What is the relationship between facilitation and leadership

what is the relationship between facilitation and leadership

For some groups, particularly the mine managers (Mmine), a pre‐existing relationship with the facilitator was perceived as advantageous because the facilitator. Mindell defines process as a constant flow of information—which we experience through signals, body symptoms, relationship experiences, and other channels. Journal of Outdoor Recreation, Education, and Leadership. . the relationship between certain facilitator characteristics and specific variables of interest.

Is there a table for folks to use? Grumbling stomachs will definitely take folks minds off the meeting. If you're having refreshments, who is bringing them? Do you need outlets for coffee pots? Can you set things up so folks can get food without disrupting the meeting? And who's cleaning up afterwards? Microphones and audio visual equipment: Do you need a microphone?

The Leader as the Facilitator: How to Effectively Lead Knowledge Workers - Training Industry

Can someone set up and test the equipment before you start? To build a safe as well as comfortable environment, a good facilitator has a few more points to consider. How do you protect folks who are worried their ideas will be attacked or mocked? How do you hold back the big talkers who tend to dominate while still making them feel good about their participation?

Much of the answer lies in the Ground Rules. Ground Rules Most meetings have some kind of operating rules. Some groups use Robert's Rules of Order parliamentary procedure to run their meetings while others have rules they've adopted over time. When you want the participation to flow and for folks to really feel invested in following the rules, the best way to go is to have the group develop them as one of the first steps in the process.

This builds a sense of power in the participants "Hey, she isn't telling us how to act. It's up to us to figure out what we think is important! Common ground rules are: One person speaks at a time Raise your hand if you have something to say Listen to what other people are saying No mocking or attacking other people's ideas Be on time coming back from breaks if it's a long meeting Respect each other A process to develop ground rules is: Begin by telling folks that you want to set up some ground rules that everyone will follow as we go through our meeting.

Put a blank sheet of newsprint on the wall with the heading "Ground Rules. If no one says anything, start by putting one up yourself.

That usually starts people off. Write any suggestions up on the newsprint. It's usually most effective to "check -in" with the whole group before you write up an idea "Sue suggested raising our hands if we have something to say.

When you are finished, ask the group if they agree with these Ground Rules and are willing to follow them. Make sure you get folks to actually say "Yes" out loud.

It makes a difference! Facilitating a meeting or planning session As we've already said, the facilitator is responsible for providing a "safe" climate and working atmosphere for the meeting. Start the meeting on time Few of us start our meetings on time. Those who come on time feel cheated that they rushed to get there!

Start no more than five minutes late, ten at the maximum and thank everyone who came on time. When latecomers straggle in, don't stop your process to acknowledge them. Wait until after a break or another appropriate time to have them introduce themselves. Welcome everyone Make a point to welcome everyone who comes. Don't complain about the size of a group if the turnout is small! Thank all of those who are there for coming and analyze the turnout attendance later.

Go with who you have. Make introductions There are lots of ways for people to introduce themselves to each other that are better than just going around the room.

NCSL Modular Curriculum

The kinds of introductions you do should depend on what kind of meeting you are having, the number of people, the overall goals of the meeting, and what kind of information it would be useful to know. Some key questions you can ask members to include in their introductions are: How did you first get involved with our organization? Break down feelings of unfamiliarity and shyness Help people shift roles--from their "work" selves to their "more human" selves Build a sense of being part of a team Create networking opportunities Help share participants' skills and experiences Some ways to do introductions and icebreakers are: In pairs, have people turn to the person next to them and share their name, organization and three other facts about themselves that others might not know.

Then, have each pair introduce each other to the group. This helps to get strangers acquainted and for people to feel safe--they already know at least one other person, and didn't have to share information directly in front of a big group at the beginning of the meeting.

Form small groups and have each of them work on a puzzle. Have them introduce themselves to their group before they get to work. This helps to build a sense of team work. In a large group, have everyone write down two true statements about themselves and one false one.

Then, every person reads their statements and the whole group has to guess which one is false. This helps folks get acquainted and relaxed. Give each participant a survey and have the participants interview each other to find the answers. Make the questions about skills, experience, opinions on the issue you'll be working on, etc.



Be sensitive to the culture, age, gender and literacy levels of participants and any other factors when deciding how to do introductions. For example, an activity that requires physical contact or reading a lengthy instruction sheet may be inappropriate for your group. Also, keep in mind what you want to accomplish with the activity. Don't make a decision to do something only because it seems like fun. It is important to make everyone feel welcome and listened to at the beginning of the meeting.

