middle ground helps us become more resilient, better communicators and de-escalators, and better at embracing diverse perspectives. In this article, you’ll learn facilitator-approved tools and mindsets to better navigate hard conversations at work and in your personal life.

Whether you’ve been facilitating for a while, or are just dipping your toe in, these 5 superpowers will help elevate your ability to successfully guide people through the winding road of decision making, ideation, and problem solving, all in the spirit of helping them do their best work.

Often, a team’s inability to work productively is due to a lack of focus, lack of support, and/or lack of alignment. In this article, you'll learn why your teams are probably getting stuck, along with a solution that I’ve seen work time and time again for getting them out of the weeds and back on track.

In this article, learn about the essential yet undervalued bookends of workshops: the prep work and wrap-up activities. The tips in this article will help elevate your workshop design, support better outcomes for the teams you lead, and set you up for success as a facilitator.

With people working in distributed, remote, and hybrid capacities, teams are more reliant than ever on virtual meetings and workshops to help accelerate ideas and projects. But how do we overcome meeting fatigue and skepticism? With the right tools, methods, and activities, we can make meetings more productive and enjoyable. The facilitator-approved tips in this article will help you do just that!

Summer can feel so precious, signaling time to rest and find ease. But it may also usher in a seemingly-endless number of things to do that compete with the desire to simply slow down. It’s a vicious cycle, but there are resources, habits, and mindsets you can use to cultivate more balance and less burnout. This article includes the most powerful tools that have helped me do just that.

Visual aids are a necessary tool for anyone who facilitates group collaboration. They break up dense information, activate different parts of the brain, and help participants better visualize ideas. As a facilitator, there are three primary ways I use visual aids, which I’ll cover in this article along with some examples you can apply directly to your work.

Empowered teams consistently outperform their counterparts—and an empowered team is only possible with the right leadership behaviors. In this article, my goal is to help you unlock the superpower that will help you cultivate more empowered teams. This advice is rooted in my work as a facilitator and the observations I’ve made working with teams of all types and sizes, as well as their leaders. 

If we want to get the most from our teams, the way we meet needs to be considered carefully, and that starts before you even send the meeting invite. This article covers the important elements you need to think about as you plan your meeting or workshop and includes some helpful tools that will prepare you to lead your best session ever.

Use these facilitation methods to unify, empower, and activate teams  that are dispersed, fragmented, remote, or disengaged. You can copy/paste these activities into your next worksop to get your team out of the weeds, dissolve or soften resistance, and re-energize the group.

The outputs of a Design Sprint are most powerful when they’re supported by leaders in the organization. I designed a way to involve key decision makers in the process so that their presence feels constructive. Use my facilitator-approved approach to add manageable and productive stakeholder reviews to your sessions!

If you lead meetings or workshops regularly, you know things are going well when sessions feel productive, seamless, and collaborative. So, how do you access more of that and minimize the hard stuff, like disengaged or disruptive participants? And how do you ensure you’re unlocking the most potential from everyone, reducing friction and resistance along the way? Here are my favorite tips to help you do just that!

Human-centered design principles have gotten a lot of traction over the past two decades – so much so that the term has gotten a little buzz-wordy. Despite some of the shininess wearing off, these principles are still as important and effective as ever. This article covers four in particular that I think are powerful leadership mindsets with the potential for big impact, and how to activate them.

A thoughtful meeting agenda can seriously improve the efficiency, productivity, and effectiveness of meetings, making them more valuable for everyone involved. A list of topics is a good starting point, but it isn't the whole story. While the actual agenda for any given meeting is highly context dependent, there are a few components you can use as a blueprint to guide the creation of almost any agenda for almost any purpose.

It’s more important than ever to kick off meetings, workshops, and strategic sessions on a positive note, especially when we’re not all in the same physical location. These icebreakers are appropriate for almost any team, but I find them to be extra helpful when working with remote or distributed groups who might require a little nudge to access a place of connectedness and optimism.

About seven years ago I started my own facilitation business and, in honor of that anniversary, I want to celebrate by sharing a few of my favorite learnings with the people who have supported me along the way. I hope you’ll find these insights and takeaways helpful whether you’re running your own business, or are simply navigating the ebbs and flows of life and work.

What does it take to stitch an innovation mindset into the very way teams operate? This article is about shifting our perspective on when to workshop and makes the case for cultivating a workshop practice within organizational culture as a necessary stepping stone to building a culture of innovation.

Here are my facilitator-approved dos and don'ts for running a successful strategic workshop, whether you’re leading a planning session, collaborative brainstorm, or facilitating another type of strategic gathering. These tips will help you turn the momentum you generate into tangible results.

Small and fractional teams need to collaborate differently than their counterparts in order to be effective. In this article, I share the secret to setting your teams up to do their best work and build momentum, along with an exercise you can replicate with your own team to unify the group.

A few months ago, I shared an honest account of how I got into and managed to walk away from burnout. I never imagined that sharing my story would reach 20K+ people and receive so many replies. In response to all the emails and messages, I put together a list of suggestions and resources for beating burnout. Take what works and leave the rest!