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Leading through Facilitation - continuation

Continuation of the article in Newsletter No. 9. For the complete article go here

A Key Leadership Skill

Our experience is that facilitation is a key Leadership skill. Without effective facilitation you are at a competitive DISADVANTAGE because you will not have the ideas and delivery you need. It is a good idea to get an external or independent person in (perhaps from another part of the business) when you have an important meeting, even if you, yourself have the skill set. If you need to take part in the discussion/decision or content of the meeting, it seldom works effectively also to be the facilitator. The facilitator should be ‘content neutral’, that is being neutral about what is being discussed so that they can pay attention to the process and not be drawn into the ‘what is happening.’ But just having the skill set is valuable to leaders.

A leader leads, the meaning being to 'go in front of people in order to show them the way'. It means being a good role model. A leader takes responsibility. A leader looks at the situation and decides what needs to be done. When you are leading, you are working with the content of a meeting or conversation. For instance if you are a the leader in your team, playing the facilitator's role and are running out of time on a particular decision, you can explicitly decide (and say that this is what you are doing) to put on your leader ‘hat’ and make the decision yourself, stating why you are doing so. At the end of the day, you are responsible for the decision the group takes. A leader walks a fine line of balance between telling people what to do (when necessary) and leading them towards successful decisions.

Back in 1990, as part of its ‘Renewal’ programme, Dow Corning was implementing a programme that they called ‘Facilitative Leadership’ which was teaching their senior leaders some of the skills and competences needed to be a facilitator. It isn’t just learning how to facilitate a meeting, although that was also a part of it, it was about enabling and developing their people. They saw it as one of the key skills their leaders needed.

We have also worked with other organisations in this way. As one CEO said about learning facilitation skills, “it helps you when you need to work IN the business not ON the business.” (Gerber, The e-myth, 1991) People are business critical – and the skills you learn as a facilitator help you to enable your people. You learn how to assess what is going on (what the process is) and then you learn different types of interventions (things you can do) to address it, to enable what is stuck to be freed up. This works equally well with groups and with individuals. Especially when you are ‘leading’ and the people you are leading are not your direct line reports, so you need to get their commitment to do what needs doing or what has been decided. Without facilitation skills it is all too easy for them to just do what they want to and not what the business needs.

Managing Performance

So, how do facilitation skills help you with change and performance management? What makes both of these challenging is that to be effective you have to deal with people and use soft skills. These are precisely the skills that you use for facilitation.

Performance management is usually you with one of your team members. By remembering to observe the PROCESS you can help yourself to be in a more neutral, un-emotional space. You ask open questions to elicit what has happened, what the individual has learned, what they might do differently, what they can improve, what help they might need from you and what they will do next. We find that you can also use questioning to perform a reality check – in case what they think they have done does not match what you think. Focus on deliverables and observable behaviours, not on things that a person is and can do nothing about. You will also need to listen actively and perceptively, summarising and paraphrasing to check your own understanding. You want to make sure that you uncover any assumptions that either of you may be making and this is not easy. You need excellent communications skills and an understanding of the organisational context within which the performance is taking place. These are a subset of good facilitation skills. You want to get your people to ‘bloom’ – to perform at their best. Facilitation skills give you an even larger set of tools with which to enable people to perform well. This is a real WIN – good for your business, good for the individual, good for you as a leader and good for your team. And it is key to business success – you want people who are motivated, creative, and bring the best of themselves to work.

Managing Change

Working with change requires the skill set mentioned above (interpersonal and communication skills) as well as an understanding of how groups work together and how organisations behave. A good facilitator knows how to ‘read’ a group – what kind of a group is it? What does it need at the moment? Where is the group’s energy? What is the correct intervention to make?

For this we use the Figure 1 above. When you start to learn facilitation skills, you start as an Apprentice. You don’t know many different tools, are unsure of when to use what, and are “consciously incompetent” and aware of feeling uncomfortable. After practise and learning, you move on to being a Performer. You have a bag of techniques, but you may use only a few of them for all the interventions you make – you may be a bit of a ‘one trick pony’. As you keep on learning and gaining experience, you become a Master. You have plenty of techniques and you can make up new ones. You can think on your feet. You recognise that you feel confident in the role. You know what is going on with a group and can come up with the correct tool or intervention on the spot. And finally, you become a Mystic: it seems seamless – people aren’t sure what you did, they only know that it worked well. It just happens as part of who you are, naturally and simply. It isn’t a particular tool or technique; it just seems to have become “unconscious competence.”

But it doesn’t end there in our experience, you keep going through the cycle, there is always something new to learn and experience. It is an iterative process. Working with change in an organisation requires you to be creative and use many different tools, many different interventions, meetings and workshops so that you can make sure that people feel that they have been sufficiently communicated with, that they have had a say in the change and that they have had an opportunity to contribute. Facilitation enables the change to take place and allows people to contribute and be part of the change themselves instead of just having it done ‘to’ them. Change is challenging and fascinating and keeping it moving, energised, unstuck and sustainable requires a leader to use facilitation skills to enable it all to succeed.

If you would like someone to facilitate for you, or you are interested in learning some facilitation skills yourself, please contact us here