Chapter Two
The Facilitator and Other Facilitative Roles
In this chapter, I begin by describing six facilitative roles—facilitator, facilitative consultant, facilitative coach, facilitative trainer, facilitative mediator, and facilitative leader—and explain when to serve in each role. I also explain how these roles are similar to and different from other helping roles, such as group coach and team coach. Next, I describe how to select the appropriate facilitative role(s) to fill and how to serve in several facilitative roles at the same time. For the rest of the chapter, I explain how to perform these roles in a way that is congruent with the core values of mutual learning.
Choosing a Facilitative Role
As I described in Chapter 1, most people who need to use facilitative skills don't need to be facilitators. If you serve in any of these roles, you can apply the same mutual learning mindset and behaviors I describe throughout the book.
A note on terms: Unless I specifically distinguish between the facilitator role and other facilitative roles, I use the term facilitative to refer to any role in which you apply the mutual learning approach as a nongroup member. In a case in which a facilitator would approach a situation differently from someone who is in another facilitative role, I'll describe the differences.
It's important to understand the purpose of each facilitative role and how they are similar and different. This will enable you to select the appropriate facilitative role—the one that you and the client agree best fits his or her needs. If the client sees your facilitative role as appropriate, values your expertise, and considers you trustworthy, you'll be better able to help that client. However, if clients think you're serving in an inappropriate facilitative role or acting outside the role you said you would fill, then you'll have more difficulty helping them. Exhibit 2.1 summarizes the six facilitative roles I describe in this section.
Exhibit 2.1 Six Facilitative Roles
| Facilitator | Facilitative Consultant | Facilitative Coach | Facilitative Trainer | Facilitative Mediator | Facilitative Leader | |
| Purpose | Help group use effective process to make decisions and increase its effectiveness | Provide expert advice on client's issues | Help an individual, group, or team achieve goals and increase effectiveness | Help people develop knowledge and skills | Help two or more people resolve a dispute | Influence a group to achieve goals and increase its effectiveness |
| Group Member | No | No | Can be | Can be | No | Yes |
| Involvement in Content | Content neutral | Content expert | May be involved | Content expert | Content neutral | Involved in content |
| Involvement in Content Decision Making | Not involved | May be involved | Not involved | May be involved | Not involved | Involved |
The Facilitator Role
Unfortunately, developing a clear understanding of the facilitator role has become more difficult in recent years because organizations now use the word facilitator to indicate many roles. Human resources experts, organizational change consultants, trainers, coaches, and even managers have sometimes been renamed facilitators.
Defining the Facilitator Role
Expanding on my brief definition in Chapter 1, a group facilitator is a person who (1) is not a member of the group, (2) is content neutral, (3) has no content decision-making authority or input, (4) is acceptable to all the members of the group, and (5) diagnoses and intervenes in a group, to (6) help it improve the processes by which it identifies and solves problems and makes decisions, in order to increase the group's effectiveness.
Many elements of the definition are designed to ensure that all members of the group, not just the group's leader or the person who contacted the facilitator, see the facilitator as trustworthy and credible. Unless all group members trust the facilitator, the facilitator can't effectively fill the role and help the group. Let's clarify each of these elements of the definition.
Not a Member of the Group
You can't be a facilitator for a group you're a member of because you can't be completely neutral about issues in your group. Even if the issues you're facilitating don't directly affect you, your membership in the group can indirectly influence your neutrality. If you're a group member or leader, other members will reasonably expect you to be involved in the content of discussions and, depending on the topic, have a role in decision making.
The facilitator needs to be a third party, but it's not always clear what this means. Even if you aren't a member of the immediate group that requests facilitation, members still may not consider you a third party. For example, if the group is seeking facilitation to address concerns with the division it is part of and you're an internal facilitator working in the same division, group members may consider you a member of the larger group and not a third party. To serve as a facilitator, the group requesting help needs to consider you a third party.
Content Neutral
By content neutral, I don't mean you have no opinions on the issues that the group is discussing. That would be unrealistic. Rather, I mean that you facilitate the discussion without sharing your views, so group members cannot infer your views on the group's topics. Consequently, you don't influence the group's decisions, directly or indirectly. Group members are easily and justifiably annoyed by a facilitator who claims to be neutral and then acts in a way that isn't neutral.
For example, if you're helping a group decide what new markets to enter, you don't share your opinion about which markets would be more profitable, give examples of what markets other organizations have pursued, or cite research on the topic. You don't even agree or disagree with other members' views. For example, responding “Good point” to a group member's comment breaks your facilitator content neutrality. By being content neutral, you increase the chance that all group members, regardless of their views on the topics, will see you as trustworthy. In addition, content neutrality ensures that the group remains responsible for solving its problems and making decisions. There is one content area in which mutual learning facilitators are not neutral. I'll describe this in the next section.
