The One Thing Great Facilitators Do More Often (Facilitation Friday #67)
Avoid having your facilitation get in the way of participants' exercising more responsibility in a meeting or workshop.
You might still produce decent results, but without taking this one action consistently your facilitation efforts may fall short of their potential impact.
What is it?
Appropriately sharing the driver’s wheel or yielding to participants instead of always forcing them to yield and conform to you.
Doing so can increase participants’ ownership of—and accountability for—both the outcomes and the process. We want them to help drive the experience, not just come along for the ride.
This is particularly important for external facilitators like myself. We are temporary custodians of a group process who are brought in for a specific purpose. We must leave participants prepared to continue those efforts without us in the future.
Of course any meeting or workshop may involve times when more assertive facilitation is what the group most needs. Generally though, allowing participants more autonomy and enabling them to be facilitative increases their engagement, growth, and learning.
What does this shift in yielding ask of any presenter, facilitator, teacher, trainer, or leader?
To get out of the way of individuals taking more responsibility for their learning in a workshop or the discussions and decisions in a meeting.
I could say more about this, but that might get in the way of you reflecting on this question and identifying opportunities to reduce making others yield to you and your facilitation, teaching, or leadership when it is not vital for them to do so.
Want more fodder to stimulate your thinking on why, when, and how to yield? (Re)read these three posts:
Anyone Can—and Everyone Should Make Facilitative Contributions (Facilitation Friday #2)
Effective Facilitation Leads with Restraint (Facilitation Friday #6)
Should I Do Something? Deciding to Intervene (Facilitation Friday #13)
Bonus Question
To get better at yielding you may find it helpful to explore this self-assessment question: Which of my beliefs or behaviors get in my way of getting out of the way of meeting or workshop participants?
Bottom Line
Facilitators can build participants’ long-term confidence and competence when we equip and enable them to help steward the group process in meetings and workshops. In order to maximize their growth, engagement, learning, and accountability for results, we must ensure our facilitation does not get in the way of them doing so.
Getting in Action
Think about a meeting or workshop where you experienced facilitation that regularly forced participants to yield. What did that feel like in the moment? How, if at all, did it influence your subsequent contributions to the discussions and/or sense of ownership for the experience?
In what situations or with what types of participants are you most likely to be more assertive or unyielding in your facilitation? What can you learn from this? How might you modify your choices to provide group process leadership AND more autonomy to participants?
Identify one or more situations that call for more assertive facilitation. How might you effectively manage these moments in a manner that also enables as much participant autonomy and ownership as possible?
© Facilitate Better and Jeffrey Cufaude. All rights reserved.
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