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Committed to the development of people and organizations

Effective Facilitation Skills

Many business professionals, whether in a sales or professional services environment, are increasingly requiring skills in managing and facilitating groups both internally and externally.

Regardless of the specific activity, it is vital to ensure that when a group meets, the session is run effectively, ensuring objectives are met and that people’s time is optimised. The Effective Facilitation Programme is a four day workshop designed to build on individuals’ strengths and knowledge to assist them in developing further in advanced facilitation skills and techniques. The workshops provide an in-depth understanding of human interaction and how this relates to facilitating group activity.

Organisational Benefits

Through the Effective Facilitation Workshop, participants can:

  • Gain a competitive edge in securing contracts;
  • Establish solid, and long term, customer relations more quickly;
  • Learn additional tools to help close business in the sales process;
  • Minimising both organizational and personal risks in important client engagements and contracts;
  • Ensuring that projects start quickly with the project members fully aligned;
  • Increase effectiveness in cross-functional teamwork.
 Individual Benefits

As a result of the Effective Facilitation workshop, participants will:

  • Learn creative problem solving;
  • Improve their listening skills;
  • Become skilled in giving and receiving feedback;
  • Better manage difficult people;
  • Gain consensus and commitment;
  • Increase awareness of self and group process;
  • Become able to work more creatively;
  • Learn to control group feed back;
  • Maintain a style of flexibility.

Target Audience

  • Managers who need to involve their teams in generating ideas and helping shape decisions;
  • Sales executives who need to run group activities within customer organizations;
  • Project managers who run idea generating sessions such as: Strategy definition and Planning, Requirements Definition, Project Risk Analysis, or Rapid Project Start-up;
  • Management-Union forums;
  • Executives defining organizational strategy;
  • Professionals who are engaged in needs analysis or requirements definition;
  • Marketing and sales professionals who need ideas-generation for strategies;
  • Managers who need to remove project bottlenecks to bring projects back to their committed baseline and budget.
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    Learning Approach And Content

    The Effective Facilitation Workshop provides a safe environment in which professionals can learn and practice skills in facilitating groups. The approach is flexible, focusing on the needs of the group, yet allowing any individual within the group to pause the process and examine any particular aspect of facilitation skills currently being demonstrated. Each workshop provides extensive opportunities for participants to role-play within a safe and supportive learning environment as well as providing a thorough understanding of group dynamics and creative problem solving techniques.

    CPA’s facilitators offer themselves as role models for the workshop participants, and share their own thought processes and actions with the participants as part of the learning process. In role play situations realistic scenarios are preferred which are relevant to the genuine needs of the business giving participants the opportunity to relate new learning to their individual situations at work. Reference material and visual aids support the learning and assist in retaining the information.