Running Great Meetings and Workshops For Dummies

Chapter 13

Ten Common Mistakes on the Day

In This Chapter

Managing the group

Dealing with individuals

Controlling the process

It’s all too easy to get group work slightly wrong – not disastrously wrong, but just enough that it doesn’t quite work out. This chapter lists ten common mistakes that you just don’t need to make. Go through the list and see which ones apply to you.

Failing to Set Up Group Work Properly

If you fail to set group work up well by forgetting to clarify expectations, timings and ground rules, you’re facing a bunch of risks. When this happens, participants can

• Do lots of unexpected things because they don’t have any boundaries
• Get aggressive because they don’t know where they are going
• Provoke conflict with you as they feel unsecure
• Include random new suggestions to test you
• Give you poor feedforward because they don’t know what success looks like
• Start turning up late and messing about generally as there are no clear guidelines for everything else

To avoid trouble like this, you have to go through a contracting process by setting ground rules and parameters with the group as you start; it’s way too late to try and do it half way through and by then the group ...