A great facilitator has the power to turn a dull, tired meeting into the highlight of your week. Sometimes that means instilling a dose of dangerously contagious high-octane energy into the room to resuscitate it, much like an paramedic swooping in to save the day, and sometimes it means a dogged resilience to stay on track and resolve the important problem at hand without diversion like, well, a relentless dog latched onto a prized stick.
What is a Facilitator?
The facilitator is a master at knowing exactly what is needed to get to the outcomes that the group needs, and adapts their style, techniques, and energy accordingly. It’s a fluid role that relies on reading the room to navigate the right path and being comfortable handling the many situations and challenges that may arise when a group of humans occupy the same room.
As such, those with a fixed approach to facilitation may find that they struggle with the role. I like to compare it to the different styles of leadership (e.g. Goleman’s Leadership Styles) where the more styles a leader masters translates into being effective in a wider range of situations. A group of senior managers dealing with the aftermath of a data breach requires a very different facilitation style than an agile team’s sprint planning session, which is different again from a hackathon or brainstorming session.
Great facilitators don’t have a single style – they have a repertoire. Different rooms, different moments, different approaches.
Rather than writing about every possible scenario you as a facilitator may find yourself in or talk only about the mechanical process (i.e. facilitation techniques, which are often covered elsewhere), I’ll cover what I believe are the vital yet often overlooked threads that will help you regardless of context. Mastering these will go a long way in elevating your facilitation game.
Start With Who You Are
I often see facilitators, especially in the agile space, adopt a style or approach based on what they believe facilitation is supposed to look like. A common example is the assumption that facilitation must be fun and light, which leads to light-hearted games without a clear purpose being included in sessions — not because they help the group achieve its goals, but simply for the sake of fun.
Now, I enjoy fun too, and I often weave it into my sessions – when it serves a purpose. But I’ve noticed that sometimes facilitators are performing to an idea of what a facilitator should be rather than discovering and expressing their own authentic style.
For example, a while back I attended a course where the trainer moonlighted as a personal trainer. She built simple, inclusive exercises into the course and drew parallels between exercising the body and the topic we were learning. It was on-brand for her, memorable, and made the course stand out from others. She wasn’t performing to an idea of facilitation, she embodied it in her own unique way while remaining in service to the group and their outcomes.
One of your greatest tools is being your authentic, unabashed self. Leaning into your personality and what makes you unique and bringing that into your facilitation game helps to create confidence and a connection with your participants.
There’s no one right way to facilitate – only the way that allows you to be most present, effective, and true to yourself. The more you lean into that, the more powerful your facilitation becomes.
Outcomes Over Ego
The purpose of the facilitator is to help the group reach their outcomes. It follows then that everything the facilitator does should be in service to this purpose – i.e. others. What I often find though is the contrary, that the facilitator is consciously or unconsciously in service to their own biases, preferences, or goals which may make them feel good or important but ultimately are at odds with the role. This is Freud’s ‘feeding the ego’ notion, where the real motives behind our actions and behaviours are the ego’s desire for validation, recognition, and self-importance.
This can manifest in many ways. The over-engineering of a workshop, with all the techniques and tricks you can think of thrown in until instead of facilitating towards the outcome, the facilitation becomes an obstacle in the way of the outcome. Or the facilitator over-talking, ever-fearful of the dreaded silence that may befall the room (the skilled facilitator knows silence can be an ally), or needing to be the one that fixes the problem or proposes the solution.
Sometimes, a facilitator simply needs to hold the space and allow others to take centre stage. This may not feel rewarding as you play a more passive role but if it’s in service to the group and their outcome then it may be the right thing to do.
How your ego holds you back from being a great facilitator is personal to you and is best understood through honest reflection and clean observations about yourself, with a healthy dose of Buddhist practices aimed at liberation from the ego.
