As the bar rises for knowledge, expertise and speed, the way leaders manage their teams has to shift, too.
Leaders can’t have all the answers. And so it becomes vital that they have the skills to effectively empower their teams to operate at their best so that they can solve problems and move fast together.
If this rings true for you, this means evolving how you see your role, from managing several one-to-one relationships between you and your direct reports, to intentionally cultivating the team dynamic between them, so that people collaborate better, share ideas and challenge each other’s thinking.
This is where facilitation comes in.
Facilitation is more than just a workshop technique that you use on special occasions. It can become a way of leading that shows up in how you interact with your team.
When done well, bringing facilitation into your leadership approach gives your team everything they need to do their best work together. It involves a combination of strategic thinking, designing the right environment, turning ideas into action, and understanding behaviour change.
The most immediate and practical place to start introducing facilitation is in how you run your team meetings.
When you bring facilitation to your meetings, it:
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creates the environment for people to be both creative and productive
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ensures everyone feels able to contribute
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builds connection and better communication across the team
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promotes proactive ideas generation, problem-solving and experimentation
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encourages real progress and productivity
And all of this can have a big impact on your team culture more widely.
What facilitation really is
Facilitation is about designing and guiding conversations that help a group of people think, work and make decisions together. A facilitator focuses on the process so that the group can focus on the content. Rather than having the answers themselves, a facilitator creates the space for the team to problem-solve together.
Facilitation isn’t just for off-sites, big workshops or client-facing sessions. And it also doesn’t have to be all about high-energy activities or you performing for or ‘entertaining’ your team. In fact, the most powerful sessions I’ve facilitated have been a series of well-crafted activities where participants have purposeful, focused conversations without seeing me as central to the discussion.
Great facilitation is also firmly rooted in business goals. It involves understanding the context, the team, what led to the session, and what might happen after, to ensure it is truly useful and drives real change.
So, what’s stopping leaders from using facilitation more?
Some real barriers and challenges might stop leaders from bringing more facilitation into their leadership.
First, naturally, is a lack of time and the mental space to think differently about how to run meetings. It takes some thinking and discipline to design them intentionally and make sure the outputs and actions are followed through.
Secondly, not seeing it or experiencing it in practice. Meeting culture across most organisations is notoriously broken, and well-facilitated meetings are the exception rather than the rule. This often means leaders need to look externally to learn these skills.
Thirdly, the risk of trying something new. Time is precious, and even if there’s a real desire to improve things, if a new approach doesn’t work immediately, leaders can quickly default to what they know, even if that isn’t optimal.
Finally, a lack of support across the wider business. It takes conscious effort to bring facilitation into your practice. This is much harder if it isn’t recognised as valuable from a higher level, or more generally across the business.
How to start bringing more facilitation into your leadership
You don’t need to fix everything at once to make a difference. Here’s where to start.
Start small. Don’t try to change every meeting at once or even attempt to redesign an entire meeting. Start with one part of an existing meeting where you introduce a facilitated discussion and notice what happens.
Use our planning template to design your meetings with intention. Before you think about structure or activities, get clear on: the purpose and outcomes (why does this meeting need to happen and what do you and your team need to get out of it), the outputs (what will actually be produced as a result), and questions (what your team needs to explore together to get there).
Develop these four core skills. Facilitation can feel daunting because it is so much about reading the room, picking up on cues and keeping the conversation on track. But focusing on just these four skills can get you started:
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Curiosity and asking questions: In addition to the questions you’ve used to design your meeting, use questions during your meeting as your main communication method to encourage and build on ideas.
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Active listening: When people share their thoughts, confirm and acknowledge their contribution. You can also create intentional moments of silence by asking your team to note their ideas individually before sharing their thoughts out loud.
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Dealing with uncertainty: You won’t always feel in control. Inviting diverse perspectives and creativity may feel messy, and that is a natural part of the process. Get more familiar with it.
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Synthesis: Be prepared to round off conversations by stepping in to draw out main points and identify next steps.
You do not need to be a ‘pro’ at a wide range of tools before you are ready to facilitate. Having a clear purpose, armed with a set of questions and the core skills above, will be enough to get you started.
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When you start to introduce more facilitation to your meetings, you may be surprised at where else these skills show up: better listening, trusting your team more (and your team feeling it), being able to better deal with uncertain and complex situations, and more confidence to manage team dynamics and tricky situations. Gradually, facilitation will become more than just how you run meetings. It will be how you lead your team.
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