As
a professional facilitator for more than three decades, I've had ample
opportunity to observe which skills make the most difference. As a
facilitation trainer the past 15 years, I've collected plenty of data
about which lessons have been the most challenging for students to
digest.
Taken
all together, I've decided to assemble a series of blog posts on the
facilitation skills I consider to be both the hardest to master and the most potent for producing productive meetings. They will all bear the header Key Facilitation Skills and it's a distillation of where I believe the heavy lifting is done.
Here are the headlines of what I'll cover in this series:
I. Riding Two Horses: Content and Energy
II. Working Constructively with Emotions
III. Managing the Obstreperous
IV. Developing Range: Holding the Reins Only as Tightly as the Horses Require
V. Semipermeable Membranes: Welcoming Passion While Limiting Aggression
VI. Creating Durable Containers for Hard Conversations
VII. Walking the Feedback Talk
VIII. Sis Boom Bang
IX. Projecting Curiosity in the Presence of Disagreement
X. Distinguishing Weird (But Benign) from Seductive (Yet Dangerous)
XI. Eliciting Proposals that Sing
XII. Becoming Multi-tongued
XIII. Not Leaving Product on the Table
XIV. Sequencing Issues Productively
XV. Trusting the Force
• • •
Sis Boom Bang
It's relatively common for people to hold an ideal of the facilitator as someone who is unflappable and emotionally contained. Someone who invariably radiates cool blue light and is always on an even keel, inspiring centeredness and steady-as-she-goes energy in those around them.
I suspect it's because many are uncomfortable in the presence of passion—not because it's bad per se, but because it engenders chaos that is difficult to follow, hard to corral, and fosters unbridled statements. There is worry that if the facilitator gets too emotionally engaged that their neutrality may be compromised and it might be interpreted as permission for participants to ramp it up as well.
While I get the concern (who wants to go to a meeting that operates at an exhausting pace and feels unsafe?), I don't buy the conclusion. Facilitators are human, every bit as much as those they are facilitating, and everyone will do their best work, in my experience, if they bring their entire, authentic selves to the task. That means their heart as well as their head. Meetings need to work for diverse styles of communication: both for
those who want a slower, more deliberate pace (the default mode in most
groups), and for those who prefer something more up-tempo and less
controlled.
For my money, meetings should be alive, not shackled. To be sure, there are still boundaries around appropriate behavior when engaging emotionally. I am not advocating for anything goes. For example, I think all contributions should be on topic and it's fair to redirect comments that aren't, regardless of whether they are thoughts or feelings. In addition, I think is important to object to aggression, by which I mean deliveries that come with barbs or judgments (I'm fine with knowing that you're angry; I am not fine with your calling someone an asshole.)
Facilitators can—and I believe should—be emotionally authentic and expressive without sacrificing neutrality or taking sides. What I'm talking about is recognizing and naming the energy in the group with affect, as distinct from expressing personal enthusiasm for the merits of a specific contribution. Connecting the dots, this means that the skilled facilitator needs to do able to accurately capture and work with input that surfaces in the context of meetings in which passion is invited. Don't license a pace that swamps you intake valves! You have to work within your range. I'm just making the case for why it may be in the group's interest to expand your range.
When the group experiences a success, why not take a moment to celebrate, with the facilitator leading the cheers? If that energy is in the room, do it. When the group is stuck, it's generally helpful to name the frustration in the room (whistling past the cemetery is not that great a strategy). When someone leaks a sarcastic comment, it's OK to yell, "Ouch!" Be real. I teach that facilitators should bring a cool head and a warm heart, as both are needed.
Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe
While most facilitators know to project optimism and a welcoming demeanor, a sterner test comes when someone injects a discordant thought or concern into a conversation that was otherwise proceeding smoothly. I'm not talking about off topic; I'm talking about a different viewpoint. Now what?
At this moment the facilitator needs to lean in and immediately set the tone. While eyeballs may be rolling on the other side of the room ("we were doing fine until you spoke") the facilitator needs to welcome this fresh voice, so long as the input is on topic. "OK this is different. So-and-so has another view on what needs to be taken into account. Do others share this concern?"
