As a manager, doing things with purpose is integral to success, whether that’s in discussions with your superiors or helping everyone align and rally behind a common goal. To go further, managing organizational change without a clear knowledge of purpose is a recipe for disaster. Get this right before you begin and many other things will fall into place.
Often, there are underlying conflicts behind disagreements taking place in a conversation, even in small meetings. The facilitator role often means being attuned to this possibility and responding appropriately. Let’s review which skills are required for a facilitator to perform effectively in each step of the process.
Interventions. Try using these “Interventions” when disruption is happening during the meeting:
Helping a team come up with a solution to an issue or develop a new strategy will have no effect if the relevant follow-up actions aren’t taken. Remember your purpose when thinking about a meeting or workshop format. Choose a format that best supports your purpose and allows your team to move towards that goal. Not every project you work on with your team needs to be an open forum. Planning is important, but stuffing a meeting with exercises and engineering your workshop down to each minute will likely increase your stress level.
Start by dragging and dropping blocks, add your timings and adjust with ease to create a minute-perfect session. If you are attacked or criticized, take a “mental step” backwards before responding. Once you become defensive, you risk losing the group’s respect and trust, and might cause folks to feel they can’t be honest with you.
What are the key roles in team coordination for Team Facilitation?
After a conversation with Myriam Hadnes, founder of Idayz and host at the Workshops Work podcast, we thought about some facilitation concepts and skills that a team manager could use when working with a team. Encouraging an open and honest exchange of feedback guides the team toward actionable insights and improvement plans. This commitment to continual growth contributes to a sustainable pace of development, improved product quality, and increased customer satisfaction over time. This is especially true in effective and productive organizational cultures. A carefully crafted agenda must take into account how much time can be allocated for each activity during a session. You might go further by creating a needs assessment to understand what the different stakeholders of an event might want in order to come up with a solution that meets your client’s needs.
It involves designing and delivering engaging and productive meetings, workshops, or events that enable your team to achieve their goals. But how do you plan a team facilitation that meets the needs and expectations of your stakeholders? Managing a team with good facilitator skills will improve their ability to deal with complex problems. Facilitators are experts in leading group meetings and gathering sessions. Oftentimes participants are facilitators who have attended workshops or design sprints based on the design process. Facilitators understand the importance of being directly involved in the facilitation process, actively engaging with team members and fostering an environment of open communication.
Driving Continuous Improvement with Facilitation Skills
However, it’s equally important to ensure you have brought the right people together. Based in Green Bay, Wisc., Jackie Lohrey has been writing professionally since 2009. Facilitation a preferred method to guide your group through a voyage of development from reflection, analyses, understanding, collaboration and action. If you think a great team facilitator could help you, please contact us to discuss the possibility. Their objectivity (inherent in their role) can provide relevant, new insight for you and your team.
- A great team manager might use tools like Slack to communicate with their team but remember the value of face-to-face chats, in-person meetings, and phone calls.
- Online meetings shouldn’t be fundamentally different than any other meeting – don’t forget your good habits because of the use of screens and ensure that best practices are followed.
- Sometimes, people dominate a discussion because they are really passionate about an issue and have lots of things to say.
- If you want to do good planning, keep members involved, and create real leadership opportunities in your organization and skills in your members, you need facilitator skills.
- This responsibility goes both ways – senior management should hear the concerns and ideas of every staff member, and every member of a company should regularly hear about what managers and executives are thinking.
Sometimes the sheer complexity of the business environment leaves people reeling. At times like these, having an impartial external team facilitator can pay impressive dividends, working closely with everyone involved to generate the best possible decisions and outcomes. A skilled facilitator understands the importance of designing and facilitating team-building activities that are engaging, purposeful, and tailored to the specific needs and dynamics of the team. Throughout the job search process, your facilitating skills and abilities become evident, showcasing your unique value as a facilitator. By demonstrating your diverse skills and abilities during the job search, you exemplify your proficiency in fostering effective communication, driving collaboration, and navigating complex group dynamics.
Team Facilitation
You should also include some buffer time for breaks, transitions, and unexpected issues. If you want to do good planning, keep members involved, and create real leadership opportunities in your organization and skills in your members, you need facilitator skills. Team facilitation is a valuable skill that can help you lead productive and collaborative meetings, workshops, and projects. However, it can also be challenging and stressful, especially when you face difficult situations, conflicts, or uncertainties.
When the goal of a workshop or meeting is to have insightful, open conversations that help a team come up with a solution or work towards a common goal, do you need to log feedback on a mobile device? Always keep the purpose and format of a session in mind, use whatever is easiest and empower your team to do the best work they can without distraction or need to upskill on new tools unnecessarily. Both overengineers and micromanagers can benefit from developing a process that their staff go through, and letting go of some of the anxiety over what their team is doing. Hire the right people, guide them carefully, ensure open channels of communication and empower them to do good work and your team will perform. This is one of the best lessons a manager can learn from the world of facilitation.
More articles on Team Facilitation
Effective facilitators recognize that both engagement and efficiency are equally important and employ techniques to strike this balance throughout the facilitation process. While it is crucial to encourage open dialogue and diverse perspectives, facilitators must also guide the team toward achieving the desired outcomes. The best facilitators possess a set of following skills that contribute to their effectiveness. Team building activities are an integral part of effective facilitation, as they help foster collaboration, trust, and cohesion within a group. Developing strong facilitative skills will help you in making better and quicker decisions in your life and workplace.
They might describe what they think is missing from the group in the way they are currently relating. An important aspect of team facilitation is striking a balance between allowing free-flowing discussions and maintaining focus and productivity. In other words, if your boss gives you a job that should be completed before noon, divide your job into pieces and give your boss the required time to complete them in an efficient way each day. The more efficient your time management is, the more you can save the lives of a whole team. Good Facilitators believe their group has the wisdom and knowledge to design successful solutions and that people will support what they help to create. Active listening helps understand how someone has spoken or why he or she offered the information.
Facilitation is a balancing act
Once you have a clear purpose and a good understanding of your participants, you can start choosing the methods and tools that you will use to facilitate your session. There are many different methods and tools that you can use to design and deliver a team facilitation session, depending on your purpose, objectives, and outcomes. Some examples are brainstorming, icebreakers, discussions, presentations, case studies, simulations, role plays, games, surveys, polls, quizzes, etc. The key is to choose the methods and tools that best suit your purpose and your participants, as well as the time and resources that you have available.
These techniques can help you calm down, focus, and reframe your thoughts. A success wall is a visual tool that can be a physical or digital board, a poster, a mural, or any other format that displays your team’s achievements, milestones, and highlights in a creative and agile team facilitation interactive way. You can organize the success wall by themes, categories, or timelines depending on your team’s goals and needs. Periodically reviewing the success wall with your team and discussing what it means for them and the team as a whole is also important.
Trust the Process
Effective people management is all about knowing your team well and being aware of possible challenges as soon as possible. Having a forum for your team to discuss concerns with you before a project begins is good for everyone. Listening skills are important for everyone who works with others and even more so for managers.
