Facilitation is leading or guiding a group so they achieve a common goal.
You can facilitate workshops, training courses and meetings, both internally within your company and externally with a client or public group.
Great facilitating is like being a party host. You begin plagued with the usual questions of will anyone turn up, will they have fun and will they behave themselves? (There is always one.) Then there is all the planning and preparation. You are in charge of the entire experience and you need to have everything ready when people arrive.
Finally, on the day itself, you work very hard to make sure everyone is having the best possible time, catering to everyone’s needs until they all leave and you collapse from exhaustion probably feeling like you coulda/shoulda/woulda done more.
The most important thing to say at this stage is that facilitation is not presentation, and presenting is not facilitating.
Presenters focus on giving one-way information. This is a perfect dynamic to deliver some key messages but it will not lead to any behaviour change, new skills development or sharing of experiences.
If the goal is to give the listener or the group a new skill, share experiences or change behaviour in the long term, you can’t just stand at the top of a room lecturing to a group. You must create an experience that allows for two-way communication.
In order to create this experience, you must facilitate, not present.
The skill of a facilitator involves:
A facilitator must get information across to gain engagement and stimulate discussion, but then they must manage the discussion, listen and pull out the key learnings for the group.
The truth is, facilitators need to do a mix of presenting and facilitating – a mix of pushing and pulling.
There is a very famous saying from Benjamin Franklin:
‘Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.’
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Turns out that he was right.
Source: Figure derived from Dale, E. (1946) Audio-visual methods in teaching, New York: The Dryden Press.
Facilitation is the skill of telling, showing and allowing the listener to experience. This guarantees the best possible result and retention. Facilitating helps people to learn on their own, rather than telling them what to do.
Facilitators use questioning and listening skills to lead a group and, most importantly, a facilitator gives the group time and space to understand, learn and contribute.
The facilitator is 100 per cent responsible for the experience created for a group, so they must:
The fundamental you need to always remember with facilitation in business is that you are dealing with an adult audience. Adults learn and contribute in a unique way that is different to how we learnt in school.
Pedagogy: derived from the Greek words ‘ped’, meaning ‘child’ and ‘agogus’, meaning ‘leader of’. Therefore, pedagogy literally means the science of leading (teaching) children.
Andragogy: described as ‘the art and science of helping adults learn’ and could be seen as the opposite of the pedagogical approach.
As a facilitator you will be applying an andragogical approach, so you need to bear in mind the following.
Remember this guy?
Adults need to know why they need to learn. Adults have a keen desire to establish ‘What’s in it for me?’ before they invest in the process.
You need to emphasise the importance of the training event or workshop in terms of improving your participants’ jobs and lives.
Adults have developed experience over many years, which needs to be tapped into using appropriate methods. These methods include:
I will go into these in more detail later in the chapter, but the most important thing to know is that a group of adults will learn far more from each other than they will from listening solely to a facilitator. If you are to successfully implement the androgogical model, you need to know your listeners and design a facilitation session that meets their needs.
Do you remember learning to ride your first bike?
Can you remember if you:
Whether it is learning to ride a bike or participating in any other learning, we all have different learning styles. There are four learning styles, as found by Peter Honey and Alan Mumford (see www.peterhoney.com):
When you are facilitating a group it could be made up of:
And… don’t forget you also have a learning style as a facilitator, and your default will be to design and run the workshop or meeting the way you prefer.
For example, I am an activist. Therefore I am a reflector’s and theorist’s worst nightmare. My default is to give zero instruction and expect instant reactions. I even get a bit huffy when they are thinking (reflecting).
Therefore, I must make sure, when I am designing and running a workshop, that I give proper instructions, good written hand-outs and time and space for thought.
There are three factors of great facilitation:
The role of a facilitator begins before the start of the workshop or meeting. You must design the session in full. To design a facilitation session, start by answering these questions:
The opening of your facilitation on the day itself is the most important part. You must start on time. The group must know things will run on time and on target. You set the standard for this.
If a number of participants have not yet turned up, you may delay the start time by five minutes, but only by five minutes, and only with the prior agreement of those who have arrived on time.
At the beginning of your workshop or meeting, your participants are sitting there with all sorts of thoughts running through their minds – for example:
As we just explored in the previous section, each individual in the group is simply thinking WIIFM – what’s in it for me?
And you need to make sure you begin your meeting or workshop with a clear and structured answer to this question.
How? By saying HOLA.
H – Hook and context
O – Outline of what you will cover
L – Link to real life and long-term benefit
A – Any other business – breaks and housekeeping
Let me give you an example of how to apply this in real life. Imagine I am running a one-day workshop on facilitation skills, with six managers who, in turn, will be designing and running workshops of their own over the next 12 months:
H
‘Hi, my name is Emma Ledden and you are very welcome to this course called “Facilitating With Impact”. You are all going to be designing and running workshops over the next 12 months; I want to help you do that as confidently and competently as possible.’
O
‘The main areas I will cover today are:
L
‘These skills will help you become a better facilitator and will also help you in client meetings, team projects and presentations in the future.