To remain neutral requires listening to members' views and remaining curious about how their reasoning differs from others (and from your private views) so that you can help the group engage in productive conversation. If you trade your curiosity for a belief that some members are right and others are wrong, or that the group as a whole is going in the wrong direction, you give up your ability to help group members explore their own views and differences and replace it with your desire to influence the content of the discussion. If you find yourself invested in an issue or in having the group reach a particular outcome, or if you have expertise on the subject that makes it difficult for you to remain neutral, then consider serving in one of the other facilitative roles.
No Decision-Making Authority or Input
This is an extension of the facilitator's content neutrality. Content decision-making authority or input means you have the ability either to make or participate in decisions regarding the group's topics of discussion. Even if you haven't expressed your view on the topic, the facilitator role prohibits you from being part of a vote or other decision-making process on the group's topics.
Acceptable to All Members of the Group
Requiring that you are acceptable to all members of the group is another way to ensure that you meet each group member's criteria and that the group will be open to your facilitation.
Diagnoses and Intervenes in a Group
A group facilitator works with the entire group. At times, you may meet with subsets of the group, including individuals, but the group is the basic venue in which you work. You watch the group in action, diagnose what is happening, and intervene to help the group become more effective in its problem-solving and decision-making processes.
Improves the Processes
Process refers to how a group works together. It includes how members identify and solve problems, make decisions, and handle conflict. In contrast, content refers to the topic a group is discussing. The content of a group discussion might be whether to enter a new market, how to provide high-quality service to customers, or what each group member's responsibilities should be. Whenever a group meets, you can observe both content and process simultaneously. For example, in a discussion about how to provide high-quality service, suggestions about providing special services to loyal customers or giving more authority to those with customer contact reflect the content of a discussion. However, members responding to only certain colleagues' ideas or failing to identify their assumptions reflect the group's process.
A facilitator is content neutral but also a process expert and advocate. As a process expert, you know what kinds of mindset (values and assumptions), behavior, process, and underlying structure are more or less likely to contribute to high-quality problem solving and decision making, and contribute to the three results of effective groups: performance, working relationships, and individual well-being. If you ask a group to use certain ground rules or if you identify certain ineffective behaviors in the group, it's on the basis of this process expertise.
As a process expert, you advocate that the group adopt a mindset and behaviors that improve its effectiveness, at least for the time you're actively facilitating the group. But being a process advocate does not mean you make these decisions for the group. You ask the group whether it sees any problems with your design for the facilitation, including the process you're advocating. For all of these decisions about the facilitation process, you are a partner with the group.
The Myth of Total Facilitator Neutrality: When Process Is the Content. It's a myth that facilitators are always neutral about the content of the group's discussions. Remember that “content neutral” means that a facilitator conveys no preference for any solution the group considers. When the content is group process, facilitators are not neutral. Not only do they have a point of view; they also are—or should be—experts. As a skilled facilitator, you know what kind of behavior and processes lead to effective problem solving and other important group outcomes, and you use this knowledge to facilitate the group. This is why groups hire you as a facilitator.
Every action you take and intervention you make with the group signals your beliefs about what makes for effective process. When you ask group members to use certain behaviors or ground rules, or when you intervene to help members act consistently with these behaviors, you're implicitly stating your belief that these behaviors and related processes will make the group more effective.
If you use a mutual learning approach, you're transparent about what you believe makes effective group process. You tell your clients that you will be modeling the mutual learning mindset and behaviors and ask them to tell you if they believe you're acting incongruently with them. As you intervene, you explain your interventions. All of this should leave no doubt about your views regarding effective group process.
Consequently, when the group's content turns to how to work effectively as a group, not only do you have a point of view on the topic, but also you've already declared and modeled your views. In these situations, your responsibility as a facilitator (or facilitative consultant) is to ask the group if it wants you to describe how the mutual learning approach can help improve the group's effectiveness. If the group chooses to pursue this, then you can shift into a facilitative consultant role, to help the group understand how it would use mutual learning in its context.
Don't Choose the Facilitator Role Unless It's Absolutely Necessary
The most common mistake when selecting your role is trying to serve as a neutral facilitator when you're a member of the group, have a stake in the issue, or have expertise to share. It's very difficult, if not impossible, to be effective in these cases.
HR business partners and facilitative leaders often make this mistake. Let's assume you're an internal HR business partner who provides HR support to part of your organization. As part of your role, you're asked to facilitate meetings of the leadership team you support. The topics of these meetings may be directly related to HR issues (for example, management succession), indirectly related (for example, business strategy), or unrelated (for example, technical production challenges). If you serve as facilitator on topics that are either directly or indirectly related to HR, you're likely to try to subtly influence the team with your expert views. When you realize that team members have ideas different from your own—ones that don't seem to reflect solid HR practice—you may begin asking leading questions in order to influence the team members' views without saying so explicitly, or you may simply identify some problems with others' proposals. At this point, you've left the facilitator role. Team members may begin to feel that they have been set up, believing that you're not filling the role you agreed to fill. At the same time, you're likely to become frustrated because you can't openly influence the team's ideas while serving in the facilitator role. By contrast, serving as a facilitative consultant or facilitative leader enables you to share your subject-matter expertise, be involved in the decisions, and still use facilitative skills.
