Facilitate the work and not the meeting

I was recently in a meeting with several “change management” experts. These people tend to be very good facilitators and the person running this meeting was no exception. He was articulate, made sure that people got to speak, clarified points and aligned to the agenda. However, I noticed about half way through the meeting that we had not focused on what we needed to do to progress the work.

Afterwards I was thinking that facilitation should focus on moving work forward which means aligning to actions, next steps and ownership and not just moving the meeting along. These can be related but the primary focus has to have an orientation around action. So many times we leave meetings not knowing what occurred, what the outcomes were and who is accountable for work.

As the title suggests, we need to make sure that we facilitate the work and not just the mechanics of the meetings otherwise the only  accomplishment that we will have is a well run meeting and nothing else to show.