3 Practices to Become a Skillful Facilitator

Why aren’t you always getting the results you expect from your workshops or meeting with senior leaders? I’ve identified some of the mistakes that you can avoid and three key things that great facilitators do so that you can up level your impact in this episode of chain of learning.

Welcome to chain of learning. We’re the links of Leadership and Learning unite. This is your connection for actionable strategies and practices to empower you to build a people centered learning culture, get results and expand your impact so that you and your team can leave a lasting legacy. I’m your host and fellow learning enthusiast.

Katie Anderson as a change leader, whether you’re an internal consultant, operations leader or executive one of the many skills you need to master is facilitation. It’s how you influence a team to change their behavior or make new decisions that will really move the needle for them and the organization. Being a skillful facilitator ensures that your meetings are powerful, effective and lead to clarity, alignment and action. And being a skillful facilitator is how you design and lead workshops or leadership retreats that are engaging and impactful and results not just in a great learning experience, but actual behavior change and motivation for your leaders to create a high performing organization.

But like many leadership skills, facilitation is not something that you can just learn from reading books or even listening to a podcast, though my goal is this episode will help you along your way to becoming a more skillful facilitator. One of the challenges in learning how to facilitate, at least in my experience, is that when we’re on the receiving end of great facilitation, we know what it feels like, but we might not know what’s happening behind the scenes. How is that facilitator? Making it a great experience, making it engaging, keeping us on task to get to the outcome. What are they doing? That’s not necessarily obvious to us as the participant, but is so critical to success. Today, I want to go behind the scenes and share with you three fundamental concepts that I’ve learned through decades of experience in practice on how to be a skillful facilitator. I’ve been fortunate to be developed by some incredible facilitators over the course of my career who helped me understand what great facilitators actually do. And then, of course, I actually had to do it, practice, get feedback, reflect and keep getting better each and every time these three foundational principles have helped me not only be more effective facilitator, but also get results from my clients. They have transformed me from being a passionate continuous improvement trainer to a sought after facilitator who now works with leadership teams in organizations around the world. And these three elements still guide me, whether I’m brought in to facilitate a leadership retreat, strategic alignment session, or develop a workshop. And I want to share these three key principles with you to help you two be an even more skillful facilitator who moves the needle for your teams and leaders. Being a skillful facilitator is just one of the eight competencies that you need to master to really be an effective transformational change leader. All of these eight competencies are described in my Change Catalyst model, catalyst spelled with a K, that you can find the link to in the show notes. But let’s dive in to what it means to be a more skillful facilitator, and the top three things that great facilitators do and that have worked for me. The first is know your role and know your goal. The second is create structure with flexibility, and the third is reflect, reflect, reflect. So let’s dive into each of those here. The first is, know your role. The word facilitate, actually, is defined as a person or thing that makes an action or process easy or easier. A facilitator is the guide for a group through a process to make it easier to get to their goal or outcomes. And in my catalyst model, I describe this further, that a skillful facilitator is someone who effectively facilitates organizational meetings, training programs and workshops that engage their audiences and achieves the desired outcomes. Your role as a facilitator is to create the process to help your group meet the goal, whatever it may be, and this means that you own creating the process and the structure, which includes both the design and the delivery of the session, and you need to stay impartial to the actual content and discussion, and rather help be a shape and guide for people to go along the journey towards the outcome.

One challenge I’ve seen for leaders is trying to facilitate and have a voice at the table. This is nearly impossible to facilitate effectively. You really need to be able to stay on task as that guide, to have that outside perspective and in some ways, to be impartial, to hold up the mirror on what’s happening, to keep time, to push people forward, to hold the space, to be a full participant, you need to be able to have a voice and a perspective. One of the reasons that a lot of clients hire me to help them facilitate sessions is that.

They as internal change leader or an operational executive, want to be fully present and have a voice at the table, either to be a participant in a shared learning experience with their group, or to work through a challenge that they want to also be sharing their ideas and perspective on as well. So if you’re going to be the facilitator, you really cannot be having a voice at the table at the same time in the same way.

