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.

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!

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.

How many times have you dreaded having a hard conversation, or over-thought how it might transpire in anticipation of it being difficult, uncomfortable, or unproductive? The inevitability is that most of us will have a hard conversation at some point in the not too distant future. So, what can we do to make them better? This article includes 4 practical approaches we can start using today to make our interactions more productive.

If you’re a leader kicking off a new project with your team, or ideating on a new product your company could launch, it’s essential to be intentional about how you plan for and guide collaborative sessions to make them a success. Apply these five facilitation learnings to your work to ramp up the effectiveness of your collaborative sessions, and have a more powerful impact on the teams you lead.

Design Sprints have the incredible ability to unlock the full potential of a team’s creativity and push innovation to new heights – that’s why they’re such a powerful leadership tool. After nearly eight years of facilitating Design Sprints, I can confidently say they’re just as effective now as they ever were. If you’re having a hard time getting over the commitment hump, here are 5 reasons why you really can’t afford not to Sprint with your team.

Don’t let the ideas and energy you’ve generated in your workshop stall out. End on a high note by facilitating the fifth and final part of a winning workshop: wrap-up activities. This article covers my favorite methods – the ones that outline a path forward to ensure your team maintains momentum.