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.

Being able to give direct feedback is one of the most important aspects of leadership. It can sometimes feel easier to dodge direct language or soften our words too much because we think we’re being kind. But, as Brené Brown reminds us, “Clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.” Let’s talk about what it looks like to be clear and kind, along with 5 ways to give feedback more effectively.

Between holidays, vacations, and general year-end fatigue, the window between Thanksgiving and New Year’s can turn into a murky holding pattern. But it’s only October, which means there’s time to get ahead of this potential pitfall! Here are 5 leadership moves you can make right now to align your team before the end of the year.

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.

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.

How do you successfully shift from strategic planning into execution? In this article, I’ll cover the common blockers to a smooth transition and the solutions to the challenges that block execution so you can keep team momentum going long after the strategy has been set.

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.

Often, a team’s inability to work productively is due to a lack of focus, lack of support, and/or lack of alignment. In this article, you'll learn why your teams are probably getting stuck, along with a solution that I’ve seen work time and time again for getting them out of the weeds and back on track.

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!

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. 

Use these facilitation methods to unify, empower, and activate teams  that are dispersed, fragmented, remote, or disengaged. You can copy/paste these activities into your next worksop to get your team out of the weeds, dissolve or soften resistance, and re-energize the group.