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Meeting Facilitation

Meeting facilitation is the practice of guiding meetings to ensure they are organized, productive, and focused on specific goals. It involves planning agendas, encouraging participation, managing discussions, and helping groups reach decisions or action items. Effective facilitation improves collaboration, engagement, and meeting outcomes.
Learn how to help facilitate effective meetings with the resources below. 

 

Please Note: The majority of these resources are curated, not created, by the MSU IT Training Team from external sources. If you experience issues with any of the resources or links, please reach out to us at train@msu.edu.

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LinkedIn Learning - Meeting Facilitation

Note: Requires a paid membership to LinkedIn Learning

  • Leading Productive Meetings
    Feel like you're having too many meetings? Wonder if they're as effective as they could be? In this course, productivity expert Dave Crenshaw demonstrates a simple, usable framework that can help you get the most from your meetings—whether in person or virtual—by turning them into productive avenues for communicating, connecting, and accomplishing real work. Dave provides insight into how to effectively schedule, conduct, and follow up on meetings with minimum time and maximum results.

    Modality: Course
    Source: LinkedIn Learning (Requires paid membership)
    Time: 1 hour

    Learn about leading productive meetings here
  • Meeting Facilitation

    While the point of a meeting is usually to help a team connect and push their projects forward, poorly managed meetings can actually have the opposite effect. If a company has too many meetings, or the meetings themselves are unproductive, they can end up squandering both time and money. One of the keys to boosting the effectiveness of your meetings is adopting a meeting facilitator—someone who can structure and guide your meetings to be more efficient and effective.

    This course was designed to help facilitators make the most out of a meeting, so participants can walk away feeling like it was a good use of their time. Learn tips for remaining neutral in a discussion, providing structure without stifling creativity, creating scalable processes, and more.

    Modality: Course
    Source: LinkedIn Learning (Requires paid membership)
    Time: 33 minutes

    Learn about meeting facilitation here

  • Virtual and Hybrid Meeting Essentials
    In this course, join Lorraine Lee, a top-rated virtual keynote speaker and the editorial director at Prezi, as she shares strategies for making your virtual and hybrid meetings more engaging, collaborative, and productive.

    Lorraine zeros in on how to turn your passive participants into active ones, as well as how to determine when virtual meetings should be held live versus asynchronously. She identifies what facilitators should do before, during, and after hybrid meetings, including how to establish rules of engagement and combat video fatigue. And since attendees and presenters alike need to mind their on-camera presence, Lorraine shares tips for ensuring that you look and sound your best.

    Modality: Video
    Source: LinkedIn Learning (Requires paid membership)
    Time: 22 minutes

    Learn about virtual and hybrid meeting essentials here

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elevateU - Meeting Facilitation

Note: MSU Faculty and Staff Only

  • Leadership Toolkit: Facilitating a Brainstorming Session

    Successful leadership in today’s business world requires a multitude of skills and competencies. Among them is the ability to manager diverse teams of individuals with different backgrounds, experiences and expertise. Facilitating effective brainstorming sessions allows leaders to harness their teams’ creativity to generate a greater quantity and quality of ideas and strategies to spark innovation and provide a wide range of possible solutions to specific business problems. Successful brainstorming sessions provide creative grist for the strategic mill.

    In this course, you will learn specific techniques and strategies for facilitating a successful brainstorming session. You’ll also learn about leading your team through productive activities, handling diverse personalities and priorities, and keeping your business team focused and on-task without limiting ideas and innovation.

    Modality: Video
    Source: elevateU (Only available to MSU faculty and staff)
    Time: 28 minutes

    Learn about facilitating a brainstorming sesion here

  • Planning Meetings Fit for Purpose

    Have you ever yawned your way through a presentation or meeting, and left feeling like it was a waste of your time? Maybe the meeting wasn't relevant to you or it wasn’t presenting the information in an engaging way. Meetings are among the most expensive forms of communication, so it's essential to make the investment worthwhile.

    In this course, you'll discover a process for preparing effective meetings by establishing a clear purpose and objectives. With the right people and agenda, and solid prep work, you're nearly there! If you struggle to start meetings on the right note, this course can help you get the most out of them, saving you valuable time.

    Modality: Video
    Source: elevateU (Only available to MSU faculty and staff)
    Time: 16 minutes

    Learn about planning meetings fit for purpose here

  • Running Meetings in Better Directions

    Have you ever attended a meeting or presentation that left you feeling frustrated? Despite their reputation for sometimes wasting time, meetings remain one of the most effective tools for sharing information, presenting ideas, and making decisions – if facilitated well. Meetings can be very productive; many issues can be resolved, and participants can feel grateful they attended.

    In this course, you’ll learn how to kick off meetings and how to ensure maximum participation and buy-in. Then you'll be introduced to what to do when meetings go off track, when to intervene, and how to deal with productivity problems. You'll also learn how to close and follow up on a meeting.

    Modality: Video
    Source: elevateU (Only available to MSU faculty and staff)
    Time: 17 minutes

    Learn about running meetings in better directions here

 

Campus Training - Meeting Facilitation

Note: MSU Faculty and Staff Only

  • Managing Meetings

    With organizational resources tighter than ever, and staff and management busier than ever, frivolous meetings are simply not an option. Yet they continue to occur more often than ever. And too many unproductive, wasteful meetings create a major drag on staff morale and motivation, thus affecting productivity, turnover, and the corporate "bottom line." And, if you are the organizer or leader of meetings, you simply cannot afford to look unprofessional when you are "on stage" in a competitive or political environment.

    Modality: In-Person Course
    Source: MSU Office of Professional Development (Only available to MSU faculty and staff)
    Time: 1 hour, 30 minutes
    Cost: $325

    Learn about managing meetings here