GSB视频｜课堂笔记：如何有效地召开会议
文摘
财经
2024-07-20 09:03
北京
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知道如何主持会议、主持小组讨论或促成重要对话对于你的职业和个人成功至关重要。不要将这些互动视为需要克服的障碍，而是要制定策略，让它们更顺畅、更具协作性。在他的课程《战略沟通要领》中，斯坦福商学院讲师Matt Abrahams解释了如何成功地引导听众的五个原则，还给大家提供了一些可以在下次需要引导关键讨论时使用的工具。以下为本视频文字整理稿：
Matt Abrahams: Facilitating interactions, like running meetings, moderating panels, or brokering crucial conversations, is critical to your success, both in business and in life. My name’s Matt Abrahams, and I teach Essentials of Strategic Communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. I also host the podcast Think Fast, Talk Smart. And today, I am excited to share with you the five Ps that I teach to be effective in your facilitation.The underlying premise of all facilitation is to help the conversation flow smoothly. In fact, the root of the word to facilitate means to make easy. But there’s nothing easy about facilitation. We have to manage time, topic, temperament of participants. It can be quite a challenge. The key is to develop a keen sense of pattern recognition. We have to be alert for who likely is to say what in what order, and the only way to develop good pattern recognition skills is to do reconnaissance, reflection, and research. We have to think about who are the people in the room, or virtually, what is it that they like to talk about, what’s most important for this interaction? By considering these issues, you can increase your pattern recognition, and help to make the conversation flow more smoothly.Focus provided by a clear purpose is essential for effective facilitation. A good purpose has three parts, information, emotion, and action. What do you want the group to know, how do you want them to feel, and what do you want them to do as a result of the conversation? It is essential that you establish a clear purpose upfront. You can do this at the beginning of the meeting, or the panel, or the conversation, or you can even send it out in advance in the meeting invite. By defining a key purpose, you not only have everybody focused, but you have a way of assessing your success at the end of your communication.In order to enable respectful, collaborative communication, facilitators need to create an open and safe environment. In effect, they’re making a promise that everyone’s voice counts and everyone has an opportunity to contribute. The best way to do this is by setting ground rules. Ground rules set expectations for behavior. You must establish these early and enforce them often. A great way to set expectations is to use a calendar invite. That’s where you can post your ground rules in advance.It’s equally important to make sure that everybody has a chance to contribute. Participation equity is critical. Sometimes you have people who are in the room and others who are remote. In those circumstances, you want everyone to feel as if they can contribute. My recommendation is start wherever there are fewer people, so if you have five in the room and two remote, start the conversation with the remote folks first. This allows everybody to participate. In doing so, you will live the promise of psychological safety and equity in participation.Having a strong presence helps your communication flow smoothly. Presence can be both what you say and how you say it. In terms of including lots of others, using language like, as you know, as you might be wondering, taking polls, those get people connected and involved. Where you put yourself physically in the room matters as well. Make sure everyone can see you, move around to help stimulate conversation. Getting closer to people sometimes can invite them to participate, or quiet others down. By having a strong verbal and physical presence, you help your interactions flow smoothly.The Swiss Army knife of facilitation is paraphrasing. Paraphrasing allows you to manage several challenging situations that you might encounter. Now, a paraphrase is not like what a five-year-old does, who simply repeats back verbatim what you’ve said. Instead, a paraphrase is when you extract the key essence of what someone has said, and then use it to bridge to something else. Imagine an overtalker who keeps talking and talking. You can politely shut them down by extracting something that they’ve said, and then tying it back to the agenda. Or imagine a conversation that goes off on a tangent. You can pull it back by paraphrasing some key essence and driving the conversation back on track. And then, finally, you can unify disparate points of view and ideas by paraphrasing a key point.Facilitation, when done well, can catalyze collaboration, increase learning, and bring people closer together. By following the five Ps of facilitation, you can run better meetings, have more engaging panels, and connect better in your conversations. When I have to present in front of my colleagues, peers who teach communication skills, I get very nervous, and I do three things to help myself. One, I do some deep breathing. Two, I hold something cold in the palms of my hand to reduce my core body temperature so I don’t sweat and blush. And three, I remind myself that I have value to bring and I’ve been asked to speak, and that helps me focus on the audience rather than all the internal chatter that I have.
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