Own the room & get results!
Facilitation Training for meetings and workshops | 2-day hands-on session.
You want to successfully design and moderate meetings and workshops of any kind. We give you the tools to make it work. Regularly in Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels, London, Paris and online. Upon request also available as an in house-training.
In our inspiring and interactive facilitation training, you will learn a universal framework for the conception of any kind of workshop and meeting in a compact 2-day practical session. You will learn to use over 40 activities to get results with groups and teams. This comprehensive set of methods will help you break down communication barriers, work together effectively and systematically generate new ideas, insights and decisions.
What you will learn
Universal framework
Learn how to divide any workshop into six key phases that ensure the desired outcome. Our workshop master framework will serve as your foundation for designing any workshop.
40 activities & tools
You will explore and engage in a hands-on toolbox of over 40 activities, enabling you to lead a group toward the desired workshop goal. As a final exercise, you’ll design a workshop concept with these activities and receive practical feedback.
Moderation skills
We will provide you with effective moderation techniques to handle all types of workshop and meeting participants confidently.
Facilitation Training Content
I. The Universal Structure of Workshops
Every workshop can be organized into three universal phases:
1. Before the Workshop
- Align on the workshop goal (what does success look like at the end of the workshop?)
- Determine the starting point
- Choose the most suitable format
- Select the best activities to move from the starting point to the workshop goal
- Select, invite, and motivate the participants
2. During the Workshop
- Create options
- Select options
- Develop and refine
- Present and test
- Define next steps
3. After the Workshop
- Reflect
- Summarize results and outline next steps
III. Team Facilitation Techniques
- Activities for Activation and Ice-breaking
- Questioning Techniques for Managing Contributions
- The Facilitator’s Mindset – Understanding Your Role as a Workshop Facilitator
- Handling Difficult Participants
- Establishing Ground Rules
- What to Do When Things Don’t Go as Planned
- Closing Exercises, such as the Spaghetti Tower
IV. Final Exercise: Designing Your Workshop
All participants will have the opportunity to design a workshop schedule with activities and timelines relevant to their professional context using our “Workshop Master Template” and receive feedback.
II. Workshop Activities & Techniques
- Sailboat
- Team Journey
- Brief Introduction to Design Thinking, Design Sprint, and Concept Sprint
- Pain Points to Opportunity Shift
- Problem Framing
- LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®
- Journey Mapping
- Jobs to be Done
- Personas
- Value Curves (from Blue Ocean Strategy)
- Brainwriting
- Brainstorming Session Facilitation
- 3-12-3 Brainstorm
- SCAMPER Method
- Perspective Shift
- Analogy Formation
- Reverse Thinking Method
- Mashups
- Crazy 8s
- Pre-Mortem
- Walt Disney Method
- Six Thinking Hats (De Bono)
- World Café
- Lightning Talks
- Affinity Mapping (as an alternative to classic clustering)
- Buffet Method
- Team Ranking
- Dot Voting
- Impact-Effort Matrix
- Art Gallery
- Design Charette
- Heatmap
- Storyboarding
- Looks-Like Prototyping
- Future Press Release (Amazon Template)
- Business Model Canvas®
- Value Proposition Canvas®
- Mood Board
- Task Buffet
- MVP Concept
- 14-Day Question (Sprint Question)
- Using AI (ChatGPT) for Idea Generation and Visualization
Facilitation Trainer
Joern Steinz (MBA)
Workshop Facilitator & Trainer
Joern Steinz (MBA), founder and managing director of the Hamburg-based agency Innominds, will lead your facilitation training. Since 2014, he has coached hundreds of teams in workshop facilitation methods. Previously, Joern served as a consultant at Accenture and held corporate development roles at XING and the freenet Group. He studied business administration in Aachen and Coventry and graduated from EADA Business School in Barcelona. For any questions or requests, you can best contact Joern via email at jsteinz@skillday.com or on LinkedIn.
Joern´s clients include prominent companies like Allianz, Bayer, Capgemini, DHL, E.ON, Ferrero, Horváth & Partners, Lufthansa, McKinsey & Company, Personio, PwC, Sanofi, Siemens, and Volkswagen, along with numerous agencies, trainers, coaches, and consultants.
Locations & dates
All training sessions are conducted in English.
Facilitation Training Amsterdam | 2 Days
Date: 07-08 October 2024 | 9.00h-17.00h
Price: 1.300€ plus VAT / person
Location: Novotel Amsterdam City
Europaboulevard 10, 1083 AD Amsterdam
Facilitation Training Berlin | 2 Days
Price: 1.300€ plus VAT / person
Location: Christburger Str. 23, 10405 Berlin (at juggleHUB Coworking)
Facilitation Training London | 2 Days
Price: 1.300£ plus VAT / person
Location: Novotel London Canary Wharf
40 Marsh Wall, E14 9TP London
Facilitation Training Brussels | 2 Days
Date: 18-19 December 2024 | 9.00h-17.00h
Price: 1.300€ plus VAT / person
Location: Novotel Brussels City Centre
Rue de la Vierge Noire 32, 1000 Brussels
Register
Please use the form below to register. For any questions or special requests, such as a team discount, contact jsteinz@skillday.com. We will send your booking confirmation and invoice within 24 hours.
