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.

How to get people to speak up, wrap up and shut up

In these days of collaboration and co-design, working together and aligning the team… this is an ongoing challenge for people leading teams, groups and running meetings and workshops.

How to get people to speak up, wrap up and shut up.

Here’s what I mean...

When I’m running training on facilitation skills - to help leaders become better facilitators of their people and teams - these three things often crop up as a challenge of being a leader of a team:

• Speak Up: how do you get people to speak up, to contribute, to be engaged, to speak out and to share the ideas they have
• Wrap Up: how do you get people to wrap up, to summarise succinctly what their thinking is, what their views and opinions are and to get to the point rather than rambling
• Shut Up: how do you get people to shut up, to conclude - once they’ve delivered their contribution, we’d often like them to pause and let others speak, or better still, stop and listen to other contributions from around the room. How do you get them to stop talking!?

Speak up. Wrap up. Shut up. 

Hmmmm, it sounds a bit harsh really. 

It’s harsh because we’re making it about ‘them’. We went them to speak up. We want them to wrap up. We want them to shut up.

If we’re a leader, what can WE do about it?

It’s not about them because:

It’s hard to speak up if you don’t feel like you’ll be listened to or you have been interrupted often. It feels like no one will listen to you if you do speak up anyway.

It’s hard to wrap up if you’re a person who needs to speak to think or says things like 'I’m thinking out loud here’ or you need to talk a bit to work out what you’re actually thinking about. 

And then it's hard to shut up if people aren’t getting your message or they need you to keep explaining it or they didn’t listen to you the first time around and so you’re having another go trying to get your message to land. 

So while it looks on the surface that if everyone would just speak up, wrap up and then shut up the world would be a wonderful place… there’s more going on here folks. 

Speak Up

How does a leader facilitating a meeting and leading a team help make the environment great so people feel comfortable speaking up? How are they giving people the opportunity, the time, the space and the ears of the room to deliver their contribution? Most of us have been interrupted by an eager contributor or cut off by someone with a supposedly better idea. I think a Leader as Facilitator helps hold the interrupter at bay and allows the person currently speaking to finish their thing; giving them the space to get their views out there.

It's not just on THEM to speak up; it’s on you as the leader, as the facilitator of the team to make the environment right for people to want to speak up. 

Wrap Up

If someone is going on and on and on and not getting to the point, they may need some help articulating their thinking. If you’re a think as you speak person you have what I call a ‘talk track’ ; you need to talk to work out what you think. Maybe your idea is still evolving. In this case you need a Leader as Facilitator who will listen, prompt with clarifying questions or capture your key points so everyone else can see and hear what you mean. You don’t want to be pushed to hurry up and finish - especially if your thinking is still evolving. Maybe you haven’t got to your point yet. To be asked to ‘wrap up’ is pushy.

It’s not on THEM to wrap up; it’s on you as the Leader as Facilitator to help people articulate what it is they think; to question, probe, clarify and elicit the information out of them. 

Shut Up

Then once someone is speaking or is contributing their ideas and view, how do we make sure they are heard and understood? Because once they are, they will take a break, they will stop. I think we keep talking or keep trying to raise the same point if we feel no one has listened or really let us know that, yes they have heard us. 

Please don’t think you need to ‘shut someone down’. It sounds a bit violent and it’s pervasive in workplaces. Usually, they haven’t had the opportunity to speak. That is, a 'protected' opportunity to speak, protected from interruption or judgement. Nor have they been heard by the leader or facilitator of the meeting or the team.

Back off, ease off and let go. Don’t rush to get people to speak up, wind up or shut up.

Think and work as a facilitator. Adopt the capabilities of a Leader as Facilitator to create a great environment:

1. Give people time to warm up and contribute 
2. Give people opportunities that are creative to contribute
3. Then when they speak, help them articulate their thinking : support them, question them or invite them to share more so you can help everyone understand what they’re saying.

The environment will be better, you’ll get more done because you’re all able to hear one another. Today’s collaborative, creative and consultative workplaces require it. 

Did you decide how you would make the decision?

