Nine Tips to Facilitation

Facilitation means “making it easy”. A facilitator is a person who takes on the role of conducting a meeting or workshop, making it easier for the people in the meeting to achieve their purpose of getting together and use their time effectively.

Here are nine quick tips on facilitation.

1. The first step is to have a sense of goal: why are we doing it? What are we trying to accomplish?

Have a general goal, but do not have something so specific that you have to herd people to that goal. There should be an exchange of ideas and the building of new ideas but there should be a clear purpose for why we are here.

2. Know the boundaries of facilitation and keep track of time. Manage the sharing and flow of ideas throughout the facilitation without being confrontational.

You need to make sure people are heard and feel respected and you should be seen as an honest broker of ideas. You should not have your own agenda.

3. Know the lay of the land and the key players in the discussion. A good facilitator adds value and is able to synthesize the points if they are not articulated clearly. Do your homework about what will be discussed in the meeting. Know your audience and ensure that you can pronounce their names correctly.

4. As a facilitator, your job is to make others look good. The spotlight is on others and not on you.

5. When introducing someone, think about how you can introduce someone in 30 secs and give most relevant information to this audience. Build the person up and shine a spotlight on them. Give real thought and practice so that the audience wants to hear from them and the person being introduced feels good.

6. Be in the moment and be 100% present, so that you can synthesize and ask follow up questions. You need to be relaxed and know the background of the issue so that you can understand what’s going on. If you have a clear understanding of the issue and don’t understand what a person said, you can use your judgment to interrupt by saying something like “Diana, just for clarification on the last point, do you mean…?”. You are doing a great service to the audience when you clarify, as others may not have understood it either. The important thing is to have almost the same amount of knowledge as your audience, so that your questions are helpful to others.

7- Ask questions to bring greater clarity to something that was just said, to simulate the conversation, to enable people to think about something in a new way and have people grow in new areas. Ask questions to remove confusion, and when there are contradictions, Ask questions that anyone would have asked when having a one-on-one conversation about this topic.

Questions should not be used to promote your idea. Do not ask the questions to show people how smart you are. Try to pull as much from others without making it seem like it is your show.

You can write some questions in advance to get engagement from everyone but most questions should be driven by the conversation.

8. At the end of the hour, without taking too long, summarize and synthesize what was said, without distorting it by adding your spin to it. You will add value by saying, e.g. Lisa said this, and Andrew said this and this is something we can take forward and work on. Make sure that when you are summarizing, you make them think they are the smartest people in the room. Do not dominate for too long during facilitation.

9- The facilitator can add most value by getting the actual consensus (in most of the sessions) about what the problem is, what the solution is, and what the immediate steps are that we need to take.

Maybe there is only agreement on the problem but not on the solution. In that case, state the top three prospects for solutions. Do not try to push consensus, artificially force consensus, or force the solution if it has not emerged. If there is no consensus, don’t say there is one.

Throughout the session, find ways to pull it all together so there is some final action for the group to take.