Mastering Your Greatest Tool - Your Body
There isn’t a facilitation technique that exists that is able to influence and guide participants like your voice and body language can. These are the first set of facilitation tools that you acquire. We develop them unconsciously through life and the goal here is to raise these incredible and powerful tools to the conscious layer, understand how they impact and influence others, and hone them so they become not just automatic processes but malleable resources to draw from.
Earlier I likened facilitation to leadership because with both, you are influencing and guiding others towards an outcome. Take a moment to think of leaders that stood out to you – or presenters because there is also a strong crossover there – what made them memorable to you? What made that speech or presentation engaging while with others you switched off and let your mind wander?
My guess is that they used their voice (pitch, tone, intonation, pace, volume) to capture your attention and create interest in what they were saying – this is so powerful it can happen even if you’re not interested in the topic to begin with! – and used their body language (stance, posture, gestures) to hold your gaze and create a sense of credibility, authority, and confidence.
This becomes increasingly important when working with senior leaders. Your ability to create trust, credibility, and authority will determine how effective you are at facilitating them, and your voice and body are the best tools to do just that.
What you’ll also find is your voice and body are directly linked to your confidence. A powerful voice and assured body language helps you fulfil your potential by generating confidence within yourself which increases your impact and ability to get results.
To help you take this further with practical tips, consider recording yourself the next time you facilitate a session or give a talk (no one likes listening to their own voice but it can be useful!). What do you notice about the rise and fall of your voice? Are you pausing for effect? Are you varying your pace and tone? How do you think your voice impacted and influenced others and how could you improve that?
For your body language, are you using open gestures to invite trust and appear welcoming? Are you making eye contact with participants? Is your posture – your shoulders and back – firm and wide while remaining relaxed and confident? As coaches and consultants we often say that we hold a mirror up to our clients, but sometimes what we need is a literal mirror to observe our body language to help us improve!
Conflict Resolution
When a facilitator is called upon, it’s often because there’s a strong need for collaboration, creating consensus, or decision-making. For participants (or even yourself as the facilitator), being in this situation often forces them to reckon with different ideas, perspectives, and personalities during which it’s common to enter into conflict. While potentially uncomfortable, this is entirely normal and an important part of the collaboration process.
But what if the discussion gets heated? What if you notice someone shying away from the debate because they’ve been challenged or don’t feel comfortable challenging back, maybe because someone is senior to them? These moments of conflict happen all too often and a competent facilitator should have both the awareness and presence to notice them (not all conflict is visible or loud) and intervene with curiosity and care.
Luckily for you, I recently wrote an article on this very topic so I won’t cover it here – check it out if you want to learn about different modes of conflict and what you can do about them.
Invisible Essentials
They may not be flashy, but the basics are nonetheless important and should be your first priority. Time management, timeboxing, working towards clear outcomes, staying on topic, doing your prep (physical room prep, virtual whiteboard templates, sending out pre-reads, clear agendas, etc.) – all of these are needed to create a smooth experience for participants.
I think of them like society’s essential services – waste collection, functioning traffic lights, stocked supermarkets, wifi – all invisible and taken for granted until they stop working and suddenly we’re in an uproar.
Neglect the basics and you may find participants leaving frustrated as they run to their next meeting without having reached the desired outcome because time management wasn’t there. Or worse, the frustration builds from the beginning because things aren’t ready for a smooth start. No matter how egoless, authentic, or adept at conflict resolution you are, not booking a room for a workshop, forgetting to set up a Zoom invite, or not managing time properly can undo all your good work in an instant.
(Here at Agile Principles, we use our 7P’s to help us prepare for a session. Here’s your free copy.)
In essence, the invisible essentials are about beginning and ending well. These two pivotal moments are often the most memorable for us and determine how we feel about an event in recollection. The benefits of a session can last long into the future, and so too can the benefits of this article if the ideas help you take facilitation beyond techniques.
From purposeful and deep small group sessions, to hackathons, or strategy and culture events, we design and facilitate high-impact workshops that spark alignment, creativity, and collective action. Click here to find out more.
