Who: Wales Environment Link (WEL), a network of environmental, countryside and heritage NGOs (non-governmental organisations) working across Wales. Together, WEL members engage with the Welsh Government and Senedd, and work together to develop effective environmental policy and practice.
WEL is supported by a small staff team, and members organisations’ representatives work together in various thematic working groups, which they chair and co-chair.
The brief:
Develop and deliver a session of facilitation training, focused on advanced skills for the working group chairs. They are experienced chairs in terms of governance, setting agendas, ensuring minutes are captured, and generally running meetings; I was tasked with equipping them with additional tools for addressing tensions when they arise, increasing participation, handling decision-making when decisions are difficult, etc. The session was in person, and as everyone was travelling from different parts of the country, I had 5 hours with them including lunch (which allowed for travel time before and after).
The in-person session at the start of the year would be followed by two online sessions – one mop-up for people who couldn’t attend, and one mentoring and advisory session much later in the year, to reflect together on how the chairs have been applying their toolkit.
What I did:
I developed a bespoke interactive session, which covered:
- Chairing styles, the role of a chair vs the role of a facilitator, when to direct and when to coordinate, support and enable
- Creating engagement and participation, including through actions before and after the meetings take place
- Facilitation techniques to ensure that everyone contributes and all voices are included
- Different collaborative decision-making processes for different types, and stages, of decisions
- Models and techniques to deal with disruption and conflict constructively
What they said:
The informal, verbal feedback was very good on the day. In a follow-up email, one of the team said:
- “All our Chairs have commented on how useful the training was.”
- “I think some of them have been applying different parts of the training, particularly around how to separate their chairing and member roles, remembering to bring people in, etc. (…) I will be using rounds for a potentially difficult meeting next week.”
My reflections:
I loved developing and delivering this session. On the day I could see the lightbulb moments happening, the moments of realisation, and the different tools and techniques that chimed with different people. It’s fun to equip people with insights, models to understand what’s at play, and tools to take away – this is my favourite kind of work!
However, designing this session to fit into just about 4 hours (if you discount time for introductions and lunch) felt like trying to stuff a duvet into a jar. There was so much I wanted to share with them, but I had to choose wisely so they had the most impactful learning possible. I wish I could have had longer with them – the time was enough to demonstrate tools with the group, but not for everyone to have a go at applying them themselves.
Expanding this half day session into 1 or even – luxury – 2 days of training would be amazing.
Post script:
We ran a short mop-up session in February for people who couldn’t attend the day, and in early October we scheduled a check-in and reflection session. Actually in the meantime some new chairs had been appointed, so they attended and I ran a summarised version of the original content, with models and tools for various situations, and time for Q&A and “what if…?” questions. What was great though was that one chair came back in October who’d been in the January session (as well as the WEL staff members) – and I thought it was interesting that they said they hadn’t changed how they chaired in any major way since the original training, but then proceeded to name a long list of small changes that they have implemented, which make their meetings run more smoothly! 😀
Photo by Federica Campanaro on Unsplash