I help organizations improve their meetings and conferences -- in-person or online. This may be reducing the time or number of meetings, making them more effective and actionable, generating better ideas, or improving collaboration. I provide meeting facilitation services for team meetings as well as conferences, retreats, and offsites. In addition, I offer meeting training courses to improve meeting skills for employees and managers. These meeting management workshops include Basic Meeting Skills, Successful Virtual & Online Meetings, Getting Innovative Ideas, Leading Meetings for New Managers, Fixing Board & Staff Meetings, Refreshing Your Conference, and Group Facilitation Training. Finally, I consult on meeting design, be it fixing weekly staff meetings or the agenda and elements of a conference. Based in Washington, DC, I work with corporations, non-profits, government and associations. Much of my career has been built on the pillars of increasing engagement, reducing complexity, and synthesizing information. My facilitation and meeting design style is collaborative, participatory, and co-creative. I strive to help organizations improve their culture with effective meetings that are efficient, engaging – and even fun. My meeting facilitation work is most heavily influenced by my decade as Director of Development with LifeWise Strategies, an education/training company. There, I helped a range of organizations improve their classes, workshops, and client sessions through consulting, training, curriculum development and gamification, and hands-on learning tools. I also oversaw the development of the company’s online assessment tool. Clients included large banks and credit unions to non-profits like Habitat for Humanity, to universities, and government agencies, including the US Army and Marine Corps. Previously, I worked in Capital One’s knowledgebase department within the training and development organization. I also wrote professionally as a journalist, interviewing thought-leaders and covering business, entrepreneurship, and technology for publications like Inc., Fast Company, Entrepreneur, BusinessWeek and Washington Post. I started my career at a large commercial general contracting company and then as a product manager for a mobile/wireless software company, managing B2B and B2C products. Very early on, I spent formative time at the Center for Creative Leadership and the creative consulting agency, Play. All these experiences come together with Better Meetings where I’m on a modest quest to rid the world of bad meetings.
