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IELTS Practice Listening: Match Headings
ID: #57429
Medium
Facilitator
Instructions
Complete the table below by dragging appropriate letter A-E in each.
Link each task below to the appropriate global responsibility.
Tasks
| writing an agenda | 1 |
| defining technical terms | 2 |
| maintaining harmony | 3 |
| guiding discussion | 4 |
| encouraging everyone’s participation | 5 |
Transcript:
You will hear a lecture about the role of a facilitator in business meetings and their main responsibilities. Now listen carefully and answer the questions. Today, in this second talk of the series, I'd like to discuss the role of the facilitator in a meeting. For those of you who aren't aware, businesses and organizations in the past 20 years or so have turned to this idea of a facilitator. A facilitator is a person in the organisation who's chosen to ensure that meetings are carried out efficiently. The facilitator works together with a meeting leader, but their roles are quite different. The meeting leader concerns himself or herself with the content of the meeting. By content, I mean, of course, what the meeting's for. The facilitator, on the other hand, is more concerned with the process of the meeting. This notion of process includes the rules for the meeting and making sure everyone has a chance to participate. OK, I next want to outline what are commonly known as the five global responsibilities of a facilitator. This is to give you a better idea of just what a facilitator does and why they're so important to meetings. One global responsibility is labelled blueprinting. Blueprinting a meeting involves creating an agenda and clarifying rules for the meeting. Much of this work is done together with a meeting leader. Blueprinting also means learning about each of the participants and what their goals and interests are with regard to the topic of the meeting. It also involves printing and photocopying documents for the meeting and assembling equipment such as visual aids. A second global responsibility is what we call pro-integration. Pro-integration happens during the actual meeting. For this, the facilitator must listen carefully to what the participants are saying then clarify any unfamiliar terms or phrases spoken by the participant. He or she then summarises what was said to ensure everybody at the meeting both fully understands and is fully understood. Global responsibility number three is what I term focusing. This is basically seeing that everyone keeps to the task at hand, not wandering off onto other topics. It's all too easy for discussion in a meeting to get off track. Here, the facilitator supervises the discussion, making sure all comments are relevant to the task. Focusing also involves knowing in which direction the meeting should be going and making sure it goes there. We can compare the facilitator's role here to that of a bus driver, steering the group where they need to go. This brings us to prompting, which is our fourth global responsibility. Not everyone at a meeting may feel confident enough to talk, and we must remember that just because they're quiet, it doesn't mean that they've got nothing to contribute. So a facilitator might prompt people, that is, ask people questions or use other activities to get members involved. The task of prompting also means making sure that participants who tend to dominate allow the quieter members a chance to speak. After all, there's nothing more boring than having one or two people dominate a meeting. When participants get into disputes or arguments with each other, then it's time for the facilitator to take on the role of friction manager. This is the fifth global responsibility of the facilitator and the last on our list. Friction management means handling conflicts in a positive and constructive manner. During meetings when members may have very different points of view, emotions can run high and people may begin to act negatively towards one another, getting into arguments or what have you. A good facilitator knows that this kind of negative behaviour serves no purpose at business meetings. Its defects are not constructive. So he or she then has to use his or her skills to return the group to a peaceful atmosphere and maintain that atmosphere. There are various skills involved in friction management, which I won't go into here, but basically, The notion of getting the group to focus on what they agree on, rather than what they disagree on, is vital.
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