The Secrets of Virtual Facilitation
Virtual meetings are the norm today. Sure, you may know how to facilitate group meetings, but how are your virtual facilitation skills? Do you know how to use technology effectively to achieve maximum group results even when you’re not in the same room? How do you minimize the common challenges of meeting with remote staff, peers, and clients — that could inevitably impact your role and your organization’s culture? Too often, participants face the glaring temptation to multi-task behind the scenes. Dysfunction may erupt and slow down the productivity of a group without your knowledge. In this session, learn how to adapt facilitation skills to the virtual environment to keep your group engaged toward delivering results — even despite the common challenges.
Richard Smith
Richard is a Certified Master Facilitator™ and Principal with Leadership Strategies, Inc., a firm specializing in providing clients with professional facilitators to lead sessions in strategic planning, process improvement, information needs analysis, and issue resolution. The organization also focuses on teaching leadership training classes in group facilitation, consulting, strategic planning, project planning, team building and management excellence.
Prior to Leadership Strategies, Inc., Richard was an executive with software services companies where he had responsibility for the delivery, training and support of complex systems including customer relationship management, finance and human resources, and enterprise requirements planning. In these roles Richard had in-depth experience facilitating sessions with clients, vendors/partners and staff in the design, implementation and support of mission critical projects. In these roles he led the training of over 10,000 professionals and administrative support personnel.
Earlier in his career, Richard was a consultant with Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) for eight years where he worked on engagements in the area of strategic planning, profit improvement, change management and systems development. He was part of the team that developed the firm's training materials for facilitation and leadership programs as well as project management.