You are trying to accomplish a number of important things in this moment:
—Legitimizing the input (so long as it's reasonably tied to a group value). This is not taking sides; it's making sure the windows and doors are open.
—Encouraging minority concerns to get expressed by promptly validating their being stated (making it that much easier for the next person to be courageous).
—Jumping in right away to set a tone of curiosity, not allowing the naysayers (who were happy with the way the conversation had been going) to respond with disagreement, or worse, scorn. To be sure, they will have their chance to weigh in, but not right away.
Tone here is very important. It is hard to be creative and build cohesive solutions when the tone is combative and the energy is fractured. (When you reflect on the current paucity of curiosity in contemporary political discourse for the viewpoints expressed by those sitting across the aisle, it's no wonder we experience broad-based gridlock in DC. Dialog is stillborn.)
Up and Out
Last, it's valuable for facilitators to wrap up meetings with a concise summary (one to two minutes) of what was accomplished at a meeting, so that the last taste in participants' mouths is what got done. Why? Left to their own inclinations, people will tend to focus on what didn't happen, or work still left to do, generating a feeling of discouragement and exhuastion. While both approaches are legitimate (that is, both may be accurate assessments) the energy of focusing on product is night-and-day different than dwelling on what didn't happen. You want people leaving a meeting glad that they attended and hungry for more.
This is not about faking it. Don't claim success that didn't happen, or paper over serious concerns that still need work. You have to be real, but it's important to accentuate the positive. Product, for instance can include a sharpening of differences, where there is more clarity about what needs to be balanced and you have a plan about how to tackle it; it is not limited to what what got tied up with a ribbon and bow.
The skilled facilitator will consistently project positivity, thereby eliciting positive responses from participants in return, bringing out their best—all the while naming the product achieved en route.
As
a professional facilitator for more than three decades, I've had ample
opportunity to observe which skills make the most difference. As a
facilitation trainer the past 15 years, I've collected plenty of data
about which lessons have been the most challenging for students to
digest.
Taken
all together, I've decided to assemble a series of blog posts on the
facilitation skills I consider to be both the hardest to master and the most potent for producing productive meetings. They will all bear the header Key Facilitation Skills and it's a distillation of where I believe the heavy lifting is done.
Here are the headlines of what I'll cover in this series:
I. Riding Two Horses: Content and Energy
II. Working Constructively with Emotions
III. Managing the Obstreperous
IV. Developing Range: Holding the Reins Only as Tightly as the Horses Require
V. Semipermeable Membranes: Welcoming Passion While Limiting Aggression
VI. Creating Durable Containers for Hard Conversations
VII. Walking the Feedback Talk
VIII. Sis Boom Bang
IX. Projecting Curiosity in the Presence of Disagreement
X. Distinguishing Weird (But Benign) from Seductive (Yet Dangerous)
XI. Eliciting Proposals that Sing
XII. Becoming Multi-tongued
XIII. Not Leaving Product on the Table
XIV. Sequencing Issues Productively
XV. Trusting the Force
• • •
Walking the Feedback Talk
For the most part, contemporary culture is downright awful at giving and receiving feedback. This shortcoming is a major impediment to clear communication in all settings, and undercuts the quality of relationships everywhere. In short, it's a big deal.
In cooperative culture the stakes are even higher, because the lives of participants are more interwoven and there is more opportunity to rub each other the wrong way. One of the main challenges to creating robust communities is figuring this out—both on the group level and the personal plane. The dynamic is complicated by the fact that groups rarely make this explicit up front (if ever) and people often join (buy a house) without understanding that their satisfaction—and that of those around them—is dependent on the group's ability to foster and sustain clean feedback among members.
In the effort to develop the group's capacity to work well with feedback, facilitators can play a pivotal role in modeling how to accomplish this with grace and minimal reactivity. (You can't very well ask it of others if you are not able to do it yourself.)