The principle here is to serve in the facilitator role only when you're not a member of the group, don't have a stake in the issue, and don't have content expertise that is unique among the group members and that can benefit the client.
The Facilitative Consultant Role
Unlike a facilitator, a facilitative consultant isn't content neutral. If you're a facilitative consultant, an organization seeks your expertise in a particular content area. You're a third-party expert whose purpose is to help the client make informed decisions. You accomplish this by applying your area of expertise (marketing, management information systems, service quality, and so forth) to the client's particular situation, recommending a course of action, and in some cases implementing it for the client.
Any substantive decision-making authority you hold results not from your role per se, but from the client delegating decision-making authority to you. A facilitative consultant uses facilitative skills while serving as an expert in a particular content area. Like a facilitator, your facilitative consultant role may be external or internal to the organization. Human resources, organization development, or Lean and Six Sigma consultants often serve as internal and external facilitative consultants.
Facilitative skills are essential for expert consulting. Even if your client isn't a group, you're likely to find yourself working with one or more groups. These groups may not be asking you to improve their problem-solving and decision-making processes, but how well you work with these groups and how well the groups themselves work to solve problems and make decisions will have an impact on your ability to help the organization.
The issues on which clients seek your expert consultation are also ones on which organizational members often have strong and differing views. Consequently, your ability to help groups address these issues depends on your ability to effectively facilitate conversations. To paraphrase one of my clients, who is an expert consultant, “What do I do when I'm talking to the client about what I found and what I recommend, and people start disagreeing with each other in front of me?” When this occurs, you can facilitate the conversation while still being a participant and expert in the content of the discussion. By integrating facilitative skills with your expertise, you increase your value to clients.
The Facilitative Coach Role
In recent years, organizations have increasingly provided coaches for their executives, managers, and even groups and teams. At the heart of the facilitative coaching role is the ability to use a mutual learning mindset and skill set to help people increase their effectiveness by helping them learn to rigorously reflect on their behavior and thinking and to make better choices for themselves. Rather than simply answer clients' questions, in basic facilitative coaching, you help clients figure out the answers for themselves. In developmental facilitative coaching, in addition to helping clients figure out the answers for themselves, you help them learn how to identify and ask these questions for themselves. Depending on your background, you may bring subject-area expertise to your coaching and include a teaching role as part of your coaching.1
As a group facilitative coach, you work with more than one person during coaching sessions. Each person is working on his or her particular goals, which may or may not be similar. The purpose of group coaching is essentially the same as individual coaching, whether you're providing basic or developmental facilitation. In either type, group coaching provides the ability for group members to give feedback to and coach each other. This is a particularly important aspect of developmental group coaching.
Although members in a group-coaching group may be from the same work team, the purpose of group coaching is not to work with the participants as a team to improve their team. That is the role of developmental facilitation.
When I coach clients—whether they are facilitative leaders, consultants, facilitators, coaches, or trainers—we explore difficult situations that they face, the outcomes they seek, and what it is about the situation that makes it difficult for them. Using the core values and principles described in this book, I help them think about how the way they are thinking and acting (or have thought and acted) contributes to the outcomes they seek as well as creating negative unintended consequences. Over time, clients develop the ability to do this kind of analysis themselves and produce the outcomes they seek with few unintended consequences.
As a facilitative coach, you jointly design the learning process with the individual instead of assuming that you know how the person can best learn. You also model mutual learning by exploring with the person how your coaching methods are helping or hindering the client's ability to learn. You and the client explore the coaching relationship itself as a source of learning for both the client and you.
Finally, it's helpful to understand how the role of developmental facilitation is similar to the emerging field of team coaching. In recent years, the field of individual coaching has created the field of team coaching. I consider team coaching to be very similar to developmental facilitation. As a new field, there is lack of agreement about the definition of team coaching.2,3 However, writers in the field of team coaching often consider team coaching to be significantly different from facilitation because they compare team coaching to basic facilitation and not developmental facilitation. For example, Clutterbuck defines team coaching as “Helping the team improve performance, and the processes by which performance is achieved, through reflection and dialogue.”4 Hawkins defines systemic team coaching this way: “A process by which a team coach works with a whole team, both when they are together and when they are apart, in order to help them improve both their collective performance and how they work together, and also how they develop their collective leadership to more effectively engage with all their key stakeholder groups to jointly transform the wider business.”5 Both of these authors describe how team coaching differs significantly from facilitation—from what I define as basic facilitation. However, their definitions of team coaching could serve as definitions of developmental facilitation. If you're interested in team coaching, the developmental facilitation role provides a systemic approach for helping teams achieve these goals.
If you want to learn about mutual learning coaching tools and techniques beyond those in this book, read Facilitative Coaching: A Toolkit for Expanding Your Repertoire and Achieving Lasting Results (Jossey-Bass, 2009) by Dale Schwarz and Anne Davidson.
