Why bother doing better...

When you’ve cursed or waved your fist at a fellow road user -- pedestrian, cyclist, driver, truckie -- for doing something crazy on the road, just remember that we can’t allbe above average drivers. Some of us are highly proficient and skilled, confident and capable. Others of us are less so … and we’ve all done something at some time that wasn’t the best decision while on the road.

The same applies to drivers at work: leaders running meetings and workshops. We might, possibly, perhaps, maybe think we’re pretty great when it comes to leading meetings, getting outcomes with a team and keeping people engaged throughout the process! 

Many a leader I’ve observed, coached or developed in facilitation skills -- the skills leaders use to bring their team together, remove obstacles and get good work done -- believe they’re pretty hot, highly capable and in short, "nailin’ it".

But we can’t all be above average facilitators. 

It could be that we haven't recently gained perspective on how we’re going or perhaps we may not have adjusted our style to incorporate some of the newer approaches to working with people that help bring them together and get work done. 

Or we might be comparing ourselves to those we work with and okay, so fair enough, in comparison with that sample, we may well be hot! But outside of your organisation’s culture of meetings and workshops, you may be resorting to habitual patterns of behaviour that could be impacting how you’re performing... and the results you're getting in meetings and workshops.

A New View

Time and again in my workshops on facilitation skills I see how delighted people are to learn new skills, capabilities and techniques in how to handle what happens in meetings, team sessions and workshops. They are thrilled in fact! Their confidence lifts. They have new ways of working with people that are contemporary, yet caring; new ways that are creative yet productive.

We don’t know what we don’t know when it comes to many aspects of leadership, collaboration, motivation, performance… you can put facilitation on that list too.

The role of the workplace leader continues to evolve.

Increasingly leaders are needing workplace group leadership skills across three main areas: 

1. to create the right environment or culture for collaboration, 
2. to elicit information from the team and
3. to build cohesion - to help bring a team together and to help them stick. (And... taking them out for drinks doesn’t count!)

So it makes sense for leaders to continue to look at how to build these types of capabilities, to build their social intelligence and to get better leverage for the time they spend working with their direct reports. 

Why bother doing better? 

If you’re on your own journey of going from good to great as a leader -- no matter your role, field, industry or organisation -- think about why you would step-up in your capabilities and performance.

In each of my workshops on facilitation skills or 'Leader as Facilitator' program, I ask participants why they want to do better or why they want to improve their facilitation capability with their team in their organisation.

Gathering up all of those replies to ‘why’ over recent years, the responses seem to focus on four main areas (and you'll see some direct quotes from the sessions): 

 

The ME

(me, myself, I - this is about them, the leader)

Their responses include improving their facilitation capability to: 

• Build confidence 
• Learn! Always be learning
• Confirm if I am on the right track with what I’m doing now
• Be more persuasive. One participant recently said: "Perhaps I’m a little bit direct; how can I be more persuasive, impactful, engaging – all at once?". Aaaah yes, a magical trio there, but it can be done. 
•  Understand what to do when I don’t know what to do
•  Break old habits and routines
•  Improve my communication skills
•  Become a better leader (Yes! Nice one that.)

The WE

(them, they, us - this is about the participants, their direct reports, team members, stakeholders, the people they work with)

They said they wanted to improve their capabilities to facilitate as a leader to: 

• Influence stakeholders and learn more ways to influence people
• Handle tricky situations and strong personalities in the room (urgh, don’t you just break out in a sweat at the thought of the next one of those you have to lead!)
• Manage up; to be able to lead leaders
• Get people on board a change program or a new or changed project
•  Engage people to increase their commitment to follow through on actions 
•  Keep people motivated
•  Manage differing outcomes and expectations

The WORK

(it, that, the work - this is about the work to be done)

Participants said they wanted to improve their abilities to facilitate in meetings and workshops to: 

• Get to a decision - as one leader said, "It's fine to all talk and contribute but where is it eventually going? Do we need to get somewhere and get agreement? If so, then I have to make that happen without being a steamroller".
• Give a name to things we may do instinctively as leaders; "I'd like to be more conscious of deliberately doing something because then I’ll know what to do to get what outcomes."
• Conduct more effective meetings (oh so common this one - such a h-u-g-e time waster when it doesn't go well)
• Achieve outcomes in a group or team environment. "The more people there are, the messier it can get, but we still need to do stuff", said a leader recently. 
• Keep a group of people on track and get the work done. (It's an ongoing and fine balancing act, hey?) 

