FULL TRANSCRIPT

00:00 – Show Opening

Are you a professional who wants to become a more effective leader? Then get ready for daily tips from the coach with the experience and inspiration to help you succeed in any leadership situation. You’re listening to the Meeting Leadership Podcast with Gordon Sheppard.

00:27 – Start Here – Podcast content starts here!

Gordon Sheppard Speaking

Welcome to another episode of the Meeting Leadership Podcast, and if you’re here right now, it’s because that you understand that to be a solid leader you have to know how to run outstanding meetings and you know that you can come to this podcast to get a few hints, practical tips and some of the strategies that you need to do just that.

00:46 – Introduction – Why you can’t afford to have a bad meeting facilitator

Thank you so much for being here and today we’re going to talk about a touchy but very important issue which is, how to fire a bad meeting facilitator. Because think about it for just a second. What are your meetings worth for one hour? Are they five hundred dollars, a thousand dollars, two thousand dollars and up? If a meeting goes poorly, what happens? You get disengagement. Things don’t get done. The productivity just tanks and it’s just an awful situation to be in. If you’ve got a bad meeting facilitator, all those things are definitely happening.

01:19 – Give Your Meeting Facilitator A Rating – Once you rate your facilitator, then you can decide what to do next

One of the best ways to get started on this topic quickly is to step back and give your current meeting facilitator a rating out of ten. It’s pretty simple. You just sort of in your head, you go, “Well, I think they’re like an eight or a nine out of ten because they’re doing all the things and more that they should be doing when they’re running a meeting.” If they’re kind of in the middle ground, then you give them a five and, of course, if they’re down there in that one or two out of ten zone, because instinctively you know that’s where they really should be rated, then you know you need to do something about it. That is why we’re going to talk about three different ways to fire a bad meeting facilitator right now.

01:54 – Fire A Facilitator: Suggestion #1 – Remove them from leading the meetings

Now, the first one is to actually take away their meeting leadership duties, which can be extreme, depending on if they really wanted to, but I think, funny enough, you’re going to find quite often that many people didn’t actually want to lead meetings in the first place and, ironically, they’ll actually be relieved.

02:11 – Fire A Facilitator: Suggestion #2 – Invest in Meeting Leadership Training and give them enough time to do it

The second way to deal with a bad meeting facilitator is to actually send them for meeting leadership training. Now there’s a few things that you need to put in place to make this successful. So often when we add training on top of sort of a regular set of duties people are expected to do it, but they don’t actually get around to it. So the first pitfall, don’t fall into that time pitfall. You want to actually make sure they’ve got enough time. I’m going to say like one to two hours per week in their schedule to do the meeting leadership training successfully. The second thing that you want to do to make this approach successful is to actually invest real dollars in the training. So often we kind of expect people to run out onto YouTube or go find it themselves, but if you really set aside a budget, and again you’ve set this person up with the right amount of time, then I think this process of taking someone from being kind of not a great meeting leader to being a solid one is about one to two hours a week over about a six to eight week period. If they can do it in that amount of time and demonstrate that they then know how to run highly productive meetings, then it’s been worthwhile. If they can’t get it done in that amount of time, then it truly is time to go back to step one and fire them.

03:16 – Fire A Facilitator: Suggestion #3 – Rotate the Chair and let others take a turn to lead the meeting

Which leads us into step three when it comes to dealing with a bad meeting facilitator and that is to rotate the chair. Now, sometimes what you can do is you can actually make an announcement and say, “This week instead of having the main person run the meetings, someone else is going to get their turn or we’re going to rotate the chair around to that person.” Then what you can do is actually have everybody in the meeting take their turn running the meetings and from there, hopefully, the best meeting leader will emerge. This is a really great approach for young people that are trying to get their feet wet when it comes to leading meetings, and it’s also a great approach to keep experienced meeting leaders on their toes.

03:54 – Fire A Facilitator: Recap – 1. Let them go 2. Train them 3. Rotate the Chair

Now let me take a moment to recap the three things that you can do when it comes to firing a bad meeting facilitator. Number one, actually let them go. Number two, send them for meeting leadership training, but make sure to properly fund it and give them the right amount of time to be successful. And number three, rotate the chair. If you’re a leader who truly appreciates the value of a great meeting, then you know that you’re going to take action on this if the facilitator in your meetings right now is not working out.

04:23 – MLP 044: How To Be A Good Facilitator – Part 1

If you’ve enjoyed what you learned in today’s episode, then you’re going to really like my three part series called How to be a Good Facilitator. That starts in Episode 44 of the Meeting Leadership Podcast and you can get there by going to meetingleadershipinc.com/44 and I’ll also make a note of that address in the show notes for this episode. 

04:45 – Meeting Leadership Academy – https://meetingleadershipinc.com/academy/

I also want to let you know that this episode of the Meeting Leadership Podcast is brought to you by the Meeting Leadership Academy. If you want to learn how to be a solid leader who runs outstanding meetings, then check out all the great live and online training options at meetingleadershipinc.com/academy. As always, I want to say thank you so much for spending your valuable time here with me today and we’ll see you tomorrow on the Meeting Leadership Podcast.

05:12 – Podcast Outro

Thanks for listening to the Meeting Leadership Podcast. Be sure to subscribe for more strategies to help you become an outstanding leader, and don’t forget to write a review so we can bring you fresh content every day. We’ll see you tomorrow, right here on the Meeting Leadership Podcast.