5Difficult Participant Mistakes

Managing challenging participant behavior requires patience,discernment, guile, perseverance, skill, and a healthy of luck. The behavior can come at you head on or catch you off guard. The behavior can come from the quietest person in the room who has not contributed anything or from the manager who had promised to come and just observe. And, just when you think you've seen it all, a new challenging behavior is staring you in the eyes. Ultimately, the facilitator's or trainer's reaction is the key because it's not what happens to you that counts, it's how you handle it.

Over the years, trainers have coined some names for many of the difficult participants they've faced; for example, the latecomer, the big mouth, ...

Get Crash and Learn: 600+ Road-Tested Tips to Keep Audiences Fired Up and Engaged! now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.