The WAY

(how we do the work - this is about how we work together, the culture of the meeting or workshop, how we perform as a group)

Participants said how they work would be boosted with better facilitation skills to: 

• Add to the toolkit of strategies and tactics we know about when working in a group situation
• Move away from click and point PowerPoint presentations; "It’s not a presentation - it’s a workshop, dude", was feedback from a leader’s direct report at a design thinking workshop recently. Ouch! But it was feedback that jolted that leader and helped them shift their thinking and then go ahead and build their facilitation capability
• Techniques to get beyond group ‘niceties’. "You know, we’re all being nice and getting along and perhaps being compliant in our decision making so we don’t rock the boat, rather than feeling like you can have robust discussion and diverse participation."
• Get different views from around the room
• Harvest ideas and get deeper information from all of the team or unit or from smaller groups or areas of the business who might not normally participate in these sessions
• Run better meetings; "we spend so much time in them and we simply don’t do them well enough”. 

There are so many ways an enhanced capability to facilitate in your team will benefit you and the team, the work that gets done and the way you all do the work. 

And while it's just one capability - facilitation - it has so many facets, perspectives, skills, techniques, ways of thinking and depth to it. It's a practice.

What’s most needed where you are at the moment? 

Watch what happens over the next few days and weeks -- where do you think a better, stronger capability to facilitate (to make things easier for the team) would be beneficial?

Leader as Coach: T-o-o s-l-o-w

The Leader as Coach approach has been a leadership staple in many industries and organisations for years.

This is where a leader schedules one-on-one conversations and meetings with their team members. These conversations may be about helping that team member progress and develop, help them uncover ideas and actions to tackle challenges or barriers getting in that person's way or to perhaps have a tricky or difficult conversation about behaviour or performance.

'Train the Coach', 'Coach the Coach' or 'Leader as Coach' programs have been a popular part of the learning and development offer for years.

I recall delivering a coaching training program for leaders for a large banking and financial institution about ten+ years ago. They wanted to ensure their leaders adopted a coaching culture and in turn, help them be more effective at those crucial one-on-one conversations. 

So, yes, coaching is a highly valued and valid leadership tool.

But there's a but: it can be so. freakin'. s-l-o-w.

Many leaders find the drain, drag and pace of one-to-ones across their team less efficient than they'd like ... and less efficient for the time they have available. 

As one leader in the bank's coaching program I ran said (in objection to doing coaching):

"It takes so long to get that person to realise what needs to be done, to go through the GROW model or whatever tool we're working on. I just don't think I have the time or the patience for this all the time".

While that type of comment may run counter to what leadership or leaders should be like (read: more patient or more effective at coaching or more 'something'), the realities of pressured schedules, busy teams and project deadlines mean many leaders avoid the one-on-one or push it out and delay it or try and reschedule it time and again.

As a result, communication, leadership, colalboration, performance and engagement all suffer.

Rather than telling leaders to coach more or insisting they must coach more, I believe we need to acknowledge that leaders have time to leverage and the better they can do that, the greater impact they'll have - certainly more than what a raft of one-to-ones can achieve.

To all the coaches or pro-coaches out there... relax, this is not to say one-on-one coaching conversations aren't needed; they are. For things like performance and development and tricky situations, sure; book a room, one-on-one and go coach. They will always be needed.

But for some organisations who adopt and prioritise coaching, it can seem as if every conversation a leader has to have with their team members has the danger of turning into a book-a-meeting-room-for-a-one-on-one kind of meeting.

When a business decrees that coaching or one-on-one conversations are the priority to lift performance or address issues, it can begin to chew up a lot of time in the diary.

