About our services

About Improve Your Meetings

How you meet is how you work

Whether you work alone or in a huge organization, you work through meetings. Ideally, all your meetings are engaging, efficient and effective, and people leave them feeling clear and energized to do their part.

Your meetings aren't ideal? Well, you and I both know that leading effective meetings isn't as easy as people think! It can be frustratingly hard to get people to work together. Meetings can be mind-numbingly boring, go nowhere and you may feel like you are pulling teeth getting people to engage.

It happens to me too! I've experienced (and even led) some terrible meetings, and I've gotten better at planning and leading them. Not perfect, but better.

You can improve your meetings, by being willing to grow, learning practical approaches, reflecting on mis-steps, and practicing new skills in safe spaces. At Improve Your Meetings, we guide you, step by step, to become a more confident, collaborative leader.

Here's the secret

Although every group -- whether in public service, business or the non-profit sector -- is unique, all collaborative meetings have things in common, both external and internal.

There are visible things, like agendas, strategic plans and tangible results. For them, we ask questions like:

-- What are you doing?
-- How are you doing it?

-- Where are you doing it?

But we also need to pay attention to the insides of our groups and ourselves:
-- Who are you working with?
-- What matters to them?
-- Who are you?

-- What do you need to heal or do to prepare to lead?

To lead better meetings, leaders attend to both the externals and internals

Therefore, in our courses and events, you'll learn how to improve the visible things like agendas and engagement, and also practice "soft skills" like listening, presence and taking care of yourself, things that are essential to being a better leader.

Learning meeting facilitation involves microskills that, in my experience, are best learned in community. Therefore, we offer group events so that you can learn from and along with other participants, and we design our do-it-yourself courses to make it easy for you to interact with other individual learners.

Bottom line: Even though you may have come to Improve Your Meetings seeking tips for having better meetings, you will also find support for simply being a better, healthier and whole human being.

We hate boring, unproductive meetings. Do you, too?

Do you want to make this world a better, healthier place?
Are you creative, practical, and willing to try new things?
Are you inclined to change yourself instead of waiting for others to change first?
Do you like learning in community with others?

If so, we can guide you to lead meetings that are more engaging, effective, and efficient -- meetings where people leave feeling included and energized.

What do you need?

Skills? We can help you design and run effective and engaging meetings, both online and in person
Practical approaches? We share ones that are easy to learn, positive, versatile and effective.
Acceptance? We accept you, of your group and of things as they are. We've seen a lot in our years in science, public health, government, non-profits, and business. And we've made mistakes, felt shame and struggled too.

Here at Improve Your Meetings, you can ask for what you want to change about your meetings. Is it your agendas? Your preparation? Your process? Your team relationships? Yourself?

We work collaboratively with people like you to meet your needs by creating custom events. Contact us and we can talk about it. And if you need help in planning a specific meeting, or even run meetings on your behalf, we can help with that too.

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Barb Bickford leaning forward to help a participant in a workshop

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Reverend Tisha Brown

,Pastor and former director of The Damascus Project online course platform

I worked with Bickford Collaboration to provide concrete meeting skills and tools to lay leaders within congregations.

Barb has been really easy to work with. She is efficient and flexible. Our first session went incredibly smoothly and the participants were extremely grateful for the concrete skills and frameworks that they acquired for how to lead better meetings.

We will definitely work with Barb going forward and can see many different ways of engaging with her and the expertise and tools she brings.

Improve Your Meetings is a division of Bickford Collaboration, LLC
Our address and phone number are in the footer, below.

We have been a certified Green Business in Stillwater, Minnesota since 2021