A second challenge that I seen is particularly within a lot of internal change leaders who are tasked with facilitating a workshop or a meeting in their organization and not being really clear on what their role as a facilitator is, rather than all the other different hats that they’re necessarily wearing in the organization, like being a coach or being a trainer or being the doer of change projects, and in your role as a facilitator, you’re often also wearing a few different hats. You might be doing some micro teaching or some coaching and holding space for questions, but your purpose truly is to be the guide along this structure for practice to get to the outcome, or the structure for the discussion, or the structure for whatever you’re doing, to guide and make it easier to get to that outcome.

And so that means you often have to push or be very directive in what the assignment is or what people should be doing or discussing at that moment. It can be messy, and your role is to help the people who are part of your session have it be easier for them to get to whatever outcome it is. And I didn’t even realize, in many ways, how well developed I was by my coaches who had helped me become a better facilitator over the years. And that that I really understood that holding the structure for that meeting or that session or that workshop was one of the most important parts of me being successful in helping make it easier for my clients.

And I got some feedback from a client that I was working with a few years ago when I was both going to their site in Europe to lead a multi day leadership learning session. It was part of a retreat and a workshop that I was doing, but a secondary learning was that I was going to coach and develop their internal team of change leaders to help help up level their facilitation skills and their coaching skills as well. And so as part of that session, we had some pre meetings and then some post session follow ups to debrief on what they observed, on how I was facilitating. And some of the clients, these internal change leaders, were really surprised at how directive I was when I gave a specific assignment for practice to their executive team, I didn’t give them choice on how much time they could have, that they was optional, what they could choose to focus on. I was very directive about the structure, the structure I had created for their practice to help them learn a skill that I had introduced. And the feedback from these internal change leaders was that they had sort of thought that maybe their role was to just always sort of ask open questions, and it was really what you know, their leader wanted to work on.

And so we had some comments that, yes, there is time and space while you’re facilitating to be asking open questions and to be encouraging reflection and thinking and processing, and there is also space to be really directive about what the structure is, what the assignment is, what the practice is, and to be a bit of that task master, you know, it’s like you’re that sports coach.

I always think of like Ted lasso with the, you know, the with the whistle in his in his mouth, and, you know, blowing it and telling people, this is use the full time. This is the structure for the practice. And then there’s other times to reflect and process and have discussion. So in your role as facilitator, you are moving through different modalities to be able to help make it easier for the people in your session to get to whatever result that it is. So that’s really important to then understand, know your role and know your goal. So what is the goal of the session? Before you even get started, you need to know what are you facilitating to if you’re facilitating a workshop, what skills are the leaders in that workshop needing to develop?

If you’re facilitating a strategic offsite, what are the outcomes or shared agreement that the leaders need to get to if you’re facilitating a team meeting, what decisions need to be made? You need to know your goal. What does success look like for your group at the end of the session or sessions that you’re facilitating? One mistake I often see, and you’ve probably experienced this yourself, is being in a meeting where there’s not clarity on what the goal or outcome is. This is the responsibility of you, the facilitator, to make sure that there is clarity.

And at times, we can make assumptions too on what we think the outcome should be. So you can avoid having lack of clarity by working in advance with your key stakeholders, if you’re an internal leader or your hiring client, define success with them. And the specific outcomes and behaviors that are needed in advance if you’re leading a workshop, or the outcomes that they need to get to by the end of whatever session it is that you’re going to facilitate.

This information will then guide your agenda in the design that you have for the session, on how to make it easier for the people participating to get to that end result. And one way to go even further, depending on the scope of the event, is to do pre session interviews or surveys with the participants who are coming to really understand what it is that either the skills they need to be developing, or some of their ideas around what it is of the shared decision that needs to happen in the session. It really depends on what the purpose of that session is, but I did this recently with a client for whom I was facilitating a half day leadership retreat and the planning team of several executives, and I had made some assumptions about what the leaders were needing. I was coming back a year later to do a second follow up of a leadership retreat.

