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Facilitation 101 from The Enlightened Manager

If you've worked as a PM or in the business world for long you've probably had your share of good and bad meetings. If you think about what makes one session run smoothly and another a mess, you might find a common theme with the well-run meetings having a strong facilitator.

Most people tend to under value the important skill of facilitation, perhaps it's because they don't understand exactly what is meant when a manager uses the word with respect to meetings. We need someone to "facilitate" this meeting.

Now, in the PM world the facilitator often IS the PM, but it can also be the test lead, the director of development, a SME, or whoever has the knowledge to share for a given meeting.

7 Questions To Assess Your Leadership Pulse

George Ambler points us to some great information from an article at the Harvard Business Review called What to Ask the Person in the Mirror. I enjoyed the post, and the article contains seven questions - areas, really, that contain a series of questions each - that author Robert S. Kaplan recommends we ask ourselves to keep ourselves on track.