The Facilitative Trainer Role
Trainers teach their clients knowledge and skills in a particular content area. One difference between consulting and training is the focus. As a consultant, you focus on solving—or helping the client solve—a specific problem or addressing a specific opportunity that the client is facing. As a trainer, you focus on teaching clients a set of skills and the knowledge that will enable them to solve a type of problem or address a type of opportunity. In practice, good consultants provide informal training in the moment and good trainers design their training so clients practice applying their new knowledge and skills to the real problems or opportunities that led to the training.
As a facilitative trainer, you use the mutual learning mindset and skill set to design and deliver the training. You work with the participants to design or customize the training so that it meets their needs. During the training, you regularly ask whether the training is meeting the participants' needs, and if it's not, you're skilled and flexible enough to modify the design in the moment. You also consider the training setting an opportunity for you to learn. You're open to changing your views and invite participants to challenge your assumptions. You use facilitative skills to enhance the interaction and learning among participants.
In recent years, some trainers have changed their title to facilitator or say they are facilitating a course. To the degree that this signals a shift in trainers' recognizing the value of facilitative skills and integrating them into their work, it makes me hopeful. Yet calling trainers facilitators obscures the fact that they are expert in and have responsibility for teaching some particular topic. I use the term facilitative trainer to acknowledge both sets of responsibilities and skills.
The Facilitative Mediator Role
According to Christopher Moore,
Mediation is a conflict resolution process in which a mutually acceptable third party, who has no authority to make binding decisions for disputants, intervenes in a conflict or dispute to assist involved parties to improve their relationships, enhance communications, and use effective problem-solving and negotiation procedures to reach voluntary and mutually acceptable understandings or agreements on contested issues. Specifically, mediation and mediators help disputing parties to (a) open or improve communications between or among them, (b) establish or build more respectful and productive working relationships, (c) better identify, understand, and consider each other's needs, interests, and concerns, (d) propose and implement more effective problem-solving or negotiation procedures, and (e) recognize or build mutually acceptable agreements.”6
Facilitation and mediation are similar in several ways. Both involve intervention by a neutral third party who is acceptable to the clients and who has no content decision-making authority. Both seek to help people reach a decision acceptable to all who are involved. Facilitators and mediators use many of the same skills and techniques.
I see several distinctions between facilitation and mediation. Parties seeking a mediator have a conflict they've been unable to resolve, so traditionally the objective of mediation has been to help the parties reach an agreement to a particular conflict, and the mediator becomes involved after the dispute has occurred. Some parties seeking a facilitator may need help addressing a conflict, but conflict isn't the focus of all facilitations. Even when facilitators are helping to address a conflict, they often become involved before an impasse; the group or groups recognize they lack the skills to have a productive conversation on an important, high-conflict topic.
In general, mediation is more similar to basic facilitation than to developmental facilitation; mediators use their skills to help disputants resolve a particular issue, not to teach disputants how to resolve any issues they might encounter. However, an approach called transformative mediation moves beyond standard mediation by focusing not only on seeking a solution to the immediate conflict but also on transforming relationships among the participants.7
Having described the differences between classic mediation and facilitation, don't assume every mediator uses the same approach or that a potential client who asks you to mediate is expecting classic mediation. Ask them what they mean by mediation.
If you're a facilitative mediator, you apply the mutual learning mindset and skill set to your mediator role. Mediators I have worked with find this a relatively easy transition to make. One part of the transition that some mediators can find challenging is that mutual learning takes a different approach to conveying information between people. Mediators often talk with disputants alone, helping each understand the other disputant's situation and what the other may be willing to settle for. This go-between role (mediate comes from a Latin word meaning “to come between”) is inconsistent with mutual learning because it shifts accountability for conveying information from the source (the disputants) to the mediator. In mutual learning, everyone is responsible for sharing their own information directly with those who need to hear it. In other words, everyone carries their own water.
The Facilitative Leader Role
Facilitative leaders use the mutual learning mindset and skill set to increase their own effectiveness and to help individuals and groups increase their effectiveness. This includes creating the conditions in which group members can also learn to use the mutual learning approach. Unlike the other facilitative roles, you're not a third party when you serve as a facilitative leader. You can be a facilitative leader whether you are the formal leader of the group, a group member, or an individual contributor.
In any case, the facilitative leader role is the most difficult facilitative role to fill because you need to use facilitative skills at the same time you're deeply involved in the content of the conversation and the decision-making process. The more you're involved in the content of a conversation, the more difficult it is to simultaneously pay attention to and help manage the process of the conversation. And the more you're involved in the content and the stronger your views on the content are, the more difficult it is to be curious about others' views and ask others to identify any gaps or problems in your reasoning. My book Smart Leaders, Smarter Teams shows how leaders and team members use mutual learning to get better results.
Basic and Developmental Types of Roles
I divide facilitation, consulting, coaching, and mediation into two types—basic and developmental (Exhibit 2.2). In the basic type, you're giving a person a fish; in the developmental type, you're teaching a person to fish.