Meetings get a bad rap as being time wasters, energy drainers and demotivators. So when a meeting rocks, it really rocks; it is effective, creative, collaborative, everyone is on song and sh*t gets done.

For many of us, the success of a meeting or session with the team is based on the outcomes it generates, the decisions made in that time and the end results we're able to walk out of the room with.

Further to my earlier post on why that meeting didn't make a decision, I wanted to delve further into point #3... which is about deciding how you'll make a decision.

Yes, deciding how to decide. It is a thing and it's a thing we can often forget to do.

As a facilitator and creator of the Leader as Facilitator program, I see this all too often: decisions don't get made because we don't quite know HOW we're going to make the decision.

I see it like a spectrum of decision-making in organisations. There's a culture of 'this is how we make decisions around here'.

When you join a new business or team, you may not know what this decision-making culture is until you've experienced it, or tried to make decisions in another way and ended up face planting (aaargh!) or face palming (duh!) or leaving the meeting in deep frustration.

We think or hope the decision-making process is going to be all sweet and nice and collaborative and consensus-like, yet we get surprised or shocked when majority rules and steals all the joy, taking things in a different direction.

Here's what to do before your meeting or session; decide how you'll decide.

Dark Patterns of Decision Making

First to the dark side, to the dark patterns of decision-making: these are Done, Un andNone. They're evil, dark and not pretty but all too common.

Done

Where a decision has already been made prior to a meeting or session and you're there because "consultation". People know they need to consult but they're adopting the decide/defend approach and aren't going to be moved.

Un

When a decision is made, all collaborative-like and everyone's good and a little while after the meeting (be it three minutes, two hours or a couple of weeks) the decision is undone, reversed, reneged or 'reviewed'. Urgh. In political circles, I believe it is called 'the backflip'.

None

No decision is made. Not a thing. Lots of time spent, lots of talk, lots of 'we've got to do this' and 'I have this great idea' and 'How about we...' but nothing actually reaches the conclusion of a decision. This could also be called the 'HUH' decision where you think maybe possibly potentially a decision was made but a little while later it's not clear what the decision or outcome was. I reckon this is still a 'none' for mine.

Moving to Brighter Decision-Making

Let's cross a line here along the spectrum and we see that what happens when we actually DO make a decision; now it's all about HOW that decision is made.

One

Here a singular person - perhaps a project or product owner or stakeholder - who is responsible for the decision, makes the decision. You might have to check-in with them, get them to sign off on it or get their verbal or written 'yes'. It happens all the time; it's the voice or go-ahead from a single sole solitary one individual human. (And with AI and robots pervading our world, they're making decisions for us too!)

Some

A gathering or group, perhaps a sub-committee or other team have been charged with the power to make the decision. Think of an organising committee. They might go off and gather information and then they decide on behalf of others or in consultation with others. Also, this is NOT about a clique or a breakaway or coup who splinter away from the main group. This subgroup has the responsibility and power to decide, as they are.

Many

When you have to put your hand up or vote on anything, this is what's going on. The organisation, project or leader is trying to see how many are across the line on this decision. It's a majority thing, just like an election. Democratic, you all get a say, you all get to stick a coloured dot on the wall, or tick the box or check an answer in a survey or poll.

Most

Here's what a lot of organisations are going for (but perhaps don't quite get there), to get a consensus of sorts. It's where you get to have your say, you get to put forward your view. When there are lots of views to consider it can take awhile. If you're working on a project and you're consulting with stakeholders and need to get most of them 'across the line' or to 'buy-in' to the decision, this is likely what you're going for.

You spend time listening, presenting, helping them understand, you clarify things, and it can go on and on and on. There's nothing wrong with this. It takes time and many people/organisations/leaders are in a panic* about time and simply won't give big decisions the time that's needed to get most people on board.

*I think while MOST is attempted by a lot of organisations, they give up after a while; it takes so long, is quite challenging and chews up the calendar. They might revert to something earlier on the spectrum.

All

Here you get everyone truly onboard. But with complex decisions it's a hard slog. So this is great for straight up simple things that require a decision, but more complex stuff, linger somewhere earlier on the spectrum.

What's the culture of decision-making where you are?

What happens most often?

