I’ve facilitated hundreds of meetings in the public-interest sector at this point in my career. Meetings between funders trying to agree on how to coordinate funding. Meetings among nonprofit groups attempting to work together in coalition. Meetings between senior teams at nonprofit groups gathering insight for their strategic plans. Meetings among stakeholder groups providing feedback on those nonprofits’ understanding of community needs. Meetings among academic groups working with foundations to advance specific research and shape narratives around particular topics.
And I’ve sat in hundreds of other meetings facilitated by other facilitators. God bless them.
The feels
One thing I always look for is “the feels.” There’s a certain chemistry that happens when you’re among a group of people who genuinely care for each other. You feel it as soon as you walk into the room. The warm hugs. The exuberant greeting for someone another attendee hasn’t seen in a long while. The fact that I have to remind folks that we’ll “start on time and end on time,” so long as we stick to the agenda. The “if you can hear me, clap once” gimmick every facilitator uses because people LIKE each other, and I can’t get them to stop talking. Soon, I will be forced to ask a room full of accomplished adults to clap twice.
As a facilitator, that kind of energy feeds my soul. I know it’s going to be okay.
The tells
And then there are “the tells.” The tells are the undercurrent of a meeting, and they signal something’s up.
Folks arrive and share gentle hellos with a frigid rapport that reads like the staleness of a LinkedIn post when a colleague asks what they’ve been up to. Everyone is seated with coffee in hand, a laptop dutifully in front of them, Outlook open, and either their Moleskine or the host’s notepad perfectly nested on top of the meeting agenda and background materials.
Whether it’s the first scenario, the second, or a mix of the two, I’ve done my homework ahead of time. The room contains every visible sign of productivity. Flip-chart sheets taped along the wall, markers neatly arranged beside color-coded dots, Post-it notes, and meeting toys like stress balls and fidget cubes.
I also know the bios of the folks in the room. I’ve had discreet conversations with meeting organizers while designing the meeting and already know that so-and-so is not on board, or that this grantee was slighted a few years ago and did not receive the grant they had been betting on, or that this team member applied for the executive director position and didn’t get it, and now the current ED is angling for authority among a staff whose allegiance is divided.
While the feels leave me with a warm and fuzzy feeling, I’m always prepared for the tells. They are the yellow, pink, and red flags that surface during the meeting and threaten to derail it.
As a facilitator, I’m of two minds in these scenarios. It behooves me to run a good meeting and get everyone on board. As part of my contract, I’m obliged to submit a full report of the meeting, and that report must represent both the client and me well. I cannot write, “No one trusts each other, but we did complete the agenda,” or “They all tried to convince the board chair not to, but the chair wouldn’t budge.”
But secretly, there have been many times when I’ve wanted to toss the agenda, forget about time constraints, and get under the hood to the root of the problem. And don’t get me wrong, I’ve done that a few times. Those experiences have also conditioned me to tread carefully.
For one, by the time the red flags surface, they’re compounded by a complex web of events far too time-consuming to unpack, and ain’t no one got time for that. And two, while my job is to be the container and hold the room, I cannot create, within a 90-minute, half-day, or full-day retreat, the trust people need to have an honest dialogue about all the pink elephants in the room.
These meetings leave me distraught. No amount of facilitator gymnastics will heal the hurt, anger, confusion, and pain in the room. And it pains me to be put in a situation where a group therapist is needed. I understand the trauma rooted in the hurt more than my client might recognize.
Years ago, in interview after interview for strategic planning contracts or meeting facilitation jobs, I was repeatedly asked a variation of this question: How would I bring a DEI lens to the meeting and what would that look like in the room. I would answer awkwardly. Hoping to drop enough nuggets about my “diverse background” to crack the code: I am a white-adjacent Cuban American, Spanish as my first language, and aligned with progressive values who can also speak “community.” I understood, inherently, that my biography itself was being tokenized to sanitize a client’s DEI imperative. When an institution cannot hold something itself, it hires someone to hold it, and then measures the holding.
If anything good has come from the anti-DEI wave sweeping the country, it is that they’ve stopped asking the question. Let me be plain about what I am saying. I am not grateful for the wave. I am relieved to be out of the hoop.
The things beneath the thing
What consultants like me see in conference rooms, between sessions, during breakout groups, on calls with stakeholders, and in the Zoom chat is not so much THE THING we are there to discuss. We are watching the joy or resentment present in the room and diagnosing a much deeper problem that no amount of strategic planning will solve.
I might carefully design a meeting to inform a strategic plan, build agreement around a budding coalition, or engage community members in shaping the outreach for a new program. But what I am really seeing is the strength or fragility of the relationships required to carry any of it through.
Sometimes the tells appear as friction in the conversation or a participant who has quietly checked out. But the good feelings can be just as tricky to read. The joy, camaraderie, and go-with-the-flow leaders who say all the right things can be a tell, too. As a consultant, I have been in rooms where the warmth felt genuine. I have also been in rooms where it felt like a performance for funders, and an almost convincing one.
Here’s the thing, folks. People are tired. They’ve either adapted to conditions where they’ve learned that performance gets the cheese, or they’re tired of performing.
Long before entering the room, they know that whoever is cohosting the meeting is likely paying for it. They know which disagreements they can surface without derailing the conversation. And I know, as a consultant, that a call for “role clarity” means a founder is not letting go of the reins, that an “opportunity for alignment” means there’s opposition on campaign goals, and that “stronger messaging and communications” is an indicator that something is amiss in operations.
My job is to package a summary with recommendations and next steps. I’ll deliver it to you in a well-written format with headers, insights, and supporting bullets. I’ll even include the dissenting views in ways that are palatable to read, nonthreatening in tone. “Participants expressed a desire for greater transparency” sounds much better than “Everyone already knows what happened, and no one wants to say it in front of everyone.”
The THING we came to discuss was discussed. The people who needed to discuss the thing were present. Everyone feels like the summary reflects what happened.
And the problems underneath the thing will remain there. Sitting in plain sight. To be picked up again where we left off.
Consultants love this conundrum. It is guaranteed work for years to come and the core of the big-box firms’ business models. So long as people are not being genuine, are prioritizing agendas over conversation, and are measuring success through the reports we generate, there is plenty for us to do. And we will never get to the root of the problem.
There is always money for another process to understand why the last process did not change anything.
What if we did things differently?
What if we crafted the agenda with the usual purpose and desired outcomes in mind, but were ready to chuck it if the truth wasn’t surfacing?
What if we spent more time building relationships with each other outside the meetings themselves? Not just socially at happy hours, dinners or conferences, but as people and friends do. Over phone conversations, Zoom check-ins, in-person visits that didn’t carry an agenda.
What if we replaced the strategic plans that read like a “5 Steps to Something” document and instead wrote: our theory of change is to change the way we do things. The act of STOPPING what we are doing, which is not working, will put theories of change to shame.
What if we extended timelines beyond SMART goals measured in quarters and milestones, and allowed for the surprises that come with meandering? Trust, it turns out, is very difficult to complete by the end of Q3.
What if THE THING is discussed, but when the pink elephant surfaces, the relationships are strong enough to hold the conversation because trust, empathy, and intellectual honesty have already been built?
I know, I know. There’s structure to maintain and grant cycles to fulfill. But I ask you this as painfully and directly as I possibly can: Look around us. What are we doing?