Exhibit 2.2 Basic and Developmental Types of Roles
| Basic Role | Developmental Role | |
| Client Objective | Solve a substantive problem or address an opportunity. | Solve a substantive problem or address an opportunity while developing the mutual learning mindset and skill set to apply to other situations. |
| Facilitative Role | Help group improve its process; take primary responsibility for managing the group's process. | Help group develop its process skills and mutual learning mindset and skill set; share responsibility for managing the group's process. |
| Process Outcome for Client | Same dependence on facilitative role for addressing future situations. | Reduced dependence on facilitative role for addressing future situations. |
In basic facilitation, consulting, coaching, and mediation, the group seeks your help to solve problems or address opportunities, such as reducing the time for responding to customers, improving work relationships, or developing a strategy for marketing a new product. You use your facilitative skills to help the group temporarily improve its process to solve the problem or create the opportunity. After the group solves its problem or creates the opportunity, they have achieved their objective. But the group hasn't learned how to do for itself what you did for it—apply mutual learning to reflect on and improve its process, and get better results. Consequently, if other difficult problems or opportunities arise, the group is likely to require your facilitative skills again.
In developmental facilitation, consulting, coaching, and mediation, the group seeks your help to solve problems or address opportunities and to develop its mutual learning mindset and skill set so, in the future, it can identify and address other situations on its own. In other words, developmental facilitation, consulting, coaching, or mediation enables a group to become self-facilitating, self-consulting, self-coaching, or self-mediating. The developmental form requires a group to reflect on and change its mindset and behavior. In this sense, the developmental form is more systemic and produces deeper learning than the basic form. In practice, helping occurs on a continuum from purely basic to purely developmental, rather than as two discrete or pure types.
But developmental facilitation, consulting, coaching, or mediation isn't worth the investment for every client. It reduces the individual's or group's dependence on you, but it also requires significantly more time and discipline for the individual or group to learn.
For a team, developmental facilitation becomes a better investment when it needs to work closely together over time on challenging, high-stakes issues, in which members have strongly held different views. Developmental facilitation is essential for some groups given their stated identity. For example, a truly self-directed work team must be self-facilitating; an organization that purports to be a learning organization has to have groups that can reflect on their mindset and behavior in a manner consistent with developmental facilitation.
Finally, as challenging as it is to provide skilled basic facilitation, consulting, coaching, or mediation, you need considerably more skill to provide the developmental form. For example, developmental facilitation requires that you think on more levels and dimensions simultaneously and in real time, about what is occurring in the group and how best to help the group. Throughout this book, I continue to describe how you would approach situations differently depending on whether you were using a basic or developmental approach.
Serving in Multiple Facilitative Roles
At times, you may serve in two or more facilitative roles. You may serve in different roles in different settings or need to serve in more than one role in the same meeting. You may be a facilitative leader in your own group, a facilitator or facilitative consultant to other parts of the organization, and a facilitative trainer as well. I recently talked with an internal HR business partner who supports a leadership team by serving as a facilitator, facilitative consultant, facilitative trainer, facilitative coach, and facilitative leader—as a leadership team member and as a project manager with decision-making authority. If you're an external consultant, you may be moving between the roles of facilitative consultant, facilitative trainer, and facilitative coach. Because all six facilitative roles are based on the same mutual learning mindset, by using the Skilled Facilitator approach, you can move seamlessly and with integrity between the roles as necessary.
If, during a meeting, you think it would help the group for you to switch roles and the new role is appropriate for you to play, here are the steps to follow:
- Identify the new appropriate role you want to switch to.
- Explicitly describe to the group the facilitative role you want to switch to and explain your reasoning.
- Seek agreement with the group to fill the new role.
- Fill the role according to the agreement.
- When you need to switch roles again, return to step 1.
When It's Appropriate to Leave the Role of Facilitator
I've emphasized how important it is to clarify your facilitative role and to act consistently with it. Yet sometimes it's appropriate and helpful to temporarily leave your facilitative role and serve in another one. Leaving the facilitator and facilitative mediator roles is the most challenging because it means giving up content neutrality or other elements of the role that lead groups to see you as objective and trustworthy. This section describes when it's appropriate and beneficial to switch from the facilitator role to another facilitative role, and what risks you face in doing so. If you decide to move from the facilitator role to another facilitative role, remember to use the five-step process above.
Moving to the Facilitative Mediator Role
There are three common situations in which part of the client group is likely to ask you to serve as a mediator, by asking to meet with you alone and/or by asking you to convey information to another group or subgroup: (1) in the beginning of a facilitation, when subgroups have concerns either about working with you as a facilitator or about working with the other subgroups; (2) during a facilitation, when a member or members want information raised in the group or some action taken without it being attributed to them; and (3) in a conflict, when the facilitation breaks down and one or more subgroups are unwilling to continue.
If you serve as a facilitative mediator in these situations, you risk acting inconsistently with at least two mutual learning core values by (1) taking accountability for sharing information for which you're not the source and (2) acting on information that you received outside the group and without being transparent about doing so.
