Facilitation Training for meetings and workshops | 2-day hands-on session.

What is the purpose of facilitation training?

The question is why this does not happen consistently. We live in a world of constant change. Teams are becoming more global, more flexible and less hierarchically defined than ever before. A leader must respond to this change by adapting to the needs of the team so that every team member feels able to work together effectively. Using the tools of a great facilitator can help leaders unlock the behaviours we want from our teams and create a high performance team that demonstrates amazing collaboration. You may be asking yourself: don’t we hire facilitators to help our team build trust or learn something? And you’re not so wrong about that. But let’s think for a moment about what facilitators actually do. Ultimately, great facilitators do three things. First, they create a safe environment where people can share freely. Second, they enable a team to recognise the unique strengths of each of its members. And third, they help the team come together and work towards a common goal. As a leader, isn’t this exactly what you want to achieve for your team?

Besides enabling a more powerful and collaborative team, being a facilitative leader brings tremendous benefits to you. Let’s talk about three of them here, which our facilitation training will empower you with. First, you harness the power of the collective. As a leader, have you ever felt that the success of the team depends heavily on you? As a facilitator, you can pass on the difficult challenges you face to the others in the room who are either better suited to solve the problem or can bring a fresh perspective to solving it. Finally, two heads are better than one, especially if those two heads are focused on the same goal. Secondly, they strengthen ownership. Have you ever noticed that you are more willing to engage with an idea if you feel that it comes from you? Have you also ever noticed how great you feel when you are part of something bigger than yourself? This is exactly how your team feels when they are involved in developing ideas and feel they are part of something bigger. As a facilitative leader, you encourage engagement, not conformity. And last but not least, you save an enormous amount of time. Do you ever look at your calendar and get excited about how much free time you have? I bet you don’t. Wouldn’t it be great to have more time in your day again? As a facilitative leader, you use your team’s key strengths to work together to solve challenges and achieve your goals. In doing so, you focus on the challenges that have the highest value and forgo the time-consuming activities with little value. Try adding the facilitation aspect to your leadership toolkit and you will find that you will be able to empower your team and get the best out of them.

The role of facilitation for a leader

What is the difference between facilitating your team and hiring an external facilitator, and what are the challenges and opportunities of a facilitation role? Well, first of all, you are an expert in content. In many cases, external facilitators do not have the context about your team or your company. The challenge in this situation is that as a leader, you can be tempted to constantly give your opinion on the topic. I have seen countless times where a leader with the best of intentions makes their opinion known so often that the team ends up only looking to the leader to make decisions and no longer wants to make their own contribution. Meanwhile, as a leader, you often wonder why my team isn’t working together and coming up with great ideas. The good news is that if you are aware of this challenge, you can use it to your advantage. If you manage not to express too many opinions and instead ask questions that make the team think, you will have deep trust in your team. This may take some time at first, but very quickly your team will start to solve their own challenges. Secondly, as a facilitating leader, you already know each member of your team. As a leader who spends every day with your team, you have the opportunity to understand the strengths and opportunities of each team member better than an external facilitator could.

The challenge here is that this knowledge can influence your thinking to focus only on your team’s perceived strengths and weaknesses. In doing so, you may be tempted to constantly fill in the gaps with your knowledge, especially if your knowledge is complementary to that of the team. As you have insight into the team’s unique strengths and weaknesses, you can help each team member build on their strengths. You can also help them develop by drawing on other team members with complementary skills and knowledge. By drawing on each other’s strengths, you bring the team closer together and ensure that it acts as a unit. Finally, you are emotionally involved. As the leader of a team, you are emotionally interested in you, your team and your company doing well, and these three things are inextricably linked. An external facilitator may not have the same incentives. Believe me, as a facilitator myself, I am emotionally invested in the success of a team, but since I don’t deal with it on a day-to-day basis like you do, I can’t imagine being as invested as a leader of that team.

The challenge with being emotionally involved is that it’s hard to relinquish control, it’s human nature. You are emotionally involved in the success of the team and often feel that you have to be involved in everything in order to control the success. The opportunity here is for you to show emotional involvement rather than emotional attachment. The former is about being invested in the people and the process of excellence. In other words, you are invested in the input. The latter is about being invested only in what the scoreboard shows. In other words, in the output. It takes a lot of courage to be emotionally committed but not emotionally attached to that success. Unlike an external facilitator, facilitation as a leader is simply a tool in your leadership toolkit. If you use it, you can achieve better collective success. And if you haven’t tried it yet, spend less than 10% of your next four team meetings talking. Instead, ask questions of the team to drive their own thinking. Even if your first session is largely quiet, keep going and I bet that by the third session you will make some wonderful progress in solving your team’s most important goals.