Blog. Ideas for better meetingsProfessional Meeting Facilitation
ProMeet. A 2016 Facilitation Impact Award Winner
IAF Regional Director Trevor Durnford and IAF Member Bruce Rowling present Sean Blair with the Facilitation Impact Award.
LEGO®, Dialogue and new meeting tools help leading college get a top UK value added score
ProMeet together with client, Brighton, Hove and Sussex Sixth Form College (BHASVIC) have received a Facilitation Impact Award from the International Association of Facilitators (IAF).
The Facilitation Impact Awards
The Facilitation Impact Awards are prestigious international awards for demonstrations of facilitation excellence in businesses, governments, and not for profit organisations. The IAF convenes the Awards to:
- Promote awareness of the role of facilitation in achieving positive and impactful results
- Reward the use of facilitation within organisations, communities, and society in general
- Recognise excellence in facilitation practices
"The Facilitation Impact Awards are tangible proof that organisations that use professional facilitation with their projects achieve significant results.” says Noel Tan, Global Chair of the International Association of Facilitators.
The 'Working Together Better' Project
ProMeet was contracted by BHASVIC to help the team at BHASVIC achieve the following objective:
To improve the effectiveness of BHASVIC Senior Management Team (SMT) meetings and help BHASVIC become a collaborative and mutually supportive team with a college-wide, participative and facilitative leadership culture.
This overarching objective was achieved by realising the five project objectives:
- Development of participatory leadership skills for all members of SMT
- Improve SMT team meetings
- Improve BHASVIC meeting skills and culture
- Develop a clear, compelling ‘living’ BHASVIC vision and strategy
- Develop a well-communicating, happy, high performing SMT
Key Impacts
Impact is the key criteria for recipients of the Facilitation Impact Awards. The 12 month project between BHASVIC and ProMeet created the following impacts:
- Improvements in senior management team development across six measures
- A ‘radically improved’ approach strategic planning
- Staff morale rose to 90%
- 100% of managers were trained to facilitate participatory meetings
And centrally, the work supported BHASVIC in gaining recognition for student outcomes. BHASVIC became the second best ‘value added’ sixth form college in the UK.
Chris Thomson - Principal at Brighton Hove & Sussex Sixth Form College said,
"Working with Sean’s been a transformational experience for the Senior Management Team at BHASVIC. We have had conversations and have made progress of a kind that we cannot imagine would ever have been possible without his skilled and committed help.
Sean has expertly facilitated a quite fundamental change in the way we think about ourselves and the way we conduct business that is having a positive effect throughout the College and not only within the SMT. We're enormously grateful to him!"
New Tools and Methods
The work over 12 months helped the team identify the positive and negative behaviours then though use or adoption of new meeting tools, including LEGO® Serious Play®, Dialogue and the ProMeet system the team learnt to communicate more openly.
Sean Blair said: "The senior manager team at BHASVIC that included Shirley-Ann Brookes-Mills, Tarquin Grossman, Jutta Knapp, James Moncrieff, Keith Murphy and of course Chris Thompson were a brilliant team to work with. This award recognises each member of that team, especially for their open attitude to try new ways of working, communicating and relating.
And huge respect and thanks to the volunteer FIA team at IAF who put enormous work into administering and reviewing entrants to the awards from all over the world. Their effort is showing the professional facilitation creates personal learning and growth, real professional development and organisational change.
Read the case study of this project.
© 2020 ProMeet