When members share information with you outside of the group conversation, they often want you to use it to intervene in the full group. But because the members often don't want the full group to know that they're the source of the information (or even that it was shared with you), they ask you to share the information for them or else act on their information without explaining that you're doing so. If you explicitly or implicitly agree to this, then you can't explain why you're intervening, and so you're not being transparent and accountable with the group. In addition, if the people who shared the information with you are unwilling to identify themselves in the full group, neither the group nor you can determine whether the information is valid. On the other hand, if you don't share or act on the information given you, the group and you may miss an opportunity to get the group together initially, to get an important issue raised, or to keep the group from completely breaking down.
In these situations, you can temporarily move to a facilitative mediator role without reducing the integrity of your facilitator role, if you meet several conditions. First, try to serve as a facilitative coach, helping one or more members of the group to raise their concerns or questions about the other members in the full group (I illustrate this in the section below on avoiding collusion). This role is still consistent with the facilitator role, as long as you're helping the group members raise their own issues and not raising the issues for them.
You can also meet with subgroups when you're beginning to work with a group and one or more subgroups have a concern about whether you're impartial and sensitive to their needs. Initially, ask the subgroups what makes them reluctant to share this information in the full group, share your reasoning on the advantages of doing so, and ask what would need to happen for them to be willing to do so. If they are not yet willing to share these concerns in the full group, it's reasonable to meet separately with them to hear their concerns. If the concerns are relevant for the other subgroups, help the subgroup members figure out how to share these concerns in the full group, if they are willing.
You also can temporarily act as a facilitative mediator if conflict between subgroups threatens a complete breakdown in communication. I facilitated a union-management cooperative effort in which the seven union members of the union-management committee simultaneously stood up and walked out in the middle of a meeting. The discussion had become tense, and union members were frustrated by what they perceived to be management's efforts to undermine the process. As the facilitator, I saw two choices. I could stay in the room, let the union leave, and see the process unravel, along with the progress the committee had made. Or I could temporarily assume the role of facilitative mediator, talk with the union members, and try to find a way to help union and management members work together again. I chose the latter course. I spent the next six hours mediating in meetings and phone calls. The next morning, the union and management subgroups were back in the room, discussing why the process had broken down and exploring ways to prevent it from recurring.
When you meet with a subgroup, especially if you decide to mediate by conveying information between subgroups, it's essential to state clearly that you will be serving in the facilitative mediator role. Develop a clear agreement with the subgroup about what information, if any, you will share with the other subgroups. Without this agreement, a subgroup can easily feel that you haven't acted neutrally, have violated confidentiality, or have colluded with another subgroup.
Moving to the Facilitative Consultant Role
Earlier in this chapter, I discussed when it's appropriate to serve as a facilitative consultant rather than as a facilitator. But even if you decide to serve as a facilitator, the client may still treat you as a facilitative consultant, asking you questions about subjects in which you have expertise (marketing, performance management systems, finance, and so on).
Sometimes it's appropriate and beneficial to the group for you to share your expertise. When you serve as a content expert, the group can quickly obtain valuable information and reduce the time it takes to make a decision. But there are also risks. The group may start to see you as a non-neutral third party, which reduces your credibility and ultimately your effectiveness. A second risk is that the group becomes dependent on you. Group members may grow sensitive to whether you approve of their decisions, which then affects the decisions they make.
In this situation, you can take several steps to reduce the risk that sharing expert information will negatively affect your facilitator role when you return to it. First, act as a content expert only when asked to by the group and only when the group reaches a consensus to do so. This reduces the chances of meeting the needs of only some group members. Second, avoid serving as a content expert in the early stages of working with a group. This reduces the likelihood of the group coming to depend on you in this role.
People who facilitate groups in their own organizations are often asked by group members to play an expert role. In Chapter 15, I discuss how an internal facilitator can offer expert information and facilitate effectively.
The Facilitator as Evaluator
Serving as an evaluator isn't a facilitative role. As a facilitator, you face a role conflict whenever someone in the organization asks you to evaluate the performance of one or more members in the group. For example, a manager who is outside the facilitated group may be concerned about the performance of one of the members. She may ask you to evaluate the member to help her decide whether to take any corrective action. Alternatively, she may be considering promoting one of several members of the group and ask you to evaluate the members to help her make the promotion decision.
You face a potential role conflict in this situation because evaluating group members can jeopardize the members' trust in you. One reason members trust you is that the facilitator has no authority and adheres to the principle that the facilitator does not use information obtained within facilitation to influence decisions about group members that are made outside facilitation, except with the agreement of the group. Evaluating group members increases your power in the organization and therefore decreases the likelihood of members discussing openly information that they believe could prove harmful to them.
One way a manager can obtain this information from you in a manner that is consistent with the mutual learning core values is to have the group member about whom the evaluation is being sought agree that you can share your observations with the manager. In this case, you provide specific examples that you observe about the group member's behavior. You share these observations in the presence of the group member—ideally, in the presence of the entire facilitated group—and ask the evaluated group member (and other group members) whether they would have made a different evaluation. Making your information available to all group members, so they can validate or disagree with it, enables the members to make an informed choice about whether you have shared valid information with the manager. This can reduce member concerns about trust to the extent that they are based on concern about your sharing valid information. In the course of your facilitation, if you have shared all relevant information with the group, it's likely that the information that you would share during the evaluation session has already been discussed with group members.
