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Twenty Years of Learning and Facilitating
Paul Winans shares the lessons learned from two decades of facilitating remodeling peer group meetings.
In 2000, I was asked by Linda Case and Victoria Downing to be a facilitator of Remodelers Advantage Roundtable Meetings. Each Roundtables group consists of around 10 non-competing member companies from the U.S. and Canada, who gather for annual Spring and Fall meetings. The meetings are three very busy days long.
I ran my last Roundtable Meetings this September. It was the right time, 20 years after I ran my first meeting.
Along with the members attending the meetings I facilitated, I learned some lessons. Here are a few of them.
Poor Prep Leads to Poor Results
Before a meeting, each attending company needs to send a lot of information to the other members in the Roundtable group. It takes focused attention to get all the information in order and make sure that it is accurate.
Those members who try to slide by, doing a less-than-adequate job at the prep, get the least useful input.
Why? The other members don't have the information they need to provide meaningful input. And they feel like their wasting their time when talking to a member who is not fully engaged.
It seems obvious that to get good results, you need to do to good prep. Every time I saw a packet of information that was not in good shape, I always wondered how they ran their business. Because if they ran their business the same way they approached getting ready for the Roundtable Meeting, the only way they would be making a profit would be by accident!
Time Slips Away
Each member gets the same amount of time "in the sun." Some members talk and talk, needing to be interrupted by the facilitator over and over again. They don't realize this is their time to get input. Input is what they came for.
Other members lay their cards on the table clearly and then listen carefully to the suggestions their fellow members make. They ask clarifying questions. They really want to understand what is being offered to them.
Many of the owner attendees are selling remodeling for their companies. How effective could they be as salespeople if they don't know how to manage time? How does their tendency to talk endlessly get in the way of them being the effective leaders their companies need them to be?
The one thing you can't make more of is time. So, use it wisely.
Work on the Hardest Thing
Each member tells the other members what they will work on improving between this meeting and the next meeting. It was interesting watching how members approached this.
Some people had a clear idea of what they should focus on before they came into the meeting room! They had thought about it ahead of time. By having done this, they got better input from the other members.
And the really smart members were still open to hearing suggestions from the other members about what might provide them with greater value. These conversations usually provided insights they didn't have before the meeting started.
Other members had no idea of what their task(s) between meetings should be. In that situation the other members were trying to come up with suggestions. Everyone got a bit frustrated.
If you don't get real with yourself about what the less-than-great parts of your company are, how can you improve? What do these people do when they are back in their companies? If you are not consistently trying to better your business, it inevitably devolves into a mess. But if you are blind to the obvious, how can you figure out what to focus on?
The hardest thing to improve in your business is you. You are the biggest opportunity. The members who I saw achieve the greatest success realized this. They then took responsibility for becoming who they wanted to be, not staying stuck being who they "are."
Be prepared, value your time and work on yourself—all good lessons. Pay attention to the choices you make. Not all of them are consistent with these principles.
For the first seven years I was facilitating other group meetings, Nina and I were members of the group. At the peer group meeting where the attendees focused on our company for the first day, I was told that the only thing not right with our company was me. Hard to hear, but I eventually embraced that truth and began the most important remodeling job I ever did—the one on me.
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