Why facilitation is the skill your teams are missing (and a free tool to help you level up your meetings)
If you want to skip straight to the tool for your team meetings, download the 7-step meeting template here. But if you've got five minutes, here are two stories about why building team meeting facilitation skills matters so much inside organisations and what I've learned about it the hard way.
Where do most team meetings go wrong?
Rewind to 2015. I'm in a meeting with my team of about seven people, high-performing, and we all work well together. And yet our meetings often looked like this:
We'd open with an agenda, then get stuck on item one, which suddenly needed an in-depth discussion. We liked to chat, and almost any topic could run indefinitely. With no agreed time limit, it rolled on and on - even though we didn't really need to discuss it at length.
Then we'd try to make a decision. We'd weigh the pros and cons and circle it for ages, because we had no clear, agreed way to decide. It usually fell to the most senior person in the room to call it once they sensed we were ready. As a participatory, consensus-driven team, we also spent a lot of time trying to hear from everyone before moving on.
By the time the hour was up, we'd covered two of seven agenda items, and people started filtering out to their next meeting. It wasn't a terrible meeting - far from it. We enjoyed getting together. But we were missing some key ingredients of good meeting facilitation:
Clarity on roles: who was keeping the meeting on track, and how
The ability to keep to time
The ability to push conversations through to an actual decision
Realistic time allocation: too long on updates, not enough on decisions or reflection
A mechanism for process improvement: so every meeting looked exactly like the last one
These are the five problems most team meetings share, and they're rarely about the people in the room. They're about the process.
A better model: The 7-Step Meeting Process
Fast forward to 2021. I'm now a freelance coach and facilitator, and one of my biggest clients is a quality improvement team within the NHS, working 1:1 with GP practices to help them identify and embed change.
Patient-facing NHS teams are some of the most time-poor people I've ever worked with. My task was to find one hour a week with each practice, usually a GP, a receptionist, a nurse or healthcare assistant, and sometimes a practice manager, and use it well. In that hour, we needed to:
Get updates on changes made since the last meeting
Review the data the team had captured
Identify new changes to test, or successful changes to adopt long-term
Review the meeting itself ("what went well, even better if")
Plan the work for the following week
It sounds like a lot for sixty minutes. Almost impossible. Surprisingly, most weeks it wasn't - because we used a structured approach called the 7-step meeting process, developed by ELFT (versions of it exist across teams and organisations worldwide).
What makes the 7-Step process different?
The real shift wasn't going through the motions of a normal team meeting - it was that we explicitly discussed and agreed the process itself, and reviewed it every week. That's the core of good facilitation: it's not just about the content of the meeting, but the process running underneath it.
The three most effective elements of this model, in my experience:
Distributing clear roles across the team to help run the meeting
A mini process review each time - a simple way to course-correct when a meeting isn't doing what it needs to do
A genuine time limit per item, and holding to it - we consistently overestimate how much discussion time something actually needs
(You can view the original ELFT 7-step model here if you want to go deeper.)
What does this mean for you?
If any of this sounds familiar, you don't need to overhaul how your team works overnight. A few small changes to how you run regular meetings can make a real difference to how they feel - and what they actually achieve.
That's why I've adapted the 7-step meeting process into a simple, ready-to-use template for your own team, whether it's a weekly catch-up or a cross-functional working session.
Download the 7-step meeting template here and try it in your next team meeting.
Or get in touch with us at hello@facilitation101.co.uk if you’d like to bring us in to train your team on this, and a lot of other tools and tips which can help you get the most out of your team, and the time you have together.
