Erin Bankey led a training session on group dynamics to better inform the company’s work with organizational design, project management, and facilitation. In collaboration with Dr. Sam Steen of The George Washington University, the course covered the five stages of group development and useful techniques to mitigate group problems. Examples raised during the group discussion demonstrated that an understanding of how people interact in groups is essential in client delivery and relevant for our work.

Offering internal training sessions is part of the FSL’s effort to provide professional development for M Squared employees. The slide deck and presentation notes can be found under Corporate Meetings on SharePoint.

Be looking for more upcoming training offerings from FSL, including strategic communications, interest-based problem solving, leadership development, and conflict resolution! Based on the feedback received so far, project management, process design, proposal writing, and organizational change management are also popular requests for future trainings.

Please feel free to email the FSL team with additional suggestions or requests for desired trainings. We look forward to your valuable input!

Can a meeting that only gets half way through the scheduled agenda be considered successful? Absolutely!

The Meeting Managers Training in September is an excellent example. The afternoon training was a great success, despite only finishing half way, as it showcased current M Squared supported meetings by each Meeting Managers. These presentations described each meeting’s significance, benefits, and where M Squared has brought direct value. We also documented a long list of the various tools that M Squared uses to support the meeting. In total, M Squared has seven Meeting Managers (and counting) supporting 19 meetings!

Andrew Slawter brought forth his vast M Squared experience in meeting management and facilitated an informative and entertaining training session on meeting minutes, proper documentation, and procedures. Hard to believe meeting minutes could actually be fun!

Outputs captured from the meeting will help M Squared develop common standards and train future Meeting Managers. With time shortened from the original schedule, we were only able to get through half of the agenda. The second half of this training session resumed in mid-October and focused on further improving M Squared’s meeting management through using technological tools and writing clearer, more effective action Items. Thank you all for your participation and feedback!