I’m here to give you a little mini masterclass in what skills you need to be a facilitator. I actually used to teach 2 facilitation courses at Penn State University. One was a team development and leadership development facilitation course and another was a dialogue facilitation course.
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Now, my job is getting hired by some of the coolest organizations and universities on the planet to train them how to facilitate really meaningful events, conversations, meetings, gatherings. I’m gonna unpack 3 of the most essential core skills that you need to be a really great facilitator and I like to just get down to it. Not a lot of fluff.
Just to get clear, facilitation is a very big word, what do I mean when I say facilitation? There are lots and lots of types of facilitation. In my world, in my brain, in my experience, there are 3 major types of facilitation.
Three Slivers of Facilitation
Experiential Facilitation
One, I mentioned that I taught a team development, leadership development facilitation course. For me, that falls under the category of experiential facilitation. Some people call it “adventure education”, “outdoor education.” And that whole world is about facilitating experiences for people to learn by doing. It’s a really fantastic way of education. I fell in love with it the first time I was introduced to it by one of my mentors, Rodley. The reason that I love it so much is you can teach people all the things that you’re expected to know, but never taught and there are no classes on them. You can teach things like conflict resolution, and communication and problem solving. Some of these more conceptual ideas that are essential to a high-functioning team or organization or individual. But, you can teach them through activity, through exercise. That activity usually has directions, the group is solving something together. That’s one area of facilitation and that is part of my work and part of what I love to do is create experiences that teach people all the things that they’re expected to know but never taught.
Dialogue Facilitation
The second sliver of facilitation I would say falls under a bucket of dialogue facilitation. This comes from working with an organization called “World in Conversation.” My job was to sit in a circle with about 10 other strangers and talk about stuff that strangers usually never talk about. Really soft, fluffy topics like race relations, long-term conflict, politics, religion, etc. for 90 minutes for the sole purpose of gaining a better understanding of the other. Building bridges rather than walls. In that form of dialogue facilitation, there’s a whole different kind of skill set required to be in that space, to hold the neutrality for a whole bunch of very diverse, sometimes conflicting opinions, to exist in the same space but land at the ultimate outcome of understanding and connection. That’s the second sliver of facilitation: dialogue facilitation.
Business Facilitation
The third sliver of facilitation, which is maybe how you ended up in this video, is a more general term. It’s like a business meeting. When you say, “Oh, hey! Tim, can you facilitate the meeting.” or “Oh yeah, I’ll just facilitate the meeting.” That usually means that person’s gonna run the meeting which doesn’t always include lots of these skills from silver 1 and 2. In fact, I think that oftentimes facilitating a business meeting or a staff meeting or a faculty meeting, usually looks a little bit more like the boss just telling you a bunch of stuff, asking for a report out, you kind of shrugging and saying, “I don’t really know what to report out. I don’t know why we’re doing this. I don’t know why I’m here but, I don’t want to get fired, I’m just gonna keep sitting here.” That’s a facilitation that I would like to stay away from. The skill sets that exist in both this experiential facilitation and dialogue facilitation can greatly improve upon and help that 3rd bucket of just like “meh” facilitation. Just a side note, if you’re reading this, this is an overgeneralization, but I find that women tend to be far better facilitators. I don’t know if it’s because of the 3 skills that I’m gonna share but, there’s a way that when we talk about that business facilitation, like it’s usually a guy that’s just like stomping over everybody’s opinions. I think really great facilitation is not really front and center and in your face. It’s not as intense as leading a meeting over here.
There’s a certain grace to it of being able to direct traffic, direct opinions, move things forward, that you’re almost like this really elegant traffic cop or like an interpretive dancer or something as a facilitator. There are the 3-course skills that I would say you’ve got to have to be a really phenomenal facilitator. These are not all the skills required to be a great facilitator.
Three-Course Skills For A Phenomenal Facilitator
Authenticity
Core skill number one, as I unpack these 3, these are not all the skills you need to be a great facilitator, but number one is authenticity. If you try to be somebody else when you’re facilitating, it won’t work well. And in fact, it’ll create an immense amount of resistance. When people see that somebody’s like- has a mask on and it’s trying to get them to do things, everybody will be very happy fighting and pushing against that. You want to be really mindful of yourself. You’ve got to maintain that level of authenticity which for me doesn’t mean necessarily being more energetic or being less energetic. It means being who you are because even people with the lowest emotional and social intelligence on the planet can spot authenticity or fakeness from a mile away.
Personally, one of the ways that I’ve experienced this that actually kind of frustrated me earlier, I started “We and Me” 7 years ago and in the 1st year, I was doing a lot of speaking and keynoting and still do a lot of speaking and keynoting. And still to this day, 100 percent of the time that I give a talk virtually or in person, someone comes up to me or chats me the exact sentence, “Oh Chad, I love your energy!” Oh Chad, I “love your energy.” And that used to really actually frustrate me because I was like, “Thanks but that’s not feedback. I can’t do anything with that.” Then what I realized was there was some part of my genuine humanity that got through to them and the best language that they were able to use to describe it was, “Oh Chad, I like your energy!” What a valuable takeaway. For me, I think really great facilitators take their strengths and put them forward. For me, I’ve stopped being frustrated and annoyed by that and said, “Cool! My energy! This is what I bring to the group. This is part of the value that I can’t put into a fee or into a whatever like this is who I am.” When I bring that, that authentic self to a Zoom meeting or a conference room or anywhere else, it changes the dynamic. The possibilities that exist in that room change when you bring that authenticity into the room.
