The Tao of Facilitation
10th Verse of the Tao
Can you love your people
and govern your domain
without self-importance?
. . .
working, yet not taking credit;
leading without controlling or dominating?
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While it is not easy leaving the ego at the threshold, it is mandatory for modern and effective facilitative leadership. Meetings run best when the leader is NOT talking, but rather listening. There is an inverse relationship between the amount of air time consumed by the facilitator’s voice and the perceived success of the meeting. If the facilitator speaks 100 percent of the time, the meeting will be viewed as a complete failure. Participants will view meetings favorably when they speak most of the time during a meeting — guaranteed. That’s the tao of facilitation.
Most of us have attended a class on public speaking. Listening, we learn, is no less important (and perhaps even more important) than speaking. Listening also supports facilitating, which is why listening is one of the core skills we apply in our facilitation training.
According to the Dalai Lama:
“When you talk, you are only repeating what you already know; but when you listen, you may learn something new.”
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Don’t ruin your career by hosting bad meetings. Sign up for a workshop or send this to someone who should. MGRUSH workshops focus on meeting design and practice. Each person practices tools, methods, and activities every day during the week. Therefore, while some call this immersion, we call it the road to building high-value facilitation skills.
Our workshops also provide a superb way to earn up to 40 SEUs from the Scrum Alliance, 40 CDUs from IIBA, 40 Continuous Learning Points (CLPs) based on Federal Acquisition Certification Continuous Professional Learning Requirements using Training and Education activities, 40 Professional Development Units (PDUs) from SAVE International, as well as 4.0 CEUs for other professions. (See workshop and Reference Manual descriptions for details.)
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Terrence Metz, MBA, CSM, CSPF, PSP01, HTTO1, is the Managing Director of MG RUSH Facilitation Leadership, Training, and Meeting Design, an acknowledged leader in structured facilitation training, and author of “Meetings That Get Results – A Facilitator’s Guide to Building Better Meetings.” His FAST Facilitation Best Practices blog features nearly 300 articles on facilitation skills and tools aimed at helping others lead meetings that produce clear and actionable results. His clients include Agilists, Scrum teams, program and project managers, senior officers, and the business analyst community among numerous private and public companies and global corporations. As an undergraduate of Northwestern University (Evanston, IL) and an MBA graduate from NWU’s Kellogg School of Management, his professional experience has focused on process improvement and product development. He continually aspires to make it easier for others to succeed.
