Do you make it easier

Today I’m working with a group of leaders on building their facilitation skills.

Facilitation at its heart means ‘ease’, to make progress with ease.

And ease is a great perspective to take.

Ask yourself
- are we making this harder than it needs to be?
- what could we do that would make it easier?
- how can I make it easier for them?
- what does the team think would make it easier?

Easy doesn’t mean it’s not good or not valuable.

It’s about being able to manage and juggle a mix of things happening in teams :

🌕 Engagement - that we are connected to this work

🌕 Involvement - that we are doing something with the work

🌕 Contribution - that we bring our ideas and efforts to the work.

🌕 Productivity - that we are getting the work that needs to be done, done.

The skills of getting people aligned, engaged, inspired and participating doesn’t happen automatically.

You’ll have to do something. Many things. Many micro things that together make great progress.

Facilitation skills apply to work, communities, groups and causes where people are in-person, online and in the changing world of what hybrid work is and how it happens.

This is work I am mildly obsessed with 😁😁

Problem maker or process improver

You can keep creating and fixing messy problems … or … focus on making better progress through improving processes. 

It’s costly when there’s no process, a process wasn’t followed or human error could have been easily picked up. 

The pursuit of improvement is a wise investment. 

But… *gulp* it can take a shift in your attitude and culture to be willing to learn and to receive feedback. 

No customer or client wants their experience to be flawed, delayed or full of problems. 

But if your business is a problem maker then you might be waiting for customers to alert you to problems. 

Not good PR. 

Better to be a process improver - making systems and processes work better. Then there’s less chance of things going wrong anyway. 😊

Try ‘Kaizen’, meaning ‘improvement’ in Japanese. It’s a truly brilliant philosophy and way of working for better progress … and customer experience. 

Read more in this Fast Company article by Molly Shea Shine. 

“Put simply, it’s the practice of thinking about what you’re doing, looking for ways to improve it, making those changes, then continuing to act upon them.”

Improvement. It’s is a much more worthy pursuit than having to make apologies for messing up. 

Fed up with the push for productivity

The drive to ‘do more’ or to ‘make the most of our time’ was wearing a bit thin pre-pandemic. 

We’d reached a kind of ‘productivity fatigue’. 

James Clear, quoted in a Fast Company article by Aytekin Tank says that “Productivity is getting important things done consistently. And no matter what you are working on, there are only a few things that are truly important.”

We are more interested in - and it turns out, motivated by - progress... and so making ‘meaningful progress’ is what matters. 

When we do that, we’re more likely to be ‘productively creative’ in the long run. 

Sounds like the ideal result. 

Worry less about whether you’re being super productive. 

Focus more on whether you’re making progress on the things that are meaningful to you. 

How creative could you be

Too many boring and dull online meetings, right?

How do we make things more interesting? And are we waiting for someone else to do the ‘be more creative’ thing?

There’s a personal scale of creativity - things that I think are creative and engaging, you may not. And vice versa. 

With that in mind, we can design and lead a number of creative exercises or activities that work in online meetings. 

Things like:
- Starter or kick off activities 
- Short icebreakers
- Introduction questions
- Quick energizers 
- Focus exercises to bring us back on topic 
- Get to know you activities 
- Idea generation exercises 
- Wrap up and summary tasks.  

None of them have to be long and drawn out. Some people wrongly think we don’t have time to bring more creativity to online meetings.

Even short bursts of a different activity can lift a mood, boost interest and attention or change the level of engagement. 

Times are tough anyway. We don’t need to make the mood worse with dull and drawn out online meetings!

It’s worth a little more effort to make the hours we spend online more interesting and more effective. 

We can all make a creative contribution here, whether leading the activity ... or participating in it. 

Naming the struggle

While guiding a group with mentoring advice recently, the most common statement in their questions and sentences was, ‘I’m struggling with…'

Learning, growing, changing and adapting is indeed a struggle. 

And it’s being magnified further in these times! 

Struggling - in less violent terms - is about doing one’s best, but I wonder, what is it that we are doing in struggling?

Are we :
- Getting used to ...
- Annoyed or frustrated with ...
- Trying to understand ...
- Debating or weighing up...
- Confused about ...
- Taking longer than we expected?

All of these situations could indeed be a struggle. And I wonder if that feeing of ‘I’m struggling with…’ is worth redefining or renaming, rather than bundling it all up as struggling. 

Acknowledge it is a struggle. Yes. 

And then explore what else it is: whether it’s a frustration, an obstacle, a question, or just another a step along a path of change. 

Perhaps it’s more challenging than we’d liked, hoped or expected.