What is the purpose of facilitation training?
The question is why this does not happen consistently. We live in a world of constant change. Teams are becoming more global, more flexible and less hierarchically defined than ever before. A leader must respond to this change by adapting to the needs of the team so that every team member feels able to work together effectively. Using the tools of a great facilitator can help leaders unlock the behaviours we want from our teams and create a high performance team that demonstrates amazing collaboration. You may be asking yourself: don’t we hire facilitators to help our team build trust or learn something? And you’re not so wrong about that. But let’s think for a moment about what facilitators actually do. Ultimately, great facilitators do three things. First, they create a safe environment where people can share freely. Second, they enable a team to recognise the unique strengths of each of its members. And third, they help the team come together and work towards a common goal. As a leader, isn’t this exactly what you want to achieve for your team?
Besides enabling a more powerful and collaborative team, being a facilitative leader brings tremendous benefits to you. Let’s talk about three of them here, which our facilitation training will empower you with. First, you harness the power of the collective. As a leader, have you ever felt that the success of the team depends heavily on you? As a facilitator, you can pass on the difficult challenges you face to the others in the room who are either better suited to solve the problem or can bring a fresh perspective to solving it. Finally, two heads are better than one, especially if those two heads are focused on the same goal. Secondly, they strengthen ownership. Have you ever noticed that you are more willing to engage with an idea if you feel that it comes from you? Have you also ever noticed how great you feel when you are part of something bigger than yourself? This is exactly how your team feels when they are involved in developing ideas and feel they are part of something bigger. As a facilitative leader, you encourage engagement, not conformity. And last but not least, you save an enormous amount of time. Do you ever look at your calendar and get excited about how much free time you have? I bet you don’t. Wouldn’t it be great to have more time in your day again? As a facilitative leader, you use your team’s key strengths to work together to solve challenges and achieve your goals. In doing so, you focus on the challenges that have the highest value and forgo the time-consuming activities with little value. Try adding the facilitation aspect to your leadership toolkit and you will find that you will be able to empower your team and get the best out of them.
The role of facilitation for a leader
What is the difference between facilitating your team and hiring an external facilitator, and what are the challenges and opportunities of a facilitation role? Well, first of all, you are an expert in content. In many cases, external facilitators do not have the context about your team or your company. The challenge in this situation is that as a leader, you can be tempted to constantly give your opinion on the topic. I have seen countless times where a leader with the best of intentions makes their opinion known so often that the team ends up only looking to the leader to make decisions and no longer wants to make their own contribution. Meanwhile, as a leader, you often wonder why my team isn’t working together and coming up with great ideas. The good news is that if you are aware of this challenge, you can use it to your advantage. If you manage not to express too many opinions and instead ask questions that make the team think, you will have deep trust in your team. This may take some time at first, but very quickly your team will start to solve their own challenges. Secondly, as a facilitating leader, you already know each member of your team. As a leader who spends every day with your team, you have the opportunity to understand the strengths and opportunities of each team member better than an external facilitator could.
The challenge here is that this knowledge can influence your thinking to focus only on your team’s perceived strengths and weaknesses. In doing so, you may be tempted to constantly fill in the gaps with your knowledge, especially if your knowledge is complementary to that of the team. As you have insight into the team’s unique strengths and weaknesses, you can help each team member build on their strengths. You can also help them develop by drawing on other team members with complementary skills and knowledge. By drawing on each other’s strengths, you bring the team closer together and ensure that it acts as a unit. Finally, you are emotionally involved. As the leader of a team, you are emotionally interested in you, your team and your company doing well, and these three things are inextricably linked. An external facilitator may not have the same incentives. Believe me, as a facilitator myself, I am emotionally invested in the success of a team, but since I don’t deal with it on a day-to-day basis like you do, I can’t imagine being as invested as a leader of that team.
The challenge with being emotionally involved is that it’s hard to relinquish control, it’s human nature. You are emotionally involved in the success of the team and often feel that you have to be involved in everything in order to control the success. The opportunity here is for you to show emotional involvement rather than emotional attachment. The former is about being invested in the people and the process of excellence. In other words, you are invested in the input. The latter is about being invested only in what the scoreboard shows. In other words, in the output. It takes a lot of courage to be emotionally committed but not emotionally attached to that success. Unlike an external facilitator, facilitation as a leader is simply a tool in your leadership toolkit. If you use it, you can achieve better collective success. And if you haven’t tried it yet, spend less than 10% of your next four team meetings talking. Instead, ask questions of the team to drive their own thinking. Even if your first session is largely quiet, keep going and I bet that by the third session you will make some wonderful progress in solving your team’s most important goals.