Chairing Meetings - How to Deal with Challenging Participants

When you are chairing meetings there is always the chance you'll have a difficult participant. And this can ruin your day and, worse, waste the time of other attendees. So, in this lesson, I'll show you how to handle challenging participants.

First, we'll look at 10 general strategies for handling challenging participants. Then we'll look at 18 difficult behavior and the tactics you can use to deal with them.

Watching this Video is worth 7 Management Courses CPD Points*.
(See below for more details)

This video is part of course module number 2.3.2
Program 2: The Manager as Communicator
Course 3: Meetings
Section 2: Chairing Meetings

Primary videos that precede this video include:

Primary videos that follow this video include:

LESSON NOTES
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General strategies for dealing with challenging participants:
1. Help the group set ground rules
2. Ignore the behavior and hope it goes away on its own
3. Give it air-time, let the person vent, then don’t revisit
4. Redirect the response to another learner in the group
5. Use humor to diffuse an uncomfortable situation
6. Call-out the behavior
7. Let's have a break...
8. …and a quiet word
9. … and move people around
10. Adjourn

Types of Difficult Behavior
- The Late arriver
- The Early leaver
- The Shy or Quiet One
- The Challenger
- The Know it All
- The Interrupter
- The Attacker
- The Backseat Driver
- The Center of Attention
- The Joker
- The Busy-busy
- The Email Addict
- The Gossip
- The Head shaker
- The Interpreter
- The Verbose
- The Broken Record
- The Sidebar

RECOMMENDED EXERCISE
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1. Spend some time reviewing this video and your notes. Make a cheat-sheet of strategies you can use for your meetings and paste it into your meeting notebook - or whatever you take to your meetings. (2 MC CPD Points)
2. Reflect on challenging participants and difficult behavior you've seen in the past. What types does it seem to fit? What would have been helpful strategies for dealing with those difficult participants? (2 MC CPD Points)
3. At your next two meetings, if you have any challenging participants, deliberately apply one or to of the strategies you have learned. After the meeting, reflect on what happened and how effective those strategies were. (2x2 MC CPD Points)

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RECOMMENDED READING
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Management Courses Continuing Professional Development (CPD) Points
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Each video has two levels of MC CPD points. For this video:
- If you simply watched the video, record 7 MC CPD points
- If you also carried out all of the recommended exercises, score a total of 15 MC CPD points
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