As a leader in a tech organisation said to me recently,

"I've got a team of 12. When you add in the time of having heaps of one-on-ones with them, along with the team and group meetings, and the other responsibilities I have influencing and managing stuff, it all gets too much. I find myself thinking how else could I be leveraging this time".

Not more meetings

Please don't assume we're talking about running more meetings here. Meetings are already under pressure for wasting time, running off topic and being dominated by the loudest voices.

But what I do think can be done is having more group conversations and sessions - small or larger groups.

These small or larger group sessions can be focused on the same sort of development, barriers, progress... whatever other topics need to be managed for that team - but done in a group setting rather than always believing it needs to be done via a bunch of one-on-ones.

This is where the leader as coach, shifts into a leader as facilitator.

For some leaders there is a fear there; 'I don't want to be running a group session' or'Then the whole thing will get out of control; I'll never reign them in!' or 'How do I shut them up?' or 'I don't want things going off-track or getting to negative or turning into a whinge-fest'.

Still other leaders are nervous in front of a group or worry about the questions they'll be asked or if they'd ever be bombarded or ambushed by a team of clique of people.

But these are simply some of the fears of facilitation, the fears of working with and leading a group... and these fears can be allayed when you know what to do with a group or team in a group setting.

Leverage for impact

Indeed it's time for leaders to better leverage their time as well as the time of their team members. Rather than going s-l-o-w with lots of one-on-ones, leaders need to bring those individuals together to have more effective and impactful group sessions: both small group: twos, threes or fours... and larger groups seven, 10, 12, 25, 40 people.

Time gets leveraged for all. Rather that 12 x 1 hour meetings, get everyone (or groups of everyone!) in the room and have a 15, 30 or 45 minute engaging session and conversation - well-facilitated by the leader.

Lift the game

Lazy leaders limp into meetings, slump into chairs and bark commands or tap their pens on the table. It's old school, last century and not facilitative. At all. Lazy leaders interrupt, bluff and bluster their way through BS jargon and wonder whey they have a disengaged and disempowered team.

The leader as facilitator is a different way of behaving and leading. It requires a lift in your thinking and capability.

The shift from 'Leader as Coach' to 'Leader as Facilitator' is underway and I see it as one of the most exciting shifts in leadership today.

When a leader facilitates, group harmony and cohesion is strengthened and the sheer energy or vibe of the team, tribe or group coming together lift people to higher levels of performance. 

Facilitators make progress easy... or easier. They run a process, respond to what happens and draw on very cool tools to make progress. 

As a participant in my Leader as Facilitator program said:

"Now I'm able to get stuff done; we talk as a team, I can help remove barriers across the team, we can make decisions as a team and I'm better able to handle the general sh*t that goes down daily in our team."

(Note, this leader wasn't naming his people as sh*t; it was more about the finicky, challenging issues and hiccups that happen throughout a typical day when leading a diverse team).

There are authentic, empathic and realistic ways to get stuff done in teams and keep the team connected to the work to be done, all via the power of facilitation. This is about being more of a Leader as Facilitator.

Review and Reflect ... alone or with the team

The end of the calendar year brings many people to the point of wrapping things up, reviewing the year that's been and thinking about the year ahead. 

(That is... if you can break from the cray-cray of deadlines hitting before holiday time or having less people in your team or on the task than you'd like!)
 
Whatever your state of mind - and work - this week and the next few,  I've collected a few resources for you to review, reflect, read and ponder... when you're ready.

If not now, bookmark and save for when you're travelling, waiting, distracting yourself or wanting some insight.


thinking
I love me a visual map; and many a group or team I've worked with have benefited from being able to capture their story, the facts, their issues or the current situation too.

Once it's down on paper (or digital) they're able to see it. Once they can all see it, it's remarkable how quickly resolutions and fixes present themselves in the conversation. It's also way quicker to get people together and focused on something. 

Here's one I prepared earlier! For you. 