Otherwise, participants may feel uncomfortable and unappreciated and won't participate well later on. Also, if you don't get some basic information about who is there, you may miss some golden opportunities. For example, the editor of the regional newspaper may be in the room; but if you don't know, you'll miss the opportunity for a potential interview or special coverage. And don't forget to introduce yourself.


Credibility doesn't mean you have a college degree or 15 years of facilitation experience. It just means that you share some of your background so folks know why you are doing the facilitation and what has led you to be speaking up. Review the agenda, objectives and ground rules for the meeting Go over what's going to happen in the meeting. Check with the group to make sure they agree with and like the agenda. You never know if someone will want to comment and suggest something a little different.

The same is true for the outcomes of the meeting. You'll want to go over these with folks as well to get their input and check that these are the desired outcomes they're looking for. This is also where the ground rules that we covered earlier come in. Encourage participation This is one of your main jobs as a facilitator. It's up to you to get those who need to listen to listen and those who ought to speak.

Encourage people to share their experiences and ideas and urge those with relevant background information share it at appropriate times. Stick to the agenda Groups have a tendency to wander far from the original agenda, sometimes without knowing it.

When you hear the discussion wandering off, bring it to the group's attention. You can say "That's an interesting issue, but perhaps we should get back to the original discussion. Help the group not to get immersed in details. Suggest instead, "Perhaps the committee could resolve the matter.

what is the relationship between facilitation and leadership

Seek commitments Getting commitments for future involvement is often a meeting goal. You want leaders to commit to certain tasks, people to volunteer to help on a campaign, or organizations to support your group. Make sure adequate time is allocated for seeking commitment. For small meetings, write people's names down on newsprint next to the tasks they agreed to undertake. One important rule of thumb is that no one should leave a meeting without something to do.

Don't ever close a meeting by saying "We'll get back to you to confirm how you might like to get involved. Bring closure to each item Many groups will discuss things ten times longer than they need to unless a facilitator helps them to recognize they're basically in agreement.


The main leadership paradigms all agree on certain basic principles: The leader has to have a vision and hold onto it while working to improve communications and push power down by developing other leaders. From a process-oriented view, business, like everything, is driven by psychological and emotional profit margins. Because financial success is a byproduct of these profit margins, the community aspects of the organization are as important as leadership and team development.

Difficult groups are groups where the psychological and emotional profit margins are in the red and the community is failing to develop the team and its leadership M. Multi-dimensional process oriented thinking can help leaders, designated or not, turn this around. These three models each focus on very different levels.

Consensus reality includes experiences that we tend to agree upon and includes focus on rules, structure, and objectively measurable outcomes and an assumption that we can control events.

Emergent experiences are subjective, not measurable, and not in our control. They include team work and relationship issues, experiences of rank differences, somatic experiences, roles, and our assumptions about each other. It is an indescribable yet sentient essence like a feeling, a tension, or something joyful.

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There is a mood, an atmosphere, that I can at times barely notice. It is a flickering signal mirroring a Pre-Emergent essence. As I observe my experience of the mood over the course of a few interactions, I notice two roles emerging: These levels are based on what Arnold Mindell calls consensus reality, dreamland, and the level of sentient essence in clinical work. Awareness of each of these levels is an important aspect of the facilitation of groups. The solution to a problem in one of these levels lies in the other levels.

When Einstein said that we need a substantially new manner of thinking if we are to survive he was referring to this shift in awareness away from a hypnosis to objectivity and verifiable phenomena Einstein, You only have to support the self-organizing tendencies that are already present by facilitating the experiences in each of these levels to help complete the processes in the background.

Notice what is already happening and help it to complete. The tendencies that drive everything first appear as briefly flickering Pre-Emerging experiences and later appear as Emergent experiences with more defined signals, roles, and process structures. However, we do often try to control CR. Trusting in PE and EL experiences means believing that they will help guide us towards sustainable solutions to CR problems. When these Pre-Emerging experiences first appear as brief, flickering signals we tend to overlook them, to ignore them, or to actively discount them.

They are tiny microsignals that seem to flirt with us. We might suddenly notice a colleague and wonder if something signaled opposition to our proposal. Did her head move away almost imperceptibly? Did his eyes really narrow when I looked at him?

Coaching Facilitation Guidelines

Did I really see that? Chances are that these flickering signals will grow stronger down the road until the opposition has congruently developed into a full scale road block. Noticing the signals early on gives us the chance to help complete the process in the background.