On the giving end, many consider it rude to speak critically of others—at least to their face. Where that's the norm, people try to swallow their irritations (a practice that leads to heartburn), or manage them through pillow talk (venting with their partner) or parking lot gossip, which is a virtual acid drip on the social fabric of the group. Not only does the would-be recipient miss out on the information, but it's hard on the giver who withholds.
Going the other way, it's also hard for people to receive criticism. It can be embarrassing, or even humiliating. Some will automatically translate critical comments into shame. Many are susceptible to conflating criticism of actions with criticism of the person. Strong negative reactions can lead to shut down, exit, and damaged relationships. If hearing criticism is unpleasant enough, people will learn defensive behaviors to deflect it or otherwise discourage others from giving feedback. It can really gum up the works.
Trump, for example, offers a textbook example of how to deflect criticism through aggression. Invariably, his
response is to lash back, often upping the ante by pushing the nastiness needle into the red. In
doing so, he's sending multiple messages:
—Think twice about criticizing me, because you'll immediately get double your ugliness back. In fact, I may publicly ridicule you for having the audacity to speak out.
—I consider people who criticize me publicly to be enemies. I demand
loyalty from my friends and allies, and it's disloyal to be speak
critically of anything I say or do.
—Criticizing me will not change my behavior. If anything, I'm likely to do it more.
To put it mildly, his response is uncooperative, and does not encourage people to express reservations and concerns (what good does it do, and who needs the grief?). It's a highly dysfunctional management style, and destructive of group cohesion and camaraderie.
To be clear, I'm not saying that you can't have reactions to criticism, nor am I suggesting that there's anything wrong with you if you do. Reactions are normal part of being human and you may have trouble with either the content or the delivery, or both. That said, a reaction does not dictate a response. You always have choices about how you respond, and I'm suggesting that you hold onto that possibility like a life ring in a storm-tossed sea. It will ultimately serve you best, I believe, if you respond in a way that most honors relationship—which is the lifeblood of cooperative groups. Instead of blood letting; think blood flowing.
How do you do that?
• Start by acknowledging what you heard, paying particular homage to the impact that your words or actions had on the other person, as they reported it. This is a good idea even if you don't like what the person said or feel you've been misunderstood. (Lashing back may feel good in the moment, but it's almost never productive.) The point of this is twofold: a) it establishes whether you heard correctly; and b) it values the other person's experience; it shows that you care, which is deescalating.
• If you have a nontrivial reaction to the feedback (let's be honest; sometimes it hurts!), it may be a good idea to delay a response until you're past the rawness. There is a world of difference between reporting a reaction and being in the reaction. If you're in high dudgeon, you might want to wait until you're no longer a drama queen. Why? Because the bottom line is connection and communication; not "winning" or proving that you have the inside track on reality.
The biological equivalent of criticism is pain—it's a feedback loop that's an essential part of health management. If you step on a nail it's a damn good thing that your foot hurts—alerting you to take a gander at your hoof. If you touch a hot pan on the stove, pain immediately tells you to pull your finger away, before you do serious damage. I'm not saying you should enjoy pain; I'm saying you should be thankful that you know when you're damaging your foot or finger, so that you can deal with it promptly. If you were insulated from pain (a health risk for diabetics) you might walk around with a nail in your foot, or seriously burned fingers and that would not be good.
Similarly, it's not good if your actions or words have triggered pain in others and you are not aware of that impact. While you may need to exercise discernment about what to do with that information—and it may or may not result in a shift in your behavior—if you don't get the memo, then you don't get the opportunity to take it into account. And it is never in your interest to not have the information—so long as it's genuine.
What all this adds up to is that facilitators need to do sufficient personal work to keep their own feedback channels open (flawed models are not that inspirational). What's more, at least some of the time criticism will be directed your way in highly public settings, and occasionally delivered raw (by which I mean with little or no care given to how it will land). While this is undoubtedly unpleasant and may not be fair, it goes with the territory, and can go a long way toward leading the group into the culture it needs.