Chairing Skills Program

Welcome to the Workspace of the Chairing Skills Program (CSP)!

Background of the CSP:

Active ICANN community contributors, and in particular, Chairs, can be easily challenged when taking up the responsibility of leading a working group or stakeholder group. Participants and facilitators of the ICANN Academy Leadership Program (LP) in Dublin 2015 agreed it would be valuable to offer a course to develop chairing skills, for both virtual and face-to-face meetings. As such, the new Chairing Skills Program (CSP) was piloted during the 2016-2017 fiscal year, beginning before ICANN58 in Copenhagen and ending at that meeting.  We took away several lessons from the pilot that will be applied to the second iteration. 

The CSP is different from the Leadership Program in many ways. It is specifically focused on current chairs, and deals with virtual facilitation as well as F2F interactions. This program is designed for chairs of working groups or stakeholder groups who would like to develop their chairing skills through coaching and feedback. The CSP started off as a peer-coaching program, but most recently, the ICANN Academy Working Group has worked with Incite Learning, LLC to further evolve ways to enhance chairing skills. The program has now been revamped to become a one-day, face-to-face program that will better serve new ICANN chairs.

The plan for the CSP in 2020:

Unfortunately, as we are now facing a global pandemic, ICANN’s meetings have been virtual this year, which is an additional challenge for the chairs to be able to lead a group effectively. Therefore, as a preview to the new, revamped CSP that will eventually take place in person, we will be holding a 90-minute webinar on Monday, 7 December 2020 from 3:00-4:30pm UTC.

The target audience for the webinar is ICANN Chairs that want to develop their chairing skills, especially newly elected chairs.

The webinar will focus on three areas that emerged from our design process as critical to success for chairs: Leadership, Communication, and Organization Skills. We will devote 30 minutes to each of the topics. Leadership skills will cover how to build trust in a group and how to convey the right balance of strength and warmth as a leader. Communication skills will explore asking questions, understanding positions, and building consensus. Organization skills is a combination of time management and meeting management - how to effectively prepare for meetings and get things done as a chair. The webinar is not meant to replace the full day experience, but rather to provide participants with both an overview to gain understanding and an opportunity to develop their personal network with other chairs.

The webinar will be delivered by David Kolb, Ph.D., the Managing Director of Incite Learning. David has been working with ICANN since 2013, providing training and coaching to the ICANN community, ICANN org, and others in the ICANN ecosystem. His focus is on leadership, interpersonal skills, and personal effectiveness. He has worked with several of the SO/ACs over the years and provided targeted training designed for their specific needs at the time.

If you are new/current chair (or vice chair) at ICANN and are interested and available to participate in this webinar, please register here by Monday, 30 November 2020 at 23:59 UTC.

Please click here for a copy of the slide deck used during the webinar.