So I’d done one the first year and was coming back, so I already had some context of things that we’d introduced the year before, and maybe where the leaders were, and the executives had a sense too. But we designed and put out a survey to all of the 80 executive leaders who were going to be coming to this session, and we had an aha moment. We’d made some assumptions around that the focus would be on problem solving and innovation, but some of the gaps and things that the leaders were feeling whereas around communication across silos in the organization and how to have better cross department communication.

So while we still focused, and I created a session that brought in concepts around problem solving and innovation. I also brought in core parts about communication and understanding how to collaborate across boundaries in organizations, and we had a much more impactful and robust session to get to the outcomes that that leadership team really needed, and then move the needle in their organization. So know your role and know the goal, and the second then is once you know those two you need to create structure with flexibility. Having a structured plan and agenda is critical to your success and your role as a facilitator to make it easy to get to that goal that that group needs. How will you design the path to the goal?

What teaching moments will you have? When will you include time for discussion, for reflection, for practice? How will you ensure that all voices and perspectives are heard and that you’re not filling the entire space with your own voice, and just like trying to overload it with teaching or your ideas, how will you use visuals or set up the room? How will you ensure that there is clarity in the next steps identified, so that participants walk out of the room knowing that the goal was achieved and what they’re going to do next?

There is so much that we could go into here about how to design a workshop, a retreat, or even a one hour meeting with your leadership team, but the most important thing here is to have a plan and then not be too rigid in how you put that plan into practice. Some of the biggest mistakes I see with less experienced facilitators is either one, not having a clear plan in advance, or two, sticking too rigidly to a predetermined schedule and the timing that you’ve created and exactly what’s going to happen and when, and not flexing to what’s happening in the moment.

The risk in that first case, when you wing it is that you’re really not likely to be making it easier for your participants to get to that goal. And this is a real failure point in you being a successful facilitator, and in the latter about not flexing is that you aren’t meeting the participants where they are in that moment, if a topic needs a bit more discussion or something unexpected comes up, and as you develop your skill as a facilitator, you’re able to more real time make these flexible trade offs and Adjust the plan so that you still get to that end goal that they need, but it may not be exactly the path that you thought. So you need to get to that end goal, but having a plan with flexibility to respond to what actually happens in the session is critical.

So there are two ways that I have learned to have a plan but be flexible about how it actually happens. The first is that I’ve learned to build an agenda with detailed times in the background, and I know what the actual sort of targets of time that I need to hit, but I don’t necessarily share that with my participants. For example, if I’m leading a full day workshop, I’ll let the participants know the flow of the day. So I’ll write out the key points of all the things we’re going to cover, and I’ll walk them through that so they know, and they know sort of what the flow of the day is and that we’re going to get to all these topics.

So I make it easier for them to know sort of what the plan is. But I don’t. Have rigidity in the specific times that we’re going to break, but behind the scenes, I do know certain time targets that I have to hit to be able to get through the agenda successfully, but there is some wiggle room in there. I always build in some buffer so that we can have a little bit more conversation on a certain topic, if that’s helpful for that group. But I also know that we need to move things forward. So I have some flexibility in there to on the plan, the actual plan, as it unfolds, but also as the facilitator, I know how to move us through that plan so that we can get to the end point at the end of the day.

And a way I do that too, is it, you know, at certain points it breaks, and other times, I’ll then look at my plan, look at those timestamps, and adjust behind the scenes, and I may adjust how much time that I’m giving for a certain exercise or anything else that comes up based on what’s emerging for that group at that time. And sometimes you have to make real time decisions when something comes up in the moment, and you know, it really is not something you planned. But maybe this is the discussion that needs to happen. It’s more important than some exercise that you had planned or something else, and that takes a lot of skill as a facilitator to make that real time decision about, are you going to give more time for this moment here and less time, or even cut something else out that you had planned, but is actually going to get that leadership team to move forward. So this happened in a leadership retreat that I was leading earlier this year where all of a sudden, in some reflection about an exercise that I’d had, all of the energy, this high energy we’d created, just deflated.

