Facilitation Skills

Introduction

The roots of facilitation

• Creating a safe, facilitative environment
• Defining where facilitation works
• Antidotes for pet peeves

The facilitation cycle

• Focusing on outcomes and objectives
• Delivering clear and concise instructions
• Overcoming common obstacles to effective facilitation

Developing Self-Awareness

The centred facilitator

• Assessing facilitative styles
• Achieving coherence: reducing physiological stress
• Keeping yourself in a positive mind-set
• Cultivating bidirectional trust

Overcoming reluctance to facilitate

• Reducing facilitative stress using biofeedback
• Applying techniques to develop emotional neutrality
• Common causes of meeting tension
• Mitigating unconscious reactions
• Remaining focused and centered when the group isn't

Planning a Facilitated Meeting

Identifying critical success factors

• Stages of team development
• Defining participant roles and responsibilities
• Collecting data beforehand for a successful outcome
• Setting the stage for a neutral approach
• Controlling the flow, not the content

Developing your meeting agenda

• Preparing for different types of meetings
• Interviewing stakeholders
• Applying critical planning and analysis techniques
• Predicting potential meeting dysfunction

Facilitating the Meeting

Opening and closing: a key to great meetings

• Making an assertive start
• Establishing ground rules
• Transitioning to meeting objectives
• Achieving the meeting outcomes
• Closing at the appropriate juncture

Active listening

• Managing individual and group emotions
• Listening for emotional content
• Restating and reframing for clarity
• Turning active listening into facilitative questions

Facilitative questioning techniques

• Creating a great starting question
• Guiding meeting context through questions
• Progressing from indirect to direct inquiries
• Crafting questions that adjust attitude

Facilitating to Consensus

Building consensus

• Consensus vs. agreement
• Moving from simple- to super-majority consensus
• Accelerating the process through the five-finger consensus
• Identifying disagreement levels and mapping matching interventions
• Recognizing when consensus can fail

Tools to maintain and build consensus

• Clarifying communication with the Delineation Tool
• Identifying strengths and weaknesses of participant viewpoints
• Synthesizing the best solution

Advanced Facilitative Techniques

Creating a highly productive climate

• Identifying passive indicators
• Managing aggressive behaviours
• Ensuring assertive balance
• Finding your continuum position

Dealing with difficult people

• Analyzing the true source of dysfunction
• Surfacing group dysfunction
• Resolving problem attendee behaviour
• Quantifying the typical dysfunctional behaviours

Creating Your Action Plan for Facilitation

• Closing and completing the facilitative cycle
• Implementing checklists to support complete and timely follow up
• Exponentially increasing personal facilitative success
• Developing a personal facilitative action plan