Facilitators are designated individuals who help groups reach a decision, plan, or outcome that everyone fully agrees on and commits to achieving. Facilitators are guides, rather than leaders, and through facilitation, they help resolve conflict and guide groups toward meeting shared goals.
When you ask someone to be a facilitator, the first thing they will probably think about is chairing a meeting or making presentations. This is a total misconception.
Facilitation is about creating a structure and environment that makes it easy for people to collaborate. Facilitation is about bringing diverse groups of people together and making it easy for them to work together to come up with a solution to a problem.
The term facilitate is derived from the Latin word “facilis”, which means “to render less difficult” or “to make easy.” In the modern context, a number of definitions of facilitation have been put across.
According to Trevor Bentley, a facilitator, facilitation can be defined as:
“the provision of opportunities, resources, encouragement and support for the group to succeed in achieving its objectives and to do this through enabling the group to take control and responsibility for the way they proceed.”
Facilitation is important in any process that requires people to work together to come up with a desired result without being bound by the constraints of hierarchical structure.
This includes processes such as brainstorming sessions, meetings, team building sessions, planning sessions, training and development sessions, conflict resolution, or any other activity that requires a group of people to collaborate to achieve specific predetermined results.
Benefits of facilitation skills
- There is more productivity. Having a facilitator with good facilitation skills guide the process provides focus and a sense of deliberateness to the conversation.
- Saves time. By investing in a facilitator, you will actually spend less time in both meetings and doing damage control outside the meeting.
- Having better outcomes. The facilitator ensures that all opinions are heard and that there is no process loss. A good facilitator aims for a collaborative harmony, which the decision has been thoroughly discussed and everyone is willing to support and live with it.
- Increased commitment from the team. A facilitator should believe that the answer lies within the collective intelligence of the team with which the probability of successful completion increases dram
- Having less stress. Facilitators focus on the process the employees do not have to. One can fully engage in the content of the discussion knowing that the facilitator is familiar to all aspects of the team process.
- Ability to create better relationships. At the end of the day, people not only wants to feel good about the outcomes achieved but also feel good about the people they worked with. Facilitators with their facilitation skills are great at managing the team dynamics to ensure a collaborative and supportive environment.
Who Is a Facilitator?
The definition of facilitate is “to make easy” or “ease a process.” What a facilitator does is plan, guide and manage a group event to ensure that the group’s objectives are met effectively, with clear thinking, good participation and full buy-in from everyone who is involved.
To facilitate effectively, you must be objective. This doesn’t mean you have to come from outside the organization or team, though. It simply means that, for the purposes of this group process, you will take a neutral stance. You step back from the detailed content and from your own personal views, and focus purely on the group process. (The “group process” is the approach used to manage discussions, get the best from all members, and bring the event through to a successful conclusion. How you design this depends on many factors, and we’ll explore this in a little more detail later in the article. The secret of great facilitation is a group process that flows – and with it will flow the group’s ideas, solutions, and decisions too.)
Your key responsibility as a facilitator is to create this group process and an environment in which it can flourish, and so help the group reach a successful decision, solution or conclusion.
What Does a Facilitator Do?
To facilitate an event well, you must first understand the group’s desired outcome, and the background and context of the meeting or event. The bulk of your responsibility is then to:
- Design and plan the group process, and select the tools that best help the group progress towards that outcome.
- Guide and control the group process to ensure that:
- There is effective participation.
- Participants achieve a mutual understanding.
- Their contributions are considered and included in the ideas, solutions or decisions that emerge.
- Participants take shared responsibility for the outcome.
- Ensure that outcomes, actions and questions are properly recorded and actioned, and appropriately dealt with afterwards.
Characteristics of Good Facilitators
Facilitation is a learned skill, but it depends on certain characteristics such as:
- Ability to manage group and interpersonal dynamics
- Powerful listening
- Excellent verbal and nonverbal communication
- Creative thinking
- Empathy
- Understanding of group processes and structures
- Time management and structure
- Focus
A skilled facilitator can either come from inside a company or be brought in as an outside expert.
Group Facilitation
In groups, facilitators use a variety of methods to smooth transitions and keep meetings moving in the right direction:
- Presenting content or reframing information so it can be easily understood.
- Providing an appropriate structure for a meeting, training, or team-building session so the core mission is accomplished.
- Drawing questions and possible solutions from the participants in order to build a cohesive mindset.
- Promoting shared responsibility for the outcome of the meeting.
Many teams don’t have a leader who can assist in their development, manage difficult discussions, or keep meetings focused and productive. Facilitation for groups or teams keeps participants on track and working towards concrete goals.
Individual Facilitation
Facilitation can also be used individually, usually to resolve one-on-one issues between coworkers or between employees and their managers.
Individual facilitation can be used to settle disagreements, set mutual goals, or debrief a project, process, or experience. In these cases, a facilitator provides the structure, content, and process that employees need to reach a mutually satisfying solution.
The Facilitation Process
Facilitation involves a series of common steps, these include:
- Setting the agenda. The facilitator’s job is to guide the group to some end, she noted. To do this effectively they must have a clear line of sight to a desired end goal and a sense of how that goal will be achieved. “You have to know and have planned the execution of the techniques that you are going to use to make sure they get you there,” she said.
- Managing group dynamics. The ability to manage group dynamics effectively is a critical element of successful facilitation. “A facilitator has to be somewhat insightful about human behavior so that he or she can ‘read’ the dynamics, give each person what they need and still move the meeting or session toward the expected outcome,” she said. While Usher-Mays said that most facilitators are familiar with common “profiles” that will crop up in meetings (the know-it-all, the quiet person, the non-participative person, the naysayer, the saboteur, the yes-person) and likely has techniques to deal with these types, the real challenge surfaces as the types interact. These real-time dynamics, she said, create the greatest challenges—and opportunities—for facilitators.
- A lot of information is shared during a meeting or group session. The facilitator’s job is to sort through it and synthesize it to identify themes and trends, said Usher-Mays. Facilitators need to be able to “connect the dots and help the group see the relevance and connection where perhaps they didn’t before.”
- Building consensus. Nothing moves forward if people are on opposite sides, Usher-Mays pointed out. “A skilled facilitator has to help the team recognize where they are potentially saying the same thing, just coming at it from a slightly different perspective, and look for win-win solutions.”