The room just felt heavy. I was like this big elephant had just walked into the room, just sat on everyone, and I had this, had to make this real time judgment about, did I just keep moving forward with the next thing, or did we address the big elephant in the room and hold this space that this leadership team actually had together to talk about what was going on? Why did the energy in the room deflate what was happening, and I decided to pivot that I was going to then assign some more follow up for them in the retreat, and not spend as much time on the next exercise, and spend some time talking about what had happened.

And this was really critical, because it unveiled a lot of hidden feelings in the organization that were really inhibiting the group to be effective in what they needed to as a collective leadership team. So it was important trade off, and if I had just stayed to my plan, we wouldn’t have had that space and time for that really important conversation to have. So as a facilitator, you need to have a plan. You need to have some flexibility within that plan, so you can adjust throughout the day, and you may have to be flexible in the moment to make some real time trade offs that are actually going to serve your client in getting towards the ultimate goal that they need to maybe not everything you’d planned for that session. So that is all the art of skillful facilitation.

And then the third part of being a skillful facilitator, and frankly, a leader in any capacity, is reflect. Reflect. Reflect. Reflection is the key to learning. You’ve heard me talk about this and so many times on this podcast and my books and anytime I talk, reflection is the beginning, not the end, of learning and great facilitators help their groups reflect before, during and after the session. They help their stakeholders reflect and they reflect to continuously improve.

So let’s talk about the three ways it’s really critical for you to build in reflection for your sessions, one before any session that you’re facilitating, the more you can help your participants do some pre work, some reflection on a topic that they’re going to be exploring, or a decision you’re going to be coming to or filling out the survey, or any way anything it could just be posing a question or doing interviews that I talked about earlier before, will help them be primed and ready for the session. So there’s a word in Japanese that’s NEMA washi, which means tilling the soil. NEMA washi is tilling the soil. It’s like priming the soil for the seeds that are going to plant. So these are those pre conversations. It’s the reflection that people have to be the most ready to have an effective moment in that session that you’re going to facilitate.

So reflect before the session two. Reflect during the session. Build in lots of time for reflection. No matter if you’re leading a one hour meeting or you’re leading a multi day workshop, you can have people reflect on what’s one key takeaway they had from this discussion, or what is one key takeaway they had from an exercise they just went through, taking that time for them to reflect personally, even if it’s just one minute, will anchor learning for them and help them be. Move forward more effectively towards a decision they need to make, or a skill that they are developing. So build in time for reflection and make sure that that is part of whatever session you’re having. And then three help them reflect after the session. I almost always schedule a follow up reflection session with my clients, either a few weeks later or even a few months later, for the participants of that group to reflect on the experience that we had together.

And this is particularly true when I do any kind of like learning experience where I’m introducing new skills and concepts, because a lot of the learning happens through applying the skill or trying to apply the skill, and then reflecting on what they actually learned through that practice and having some more follow up discussion.

So having this reflection and building that structure in not just as a one and done experience, but as an ongoing learning process, really helps leaders move the needle. I recently led a one hour follow up session for a leadership group that I’d done a full day workshop with in person, and it was really powerful, the reflections from this group, some people had put in place and been practicing the concepts they were also energized about coming out of our workshop, and then the reality was that many leaders shared that they while they were energized and inspired by all the things about breaking the telling habit and how to slow down and ask more questions and pause, that when they went right back into work, the same pressures were there, and they just went back to the way things always had done.

So we were able to then unpack that, explore, that reflect together, and for them to reflect as groups together and help them think about how they can take one step forward, to break down that meta goal that they had for how they were going to show up as leaders into smaller steps for practice. And so having that reflection process was a way to actually help them move forward more effectively and really move the needle for them as leaders, hold space for reflection before, during and after your session. Another way to reflect is to reflect with your key stakeholder or your hiring client on the effectiveness of the event that you had, whether it was a meeting, a retreat or a workshop, on moving the needle and reaching the goal that they had, either that for the event or the bigger goal as well.