The Group is Your Client
One significant principle of the mutual learning approach as applied to group facilitation is that the group is your client. When you choose the group as your client, you're telling your client that your responsibility is to help the group as a whole rather than only the formal team leader, a subset of the group, or even someone outside of the group. This simple choice has many implications. In practice, it means that you offer the group an informed choice about whether to work with you. It means that you don't automatically agree to the group leader's requests (say, to use a certain agenda or process) simply because they come from the group leader.
Facilitators often have concerns about treating the group as their client. The group leader has more authority and often more power than other group members. You may be concerned that if you try to meet group members' needs, you may not be able to fully meet the group leader's needs, and this may alienate the leader and jeopardize your future work with the group or the larger organization. But if you meet the leader's needs at the expense of other group members' needs, you lose your credibility with the group and your ability to facilitate. Viewed in this either-or way, you find yourself in a dilemma; either choice creates problems. The challenge is to recognize that the leader's role in the group is different and still treat the group as your client. I describe how to do this in Chapter 13, on contracting.
What is Your Responsibility for the Group's Results?
One challenging part of the facilitator role is deciding what responsibility you have for the group's results. As a basic facilitator, you fulfill your responsibility to the group by using a mutual learning approach to (1) design an effective process with the group to accomplish its work, (2) identify for the group when members have acted inconsistently (or consistently) with principles of effective group behavior, and (3) enable the group to make informed choices on the basis of your interventions. In addition, as a developmental facilitator, you help the group members learn how to (1) identify when they have acted inconsistently with the mutual learning mindset and behaviors, (2) explore the conditions that create this, and (3) change these conditions to generate better results.
Although you're not directly responsible for what the group decides, you are responsible for helping the group consider how its process affects the results it achieves. If a group is trying to decide what data to use to predict the size of the market for a service, as a facilitator, you don't offer an opinion about which are the best data to use (as a facilitative consultant with expertise in this area, you would offer your view). But you do help the group consider which criteria it uses to make the decision. If members disagree about the best data to use, you help them design a way to test their disagreement.
Given the difference between process and outcomes, some facilitators believe they aren't responsible for the client's results. These facilitators reason that their job is to focus on the group's process; if the client doesn't use this to achieve their results, the facilitators aren't responsible.
Other facilitators believe they are responsible for the client's results. These facilitators reason that they're hired to help the client achieve its objectives and if the client fails, they fail. If you're an internal facilitator, you may have even heard this message directly from managers who ask for your help, saying something like, “I need you to get this team to…” These managers finish the sentence by identifying a team outcome for which they have now made you responsible.
The problem with these approaches is that they assume either too little or too much responsibility for the group's results. Consequently, they fail to recognize the four possible relationships between whether the client achieves its results and whether you as the facilitator act effectively: (1) the client achieves its results because of the facilitator's actions, (2) the client achieves its results despite the facilitator's actions, (3) the client doesn't achieve its results despite the facilitator's actions, and (4) the client doesn't achieve its results because of the facilitator's actions.
The Skilled Facilitator approach recognizes all of the four possible relationships. It assumes that if a client achieves its results, you have contributed to this positive outcome only to the extent that you have acted effectively as the facilitator. It also assumes that if a client doesn't achieve its results, you have contributed to this negative outcome only to the extent that you have acted ineffectively as the facilitator. Acting effectively as a facilitator means operating from a mutual learning mindset and appropriately diagnosing and intervening in the group, within your facilitator role. These same assumptions apply if you're a facilitative consultant, facilitative coach, or facilitative trainer.
Here's an example in which you would bear some responsibility for a team's negative outcomes: You're working with a senior leadership team that is deadlocked about whether to release some survey results showing that employees have significant concerns about management. Instead of helping the team understand members' different views to determine the source of the conflict, you reinforce it by having the team list pros and cons for releasing the survey results. (I describe this example in detail in Chapters 4 and 5). You share responsibility for the team's outcomes, to the extent that it makes poor decisions based on your pros and cons process.
If you're wondering why a client may not achieve its goals even if you have facilitated effectively, there can be a couple of reasons. First, the group may make decisions based on incomplete information. As facilitator, you're responsible for helping the group raise and discuss all the relevant information. But if the group doesn't know that it's missing some relevant information and you don't have the content expertise to identify that missing information and ask whether it's relevant, then the group can make low-quality decisions.
Second, even if the group has all the relevant information and you have facilitated the conversation effectively, members can still make what you consider low-quality decisions. Even if you point out flaws in their reasoning process, they may still choose to make decisions based on the flawed reasoning. The group may have different values or assumptions about the situation than you do or consider different needs more important. Watching a group make what you consider a poor decision may be the most difficult part of acting congruent with the mutual learning core values and the facilitator role.
Evaluating Your Performance Independent of the Group's Results
Because the Skilled Facilitator approach distinguishes your facilitative effectiveness from the client's results, you need a method of evaluating your facilitative performance that is objective and independent of the client's results. The Skilled Facilitator approach enables you to do this by comparing your group interventions to specific criteria.