I use this type of map and the headings of 'Less Same More' in workshops and keynotes to help people get actions down from their thinking and ideas. (This handles overwhelm and chaos well too!)

What do you want more, less or the same of...?

• LESS: stop or drop this stuff. Wind back, remove and reduce it.
• SAME: keep on truckin', keep going, keep moving with this stuff.
• MORE: ramp it up, do more of this, get or have more of this. 

This is about you  - what do you want less, same or more of in your life, in your work. It can relate to anything at all. 

Fill in the spaces. I use dot points or key words to prompt me and capture my ideas. It becomes my personal visual plan and idea collection place just like a 'plan on a page'. It then goes up on the wall in my office or in digital/photo form on my phone. 
 
Oh and there's a cheeky light bulb on the bottom right. I call that:

• AND, dot dot dot :... it's a little like 'How about this?' as if you were pitching to some big-time investor or director. What are some random, hopeful or dreamy things that would be interesting to look at or pursue further? Capture them right there.

Use this page with the team. Or use it alone. Perhaps with a partner or friend or the family. Chilled out one Sunday afternoon, fill it out. Kicking off a project with a new team, get them to tell you what they want more, less and same of.

It's a great way to review, it's a sweet start to planning; it's an even better conversation starter.

For all the times you think you can't get engagement with people, ask them to jot a few points down under each heading and you can have a conversation from there.  

Review, reflect and then do something with this and the other resources here, below. In your own time....

What's your attitude to facilitation?

For many leaders who facilitate, they simply get on and do it. They may not be aware of what they’re doing or what impact it’s having; it just is. They just go ahead and do the best they can with what they know.

For other leaders, they lose sleep before facilitating a big meeting or planning session or workshop and run scenarios of failure and horror over and over in their mind or they workshop options and possibilities and agenda timings in their head.

Yet others see their facilitation skill as something to be improved on. I certainly do. The capability is just that; a capability. And it can be improved.

There is certainly a confidence about facilitation. Often we know we’re not quite ‘there’ with our confidence but we’re willing to keep putting ourselves out there and continuing to learn, develop and grow as a facilitator, as a leader. 

Stepping up the Ladder of Capability

Here’s what I think this path to improving your capability in facilitation at work looks like. It’s like moving up a ladder. 

There are two halves:

1.   where you avoid facilitation and are questioning yourself and your capability; and

2.  where you engage, where you are questioning others (in a good way), as a facilitation technique or style.

Looking at the avoid half, way down in the depths is the ‘no, don’t make me do it’response. It may be your first experience facilitating, or even an experience earlier this week! In any case, you felt out of your depth, out of control and wishing it wasn’t you at the front of the room in charge of making things happen. You wished it could be anyone but you. It’s the ‘no not me’ scenario. You feel like running away. A dose of fight or flight and you’d prefer to flight, right out the door and into a safer, more comfortable space. If you have the situation of the rotating chair in your workplace, where a different person facilitates the meeting each time, you may have felt this.

A little higher on the ladder is where you are unsure. You take on the role to facilitate but are wondering ‘why me’. Then possibly while you’re facilitating you’re hesitant, waiting, wondering ‘what is best to do when’ for the outcomes you and the group are seeking.

Then comes a tipping point… where you shift up and over a hurdle of sorts; where you move from questioning yourself or doubting yourself, to really stepping into the role of questioning others and embracing the role of being of service to what the team needs...so you’re truly facilitating others.

When you take on the role of a facilitator, a Leader as Facilitator, you do it, but you’re inconsistent. You’re wanting to learn more, to be more aware; you’re wondering ‘what next?’ Imagine you’re deep in the middle of a meeting or workshop and the team is working through a problem. You wonder, ‘Is this it? What else could I be doing to help the group? What’s the best use of my services as a facilitator?’ You decide to ask the group rather than wondering to yourself. You might say, ‘So what next? What do you think is the most important thing for us to address next?’

With further awareness, learning and experience, you shift up to being capable, to thinking ‘Yes, I’ve got this’.

I worry though for people who believe they are already here; they already think they've got this. They think they’re pretty good facilitators; they think they know it all and have little left to learn.