So talking about the process with them and ways that they might need support to continue to make progress on their goal, it’s rarely that any one event does it all. So this is an opportunity for you to reflect and also continue to build a relationship with either your internal stakeholder client, or if you’re an external facilitator, with your external client. And the third, and in my mind, perhaps the most important, is reflect for yourself. How did you do how did you show up? Did you ask the questions? Did you hold the space? How was it when you pushed people or were more directive. Reflect on yourself, on how you did as a facilitator, what worked well and you want to keep moving forward, and what were some times maybe didn’t quite go as you wanted, and how would you do that differently next time, when you spend that time reflecting for yourself on your own practice your own delivery, that will accelerate how you’re getting better too, and don’t be afraid to ask for feedback on people’s experience of the workshop, or to hire a coach or a trainer to help you with your facilitation, because, as we talked about earlier, it is really hard to just sort of know what’s happening behind the scenes.

So reflect, reflect and keep getting better at yourself as a facilitator or change leader. You don’t ever want to be that person that your senior team dreads leading their workshops or meetings. You want to be that go to, person that your leadership team or your clients call when they need and making it easier for them in their group to move forward towards a goal, whether learning new skills in a workshop, gaining alignment on a strategic direction, or working through an organizational problem. You want to be the one who makes it easy for teams to change their behavior and make new decisions.

You do this when you make every one of the experiences you facilitate engaging, purposeful and relevant while maximizing everyone’s time and energy, and you get to the needed outcome. Becoming a skillful facilitator is essential for you, no matter your official title, it’s how you move into becoming a transformational and influential leader. Being a skillful facilitator is the single best way to establish your credibility with a senior team and make it easier to get the results they and the organization need. The three key principles to being a really skillful facilitator, and the three that I always go back to, no matter what kind of event I’m facilitating, are, know your role and know your goal. Two, create. Structure with flexibility and three reflect, reflect, reflect, for your group, for your client and for yourself. In the spirit of reflection, I invite you to reflect on this episode and the three tips that I shared for being a more skillful facilitator, think about for the next meeting or workshop that you’re tasked with facilitating, and be sure that you’re addressing all three points.

Do you have clarity on your role and your goal? Have you created a structure that will engage and make it easy for your participants to get to the outcome? And how are you building in time for reflection, for your participants, your key stakeholders and yourself reflect on your most recent event, identify one thing that you want to work on improving, and build that into your next event plan so that you can continue to get better bit by bit.

Being a skillful facilitator is just one of the eight competencies of my catalyst change leader model that you must master if you want to not just be a process improvement doer or trainer, but a truly transformational change leader. If you haven’t already done. So be sure to download my free catalyst self assessment that covers all of these eight competencies at Kbj anderson.com, backslash catalyst, spelled with a K. And also go back to listen to episode nine of this podcast to learn more about each of the competencies and more.

As I mentioned in this episode, one of the ways I love working with organizations and clients is helping facilitate them to the goals that they need. If you’re looking for a dynamic facilitator for your upcoming leadership retreat or an engaging learning experience that will not only inspire but equip you and your leaders with the skills you need to create a high performing learning culture, I’d be happy to help, and I also love working with internal change leaders to grow and develop your skills as Change Catalyst to create impact in your organization by modeling the way with skillful facilitation coaching and other change leadership skills, so that you and your team can practice and apply them and get better in helping Your organization get to the goals it needs, reach out to me via my website, Kbj anderson.com and the link is also in the show notes below. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to follow or subscribe now to the podcast on your favorite podcast player and share the episode with your colleagues so that we can all strengthen our chain of learning together. Thanks for being the link in my chain of learning. Today. I’ll see you next time. Have a great day. Bye.