Sometimes we are right. Often we are wrong. Our collective misunderstandings of these signals and their meanings and our collective inability to facilitate deeper dialogues ultimately leads to war.

It can help to introduce this as a role play: What would that person say? This freedom is the basis for empowerment, which conversely plays a big part in helping a difficult group develop its ability to track its own experience. There is a simple way to empower people. Empowerment happens through understanding the meaning of the person, event, or signal and reframing it in terms of its meaning to the group and to the organization as a whole. Imagine you are in a meeting and someone interrupts another person.

Behind the interrupting may be a roles that says, I know better than you. I hope that both will get to be completed.

How come he never says anything?

what is the relationship between facilitation and leadership

Those who speak know more. So many good things are being done here we barely have time to listen. When I look at him it reminds me to listen too. Introducing these concepts into an organization is a project, and every beginning project is plagued by conflict that seems to have a purpose. Those people who really want to do it will hang in, not out of a sense of commitment but because they enjoy learning together and helping the organization grow. These conflicts are important because they parallel a lot of organizational and social issues and conflicts, which means that they point towards the issues that the group will need to deal with.

Introducing these concepts is also difficult because deep democracy is not a set of rules about how to run groups. It is a set of tools and principles that can help the group to discover its own path towards noticing and embracing deep democracy and an atmosphere of inclusiveness.

You only have a limited amount of time to make a meaningful difference in a group. Groups that focus on completing experiences, one at a time, tend to work better than groups that attempt to address everything all at ones.

Suggest that the group focus on one particular polarity. Create the ghost role that speaks for the marginalized parts. Instead of trying to get the parts together, ask the group why they are conflicted? Was it already a problem way back? Model a new relationship to the ghost role. Discovering the story that lies between them reveals the tensions that kept them apart. It is also important to focus on and complete any hot spots as they arise before moving on.

Hot spots are moments in a group process where there is a strong reaction or a sudden, tense silence. Overall, following signals is the easiest way and the shortest path to helping a group move forward.

With mastery it is almost effortless, although gaining mastery requires practice and courage and trusting that there is a wealth of information that can benefit the group and help the facilitator to develop her awareness, leadership, and eldership.

The forces that organize the group are also fractals, meaning that the process structure that exists at one level in an organization often exists at other levels, structuring the entire organization.

Those roles that lay outside of the group are ghosts. Introduce them as roles so the group can interact with them and complete the story. If you deviate too much the organization has to cut you out to protect its own integrity. Go for it anyway and check feedback carefully.

First and Second Training: Mindell refers to developing mastery in these two tasks as the first training and the second training, emphasizing the complexity and enormity of each of them. The first training is developing mastery in noticing and tracking signals, forming structural hypotheses from the patterns, creating interventions from these, and carefully noting the feedback from the group; which will either confirm the hypothesis or suggest another direction.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. Einstein, Key terms: Consensus Reality This is the level of our normal daily experience.

Consensus reality includes experiences that we tend to agree upon and includes focus on rules, structure, and objectively measurable outcomes and profit. We assume that we can control events. Deep Democracy Deep Democracy is an attitude that focuses on the awareness of voices that are both central and marginal. Eldership A role and a metaskill: An ability to care for others and the whole system simultaneously that includes an awareness of which role you are in, a feeling connection with others, and an ability to demonstrate fluidity.

Emergent Leadership Emergent Leadership is an initial attempt to develop or express leadership, which is experienced in momentary signals of power, which—because they are not yet understood and may not be initially well directed—are often seen as difficulties, confusion, or a lack of respect for authority.

Emergent Level Emergent experiences are subjective and not measurable and not in our control. Most of us have difficulty articulating our struggles in a public forum, especially in the presence of our boss and peers. This probably stems from history we may have with bosses who said things like: If people have problems, you want to get them out on the table so you can help find solutions.

Recognize that knowledge is power. Leading a Knowledge Worker means they know more than you do.

what is the relationship between facilitation and leadership

Embracing that reality in the context of organizational power is critical. The boss can rarely force people to tell him or her the truth. They can, however, create a forum where truth telling is celebrated, rewarded and normal. Be wary of making suggestions without true expertise.

It is difficult — if not impossible — for the formal leader aka boss to make suggestions. This is problematic for two reasons: It may well have been a less-than-optimal suggestion by a boss without true knowledge.