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.

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 we want to get the most from our teams, the way we meet needs to be considered carefully, and that starts before you even send the meeting invite. This article covers the important elements you need to think about as you plan your meeting or workshop and includes some helpful tools that will prepare you to lead your best session ever.

There’s no magic button to eliminate unruly behavior among workshop participants, but there are a few things facilitators can do to get ahead of it. In this post, I share my four favorite ground rules that set teams up for better meetings and workshops, along with a few bonus rules that apply to virtual sessions.

Hard-to-handle participants are par for the course if you frequently facilitate meetings and workshops. While it’s stressful when these things happen, it doesn’t need to be the thing that keeps you up at night. Here are 4 tips for managing the checked-out or disengaged attendees in your meeting.

If you’re looking for a more meaningful and actionable way to wrap up meetings, take a look at these 5 options for closing your next session. They’re organized based on the scenarios meeting leaders and facilitators often find themselves in, with practical advice for each.

You can’t make unruly or unwilling attendees disappear from meetings and workshops, but you can control how you prepare, respond and engage in real time. Doing so will make the workshop experience better for you and your participants. Here are five tips for navigating this area.

How do meeting leaders and workshop facilitators make sure teams can collaborate and produce their best work without being bulldozed by someone loud and intimidating? A bit of effort before and during a session can keep things running well and reduce the likelihood that this type of behavior will emerge from participants. And when it does, I’ve got tips for that too.

What kicks off a day of collaborative work on a good note? How do you create a sense of camaraderie amongst colleagues or perfect strangers? The truth is simple: icebreakers. I know there’s a perception that they’re old school, or fluffy, or even cheesy. But that’s only if you aren’t using them correctly. Here are three common scenarios in which icebreakers are particularly helpful, along with specific examples so you can copy and paste them into your next session.

How can we make meetings the productive, efficient, good-natured gatherings they were intended to be? My answer: never head into a meeting without an understanding of where we intend to go together. Here are some specific tactics to make this dream a reality for both meeting attendees and organizers.

Comfort is physical, mental and emotional. It’s applicable to introverts and extroverts. And it’s something that facilitators should prioritize cultivating. Why? Because a group of comfortable humans is more likely to produce / co-create / unlock their best work yet. Leverage these 6 methods at your next session and see if you observe a difference.

Workshop methods that can be applied to meetings so we can be more intentional about how the diverse voices in the room are heard and represented.