The session is very practical and tailored around you. I will record you facilitating on a camera and play you back to yourself so you can get awareness of your personal facilitation and presentation style. I will also give you detailed feedback.’
A
‘We will take two coffee breaks and a lunch break, and finish at 5pm. All I ask is for everyone to please turn your phone and laptop off before we begin.’
One strategy for ensuring your group works together is to begin the day with a list of ground rules about how the group must behave during the meeting or workshop.
You can look at setting ground rules around these areas at the beginning of your course:
I have been a trainer for 10 years and I have never set formal ground rules or asked any group I work with to set them. I do ask for phones and laptops to be turned off, but that is as far as I go. I feel ground rules are too much like school, and I trust that if my opening HOLA is good enough I will gain and keep attention.
In my experience, adult learners are well able to behave properly and they don’t like being patronised, which I fear is what ground rules can do.
This is my opinion, based on my experience. You will have to make the decision whether or not to set ground rules for yourself and your group.
Once you have said HOLA, the next step is to understand what your participants need from the session. You also need to have an ice-breaker to give the group a chance to get comfortable with each other.
The idea with an ice-breaker is to relieve some of the normal tension that exists in a room with a group of adult learners who may or may not know each other, and who are possibly feeling nervous about the day.
Ice-breakers are about breaking down barriers, creating a more pleasant learning environment and facilitating learning. A ‘good atmosphere’ is not accidental – it can and should be created by the facilitator.
If you have a group of fewer than eight people you can simply go around the group one by one, asking each person their name, their personal challenges in the area you are covering and their goal for the training.
Even though it may seem that way on the surface, this is not a simple question-and-answer session. This is a discussion with the purpose of bonding the group, finding common ground and relieving some tension. Take your time and allow a dynamic to develop as you question each person. Find common themes and link people together in their expectations of the day, their challenges or their goals.
A tour of the table is not your only option for an introduction and ice-breaker. You can be more adventurous, depending on the age and size of the group. Here are a few other examples of introductions and ice-breakers.
The heart of facilitation lies in getting the group to do the work, rather than the facilitator doing the work.
There a number of ways to do this using the tools below:
Let me give you a very simple example of how I would use group discussions to explore the use of visual aids in my ‘Facilitating With Impact’ course.
H – Now we are going to look at using visual aids during a facilitation workshop and establish what is best practice.
O – The goal is to examine all the possible visual aids you can use and the pros and cons of each type.
L – This session will help you identify the best visuals to use in different scenarios and also how to prepare them.
A – You will be working in groups of three and each group will get a chance to present back to the room on a type of visual aid.
I then ask them to get into groups of three and do this series of exercises:
Once this is completed, as the facilitator, I can now fill in any gaps that may have been left out.
The goal of facilitation is to make the group do the work, as opposed to just presenting the information at them.
I have been facilitating and training groups for 10 years now. The part I find the most challenging is managing the group dynamic.
Great facilitation looks like this:
A great facilitator is like a great shepherd. They allow the participants (the sheep) to move from one area to another while keeping everyone safe and keeping the flock intact.
Great facilitation has a clear agenda, starts on time, sticks to time and moves the group to an end-goal, while allowing space to share and debate.
Bad facilitation looks like this:
Bad facilitation has the participants (the sheep) running all over the place, baaing like crazy and behaving out of control.
Keeping your participants safe and getting them to the end-goal intact is a challenge for any facilitator.
At any time, a participant can behave in a negative way, which may have a destructive impact on the group and on the learning. These are some of the behaviours you will come across and will need to manage:
There are several reasons why negative behaviours occur. For example, the participant:
No matter the reason, when you are faced with a problem behaviour that will impact negatively on your group, you must act to manage that behaviour as best you can.
In order to do these three things, you need to not take the behaviour personally and you need to intervene using the ‘Levels of influence’.
The ‘Levels of influence’ is a simple concept that may help you in this area.
The ‘Levels of influence’ suggests that, as a general rule, if you have a difficult participant you start by addressing their behaviour in the least impactful way first.
For example, if you have two people in your group having a side conversation, the following may be the first ways you might try to intervene and solve it:
If your problem persists, it may be necessary to move up a level. For example:
At the top end of the ‘Levels of influence’ are the more drastic actions you can take – even asking someone to leave the group. You should never have to do this except in a very extreme case as it would represent a failure on the part of the facilitator. You should expect to be able to manage challenging situations in a positive way without making ultimatums or causing things to escalate.
When I began working as a facilitator I was told you will always ‘lose control of one group in your career’. I have yet to completely lose a group but I have come close a few times.
Each facilitator has their own style, and groups respond differently to different people and situations. There is no ‘one size fits all’ in terms of group dynamics. Over time you will develop your own style and ways to manage your groups as a facilitator.
Facilitation is a powerful skill to master in business as it allows you to interact with others in a very engaging and authentic way. It challenges you to be listener-focused, which is at the heart of great communication.
The ability to listen well and ask questions, all the while genuinely caring about the experience you are creating, will allow you to run great meetings, have better relationships and be a great leader to your team.
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