Blogpost about the Online Facilitation Course

Leading meetings in real-life circumstances can be difficult and messy.

Meetings bring together a mix of challenges: tight deadlines, competing priorities, some underlying team dynamics.

All of these these elements can pop up in some form or another during a meeting, and you, as the facilitator, need to navigate them to get to real results by the end.

Leading meetings in real-life circumstances can be difficult and messy.

As our work becomes more collaborative, expertise on how we work (process) becomes as important as what we work on (content).  Facilitating group decision-making processes is a key skill for managers, team leads, campaign leads, project managers, and directors.

So what does it take to facilitate effectively?

1. They Establish a Clear Purpose

• Why are we really here? What’s my role? What will exist after this meeting which currently doesn’t exist? They get the whole group aligned on the meeting’s purpose, objectives, and desired outcomes.

2. They Build a Structured Process

• Facilitators ALWAYS think in terms of process rather than agenda. What should happen before, during, and, after the meeting, so that we reach our desired outcomes?
• Before the meeting, we’re setting the right expectations, during the meeting, we keep the group on track and balance participation, and afterwards shape for accountability and follow-through.

3. They Lead with Presence

Your energy, tone, and non-verbal cues shape the room. A skilled facilitator stays calm, confident, and flexible, even when discussions get heated or when things don’t go as planned. Presence isn’t just about speaking—it’s about listening deeply, creating space for others, and knowing when to step in or step back.

4. They Understand People and Power Dynamics

They don’t just focus on the loudest voices; they create space for contributions across the spectrum, ensuring that both formal authority (e.g., seniority, decision-making power) and informal influence (e.g., expertise, social capital) are acknowledged and balanced.

There’s only so much one can learn from books. The real learning takes practice in learning-by-doing spaces. A learning-by-doing space is an environment where you can take risks, stretch you skills, and find your facilitation style. It’s a place to test out a session with supportive peers.

“Did the format allow for enough thinking time? Was my presentation clear?”
“How did my new brainstorming approach land?”
“How did I navigate that conversation, and what would you do in my case?”

And these sessions are not just beneficial for the ones leading them. Participants learn lots as well:
“Wow, I did not know about this format?”
“Would this approach suit my own team at work?”

At the end of a session, the facilitator knows what works and what doesn’t, and is ready to lead the session with confidence and ease in the real world.

When you sign up, you’ll …

• Kick-off with your facilitation coach
  During your one-on-one, you’ll bring a past or future meeting you’d want to give an overhaul. You’ll explain the context, your role, the participants, and what you hope to achieve. The professional facilitator will ask a bunch of questions and then will suggest an approach for your session that incorporate the 4 elements of effective facilitation.
• Browse through our Facilitation Resource Hub
  Read about theoretical frameworks and prompts that can help you build your session.
• Design and prepare your meeting the instructions, the activity, and you ping the other participants with the title and maybe a prep question.
• Run your own online meeting (20 min) + debrief (20 min) You’ll run a 20 min session. You’ll experience what worked and what didn’t. And your supportive peers will give you tips on how to make it even better.

In addition, you’ll:

• Experienced 16 wildly different online formats as a participant. Your peers will bring challenges that may feel familiar to you and you get to learn from their approach.
• Run one mini-format with a set of instructions to give you that extra practice.

This is the course for you if:

• You regularly need to lead meetings, either internally or externally, as a team lead, project coordinator, program officer, or manager.
• Until now you’ve successfully relied on your inituition alone, but now you crave novelty an inspiration. This course will expose you to lots of new approaches in a short amount of time coupled with the facilitator’s designing and planning process.
• You like highly participatory courses.
• You’re curious. You don’t need to have a meeting challenge in mind before signing up. With your facilitator coach, you’ll talk about your work and together you’ll find a meeting challenge to work around.

This is not the course for you if:

• You never lead meetings and frankly, you hope you never need to.
• You are very advanced in your facilitation journey – meaning you confidently tackle 3 out of 4 aspects – and you prefer doing a deep dive into one niche aspect.
• Experiential learning is not your thing – you prefer a book or podcast.
• You cannot commit to attend the 4 sessions.