Still others say ‘I’m all ears’ or ‘I’m on a learning curve’ yet they do anything but learn! They’re closed to ideas or have heard it all before… or done it all before.

Beware! Even the best and most experienced facilitators have more to learn. Always. There is always more to learn, more to be exposed to, more approaches, ways of working, things you can do to support a team or group as a facilitator.

So it continues. And you move on up to some nirvana of facilitation where you realise all of your good and bad and in-between life experiences contribute to make you a wise and capable facilitator. You say ‘bring it’ and you realise, believe and behave as if you can handle whatever may come. If you don’t know what to do, you know you are at the service of the group or team and together you will know what to do.

• Where are you on the ladder?
• What have you experienced?
• Which levels do you recognize?
• What’s the next step for you? 

I'd love to hear your thoughts about facilitation and your attitude to where you are, where you've been or where you'd like to get to.

Beyond being a consultant

When you’re a consultant, advisor or expert, you spend a lot of your business time delivering advice, working with a client and helping them with your expertise and know-how.

Sometimes you have to work with more than one person. Perhaps it’s a business owner and some of their staff; maybe it’s a project manager and some of the project team; or it could be a senior leader in an organisation and some of their stakeholders or colleagues. 

I reckon that every time you’re working with more than one other person, it’s time to put facilitation skills to work. 

Facilitation means ‘to make easier’. When you’re facilitating, you’re helping to make great progress and to get things done. 

While a one-on-one conversation often involves coaching or consulting, working with a group of people (say 2 or more) involves using some additional capability - and that capability is facilitation. 

Facilitation : another tool in your toolkit

Increasingly the capability of facilitation is coming to the fore for consultants, subject matter experts and thought leaders. You find yourself working with your client and some of their team … as a group. And you’re helping them work on something or create something together… as a group.  

You may have been asked by a client to run a group session, a workshop, work with them at a team day, assist with planning or some other type of gathering.  

It makes sense to use facilitation. When a client wants to get several people in the room at once and work with them, they want to achieve an outcome.

That outcome may be to:

• plan
• design
• decide
• create
• brainstorm
• implement
• solve

… or other business task or project. 

As the facilitator, you’ll be able to help them achieve their outcome AND use your incredible expertise, knowledge and advice at the same time. 

Three key outcomes

Going beyond consulting, I see that you're helping them do three main things. You help them be:

• PRODUCTIVE: you help them get stuff done. 
• COLLABORATIVE: you help bring people together 
• CREATIVE: you help them do good work.

Looks like this ;-)

For you as a consultant, going beyond consulting and using facilitation skills, you'll focus on :

• the work that needs to be done,
• theway that work will be done,
• the people who you're working with,
• and the progress you'll help them make.

It may feel a little 'clunky' at first

For many consultants, shifting into facilitation mode doesn't come immediately, naturally or automatically. Yes you've likely got ace questioning skills and listening skills but you might be too quick to jump into prescription or solution, to provide 'the answer'.

As a facilitator, you can draw the answer out; get people more involved. In the long run, they'll have bought in to the process more, having had more of a say.

So if it feels a little odd or clunky at first, persist. You might find yourself switching from consultant to facilitator, to trainer, to speaker, back to consultant - all the while delivering your expertise, advice and experience in a valuable and helpful way.

Plan a response, process or approach

Don't launch into facilitator mode unprepped. Some of the best processes, models and tools for facilitation come from a little thought about what might suit this situation or group best. This doesn't mean control-freak over-engineering an agenda down to the last minute. What it does mean is some thought about where they are, what they need to do, how you can help them do that.

Next: 9 things to prep

Next post I'll unpack the nine things I think you need to do when you're adding facilitation to your consulting toolkit and what some of the things are to consider.

Above all, know you have an extensive range of insight, experience and capability; make sure facilitation is part of how you deliver that expertise.

With the world all co-creating, contributing and collaborating, it's smart as a consultant to be able to help people get sh*t done in a way that's beyond just consulting.