Colluding with the Group
Collusion is cooperation or a secret agreement between parties that affects others negatively. When you collude with a group, you're explicitly or implicitly asked (or you ask others) to act in a particular way but not to reveal that you're doing so, or why. Collusion is inconsistent with any facilitative role. It requires you not to be transparent and to unilaterally place the interests of some group members above the interests of the group as a whole, which prevents the full group from making an informed choice.
You can collude in several ways: (1) with one or more members against one or more other members, (2) with one or more members against a nongroup member, and (3) with a nongroup member against one or more group members. Here are examples of the three forms of collusion:
- Jack, a group member, approaches you before a meeting. Jack says he wants to raise an issue in the meeting but doesn't want the group to know it's his issue. He's concerned that the issue won't get the attention it deserves if the group thinks he's raising it. Jack asks you to raise the issue “at an appropriate time” but to not tell the group where it originated. You agree.
- A project team that you're facilitating is about to meet with Erika, the executive who sponsors the project but who isn't a member of the project team. Everyone has agreed that you will facilitate the meeting. The project team members are concerned that Erika is going to get into too much detail and start doing the team's work. However, team members are concerned about saying this to Erika, so they ask you to subtly bring Erika back to the appropriate level of detail if this happens. You agree.
- Sven, a manager, tells you that a team that reports to him (and that he isn't a member of) is spending too much time on an issue. Sven is especially concerned that the team is spending time discussing issues that aren't in its charge. He asks you to attend fewer group meetings and, when facilitating, to steer the group away from those issues. You say, “Okay, I'll see what I can do.”
Colluding with group members is a solution that creates new problems and often makes the situation worse. In an attempt to help the group, by colluding you act inconsistently with the core values you espouse, reducing your effectiveness and credibility and the group's effectiveness. By shifting the accountability for raising issues from a group member to you, the group misses the opportunity to develop its skills for dealing productively with difficult issues, and you reinforce ineffective group behavior. Over time, you may wonder why the group is overly dependent on you, without realizing how your own actions contributed to the very outcome you set out to avoid.
In any of the situations described previously, you may feel a lot of emotion. You may feel angry if you believe members are asking you to collude with them. You may feel trapped if faced with choosing between meeting the request of a powerful member (who might pay your bill or salary) and acting inconsistently with your role and not helping the group. If members ask you to raise issues for them because they're worried about the consequences if they raise the issue themselves, you may feel sorry for them and want to protect them. In some of these situations, you may be naturally more compassionate than in others. Your challenge is to respond out of compassion when it's not your immediate response—and to do so in a way that doesn't shift member accountability to you because of how you are feeling about yourself or about others. We explore how to do this in Chapters 12 and 13.
Dealing with Collusion
One way to avoid colluding with a group is to discuss the issue as part of your contracting process with the group (Chapter 13). When you discuss the role you will play when helping them, you can describe what you can and can't do within your role, explaining how colluding creates negative consequences for the group and you. You can give examples of requests that you can't fulfill because they would lead to collusion.
If you receive a request that requires you to collude with the group, you can explain again how accepting the request would create negative consequences. You can then ask the individual if he sees the situation differently. In this way, you can work with the person making the request to find a way for him to raise the issue directly with the relevant individuals. You might begin by saying, “I think it's important that the group hear your concern, and I think it's appropriate for you to raise it with the group because it's your concern. People may have questions that only you have the answers to. In addition, if I raise the issue in my role as facilitator, people may think I'm steering the conversation and acting outside my role, which can reduce the group's trust in me and make it harder for me to help the group. I can't raise the issue for you. But as soon as you raise it, I'll actively facilitate to help you and the other group members have as productive a conversation as possible. What do you think about what I'm saying?”
Summary
In this chapter, I have described six facilitative roles in which you can use the mutual learning approach: facilitator, facilitative consultant, facilitative coach, facilitative trainer, facilitative mediator, and facilitative leader. The role you choose depends on the type of help the group needs. When the group needs multiple kinds of help, you may find yourself moving between one or more of the facilitative roles. You can implement most of the roles in either a basic or developmental form. In the basic form, you use your skills to help the group learn and/or solve one or more problems, or pursue an opportunity. In the developmental form, in addition to helping the group learn and/or solve one or more problems or pursue an opportunity, the group also learns how to do for itself what you are helping the group do. Central to all of the facilitative roles is the principle that the group is your client rather than the leader of the group, some subset of the group, or even a sponsor outside the group. Although temporarily leaving your role of facilitator is appropriate at times, it may also jeopardize the group's and your ability to act consistently with the mutual learning core values and reduce your ability to help the group. Finally, when a group's topic is improving its group process, you are not content neutral, even if you're serving as a facilitator. In all of the facilitative roles, you model and serve as an advocate for effective process using mutual learning.
In the next chapter, I will explain that how you think is how you facilitate—or consult, coach, or train. I will then explain how you undermine your ability to help groups when you operate from a unilateral control mindset.