Over the past six years of facilitating virtual collaboration, I’ve learned something important: the quality of a virtual workshop often starts with your setup. Here are eight pro-tips that will help you hold the room, guide decisions, and keep people engaged across screens and time zones.

Leadership requires judgment and direction. Facilitation requires neutrality and mechanics. When one person tackles both simultaneously, progress suffers. This article explores why the balance is so challenging, and the importance and benefits of separating the roles.

Having a defined plan is important—essential, even—but it must be balanced with curiosity and adaptability. If you’re constantly navigating stakeholder pressure, team friction, and the gap between strategy and execution, learn how to build muscle memory around this balance with my facilitator-approved tips.

If you’re thinking about leading a workshop yourself, learn about the five most common roadblocks that stall progress, along with a few of my facilitator-approved tips for getting ahead of the spiral.

You don’t always need to wait for a big strategy offsite to kick off meaningful conversations with your team. Here are five facilitator-approved, easy-to-run micro-workshops designed for teams working on innovation, new product/feature design, ideation, or simply looking for more productive ways to collaborate.

The best leaders are more focused on asking questions than leading with answers. In this article, I’ll share some researched-backed evidence for this mindset, along with practical, facilitator-approved advice for asking better questions and leading with inquiry.

When conflict arises in work and life, it can seem easier to ignore or divert, but finding middle ground helps us become more resilient, better communicators and de-escalators, and better at embracing diverse perspectives. In this article, you’ll learn facilitator-approved tools and mindsets to better navigate hard conversations at work and in your personal life.

Whether you’ve been facilitating for a while, or are just dipping your toe in, these 5 superpowers will help elevate your ability to successfully guide people through the winding road of decision making, ideation, and problem solving, all in the spirit of helping them do their best work.

In this article, learn about the essential yet undervalued bookends of workshops: the prep work and wrap-up activities. The tips in this article will help elevate your workshop design, support better outcomes for the teams you lead, and set you up for success as a facilitator.

With people working in distributed, remote, and hybrid capacities, teams are more reliant than ever on virtual meetings and workshops to help accelerate ideas and projects. But how do we overcome meeting fatigue and skepticism? With the right tools, methods, and activities, we can make meetings more productive and enjoyable. The facilitator-approved tips in this article will help you do just that!

Visual aids are a necessary tool for anyone who facilitates group collaboration. They break up dense information, activate different parts of the brain, and help participants better visualize ideas. As a facilitator, there are three primary ways I use visual aids, which I’ll cover in this article along with some examples you can apply directly to your work.

Empowered teams consistently outperform their counterparts—and an empowered team is only possible with the right leadership behaviors. In this article, my goal is to help you unlock the superpower that will help you cultivate more empowered teams. This advice is rooted in my work as a facilitator and the observations I’ve made working with teams of all types and sizes, as well as their leaders.