Which types of decisions get sorted quickly and by which approach?

What other decisions fall elsewhere on this spectrum?

Before you next meeting or the next agenda item, decide what you're going for and how you'll decide. Does everyone need to give a thumbs-up or are you going with something less?

Whatever you do, keep away from the dark patterns of decision-making. They're last-century, old old school and scary.

You are sooooo much more than a coach

The commitment to being a coach runs deep. To spend time with someone, one on one. To take time to uncover the situation, identify some possibilities for breaking through and achieving that shift that is needed to help people reach their best.

There may have been accreditations and development and courses to get you to this space of being able to do it seemingly effortlessly, artfully and craftfully.

So when people set up their business as a coach, life coach, business coach, coach's coach or executive coach, I often twitch a little and think to myself, ‘Oh but you are soooooo much more than a coach.'

Ingenious and Interlocking

You might call yourself ‘coach' so people can find you and that explains what you do, but the art of coaching runs way deeper.

Yes, the capabilities are complex and interlocking, layered and so very clever - ingenious even - to be able to connect with people and help them unlock or breakthrough and reach greater clarity, progress, understanding or heights.

But why do so many coaches only deliver these brilliant services primarily as a coach?

Many coaches have developed their own IP or curriculum, models or processes - or they’ve adapted ones they’ve learned to suit the field or industry they coach in.

So why don’t they do more with their coaching skills?

If they’re content and happy, great. But for many, it’s hard work, earning a decent living and having time to spare for self and others.

Commodotised or Differentiated?

If you say you coach, you coach. Actually, it can become a bit commoditised. You’re at risk of getting locked into corporate coaching panels and day rates aligned as the ‘same as’ the services of so many others. What differentiates you?

Don’t get me wrong; this can be great, right, perfect for where you’re at. But even saying you’re an ‘executive coach’ still puts you with the others. 

What if you had skills, knowledge and IP that wasn’t being tapped? That there was work, impact, influence, change or money 'left on the table’ or there were people you weren’t helping but could?

More than...

So what else could you do with those skills that don't involve the often labour intensive one-on-one sessions of coaching?

There are other ways through which you can deliver your coaching prowess.

The first most obvious is to take that knowledge and deliver it to a group, not 1 on 1.

A group. Anything bigger than two people. Now you’re in facilitator mode.

Not coach, but facilitator. Helping make the group’s work easier, not just an individual’s.

(Hello: If you don’t like groups and you’d rather coach one-on-one, carry on. But if you’re thinking ‘hang on… maybe there’s something in this, I tried it a few times and…’ read on)

As a facilitator, you’re asking questions, eliciting information, using models and processes and your wonderful capabilities to guide or help a group reach its potential.

Not just one person at a time.

The leverage and impact you have here is significant. Massive. More getting done, in less time, for more people. The power of the group is all powerful. The synergy (yes, synergy, a corny word but that’s what happens in a group - a mini explosion of euphoria as they bounce off each other and build a wonderful bubbling of possibility and insight) of the group is like... wow!

Yes you still see individuals in the room. You can see their challenges, barriers and sticking points but you can see it as it affects the group, as well as the individual.

Helping them with leverage

Increasingly, businesses and organisations are needing facilitators who will help teams and groups make breakthroughs and progress and get clarity and do awesome work. Not just coach individuals.

You can carry on being all one-on-one but it’s gonna take so long to get around to see and work with everyone. And many businesses just won’t take the time for everyone who needs it to have their on-on-one transformational journey. It's not leveraged enough; it's not productive enough and it's too pricey. Bottom line is not a good enough return on investment.

How can you help a business leverage their people and their time AND bring your expertise as a coach?

It’s to use your skills as a facilitator. To coach a group. To facilitate.

Oh, and relax....

And you can relax… you still have your coaching abilities to offer when individuals need your guidance and expertise. You don’t need to stop this or remove it or delete it. It's because you are more than a coach.

So hey, don't label yourself just as a coach or only as a coach. It’s limiting your expertise and reducing their leverage. Plus it means there are teams and groups and businesses and organisations out there who could be benefiting from your great skills ... but they are having to wait in line until it’s their one-on-one time.