Clarity
Core skill number two is clarity. You can be a really well-intentioned facilitator but if your instructions aren’t clear, if your guidance isn’t clear on how to participate, if the rules to the game aren’t clear, you’re gonna have a mess on your hands and you’re gonna be a street sweeper trying to clean up that mess rather than a really great facilitator going back to that person who’s kind of directing traffic and working that room or grid, I guess, if you’re in gallery view. Both books that I’ve worked on have touched on (1) has touched on experiential facilitation. It’s called the “Pocket Guide to Facilitating Human Connections.” And the other one of dialogue facilitation on how to “Ask Powerful Questions: Create Conversations that Matter.” Both have elements of clarity. But, specifically on this one, we share a framework called FOGS.
Me and Rod, my mentor I mentioned earlier, came up with this framework and it very simply stands for Framing, Objective, Guidelines and Safety. Really great facilitators inherently, without even thinking about it, go through that FOGS framework to keep people out of the fog; to make it more clear- you see what I did there? To make it more clear and salient for people on what’s going on. Framing is where you help to kind of situate the context. Context matters a whole lot. If I tell you to think of something red, did you think of something red? You might have thought of something. If I tell you to think of something that is red and within 10 feet of your location, something else comes to mind. That is me changing the context. Framing, you’ve got to change the context and make it relevant for everybody. You know, your group, your team, your organization better than I do but a really great way of framing is by sharing a story that leads into the purpose or objective of whatever you’re doing. Whether it’s a conversation or experience or anything else.
The 2nd piece: objective, is a really lovely element that I think is left out sometimes. An objective also in and of itself has the ability to gamify an experience or maybe even a conversation to some extent. It gives it a purpose. “Let’s be in this space for this time for this objective.” Whether sharing that objective is just sharing the purpose or your aim or goal on an activity, it might be to score 10 points. It might be to, from a dialogue facilitation perspective, the objective might be to share your stories withholding all opinions though. To just stories that are personal for you but to not let your opinions filter into that. Because usually people get into fights about race relations or politics or religion or long-term conflict because opinions are shared back and forth but very rarely are personal stories entering the scene. When you give people that objective, it totally changes the name of the game and just that alone, can make you a better facilitator. Now, taking objective 1 step further down to the “G” is guidelines. This is where you’re offering some rules of engagement.
Priya Parker talks a lot about how creating rules is actually really beneficial. I was listening to a podcast the other day and she was sharing the example that she gave was this mom’s group meet-up that had a hard and fast rule that if anybody talked about their kids, they had to take a shot. It’s an idea of when you create that rule, it changes the game and it adds something really special and interesting to it as opposed to like just a mom’s meet-up. You’ve got a mom’s meet-up, if kids are in the picture, they’ve got to take a shot.
There are 2 totally different gatherings in that context, that’s a really valuable element to take away. Sometimes adding rules in actually makes your gathering better. Then the last one, safety, has 2 components: physical safety and psychological & emotional safety. Great facilitators are masters at tuning in to that. From that physical safety element, if you’re doing something that’s gonna have people running around, moving, you don’t want people tripping over chairs, no trips to the ambulance. That would make you a bad facilitator perhaps. Although, there was a scenario where I was facilitating an exercise and somebody did dislocate a shoulder. That was quite a fluke incident and there was an ambulance involved. I guess we learn from our mistakes. The physical safety you want to be really aware of that. Tune into that.
That’s like long-hang fruit, keep people safe. The psychological, emotional safety, a lot of people who run meetings don’t even mention or acknowledge or think about the psychological and emotional safety. And yeah, as I’ve said over and over and over again, the number 1 predictor of high-performing innovative teams is the degree of psychological safety in that team. If you can, as a facilitator do everything in your power to increase that psychological safety, you will find a much more impactful gathering happening.
Listening
Third core skill to be a really phenomenal facilitator is listening. My business partner, Will’s, old, old Gmail used to be wiselistening@gmail.com. And his last name happens to be “Wise” so, there’s something clever about that. But, he embodies that. He’s taught me so much about listening and to be a really great facilitator, it’s not about the performance in the front of the scenes and how people see you, it’s about what you hear and what you do with that information. Really great facilitators don’t just listen to the words that somebody’s saying, they listen to the fears that are present in the room, they listen to the aspirations that people have, they listen to the core message, they listen to the process that’s going on. If someone’s repeating themselves over and over in a meeting, it’s because they don’t feel heard. A really great facilitator will jump in and reflectively listen and say back what they hear that person saying and insure that everybody else really hears the concept. The way that you listen has the power to change what people say.
I mean that very literally. The way that you listen actually has the power to change what words come out of people’s mouth. If you’re listening like, “Come on, come on, come on.” People will speak less and less authentically. If you listen and you really are careful in the way that you’re listening and you really want to hear what somebody has to say, they will share more, you will learn more, the ideas that will be out on the table and the organization will go up. There’s some magic that happens when you listen really carefully. If this was nice for you and you enjoyed learning these 3 skills and you want to extend upon it, that’s what I get to do professionally for a living, if you want to set up a train the trainer or a facilitation training for your group on how to make virtual engagement easy or just how to make engagement easy, not pixelated engagement, reach out. I think my info is below in the description. If you’re not ready to take the relationship to the next level there, there’s a ton of free resources. In fact, we created a whole connection tool kit that has a couple card decks and both the books that I mentioned that can absolutely take your facilitation up a notch for a much cheaper price as well. I’m not a particularly cheap date