The Role of Session Leader
You have a multitude of tasks to perform during the workshop. The success of the facilitator’s effort is dependent upon your skill, knowledge, and abilities as a session leader. The role of session leader includes both the traditional role of “Facilitator” discussed below and the role of “Meeting Designer” discussed below.
You can complete a project without facilitation, but you could also cut your own hair.
—Various
Responsibilities in the Role of Session Leader
Role of Session Leader
Context represents the primary responsibility of the session leader, frequently called a facilitator—Responsibilities include:
- Actively listening to the discussion and challenging assumptions.
- Creating synergy by focusing on the group and using your facilitation skills to enhance communications.
- Ensuring that all participants have an opportunity to participate.
- Explaining and enforcing the roles.
- Keeping the group on track.
- Managing the documenters and the documentation process.
- Observing the group interactions and adjusting when necessary.
- Questioning to achieve clarity—aiding communication between participants and yourself.
- Recognizing disruptive behavior and creating positive corrections.
- Working to resolve conflicts that arise.
Key Success Element in the Role of Session Leader
Your role creates an environment where every participant has the opportunity to collaborate, innovate, and excel. Observing the team’s progress helps you understand the dynamics of the group and how your approach enhances or detracts from the final output.
The Group Dynamics
- Ask yourself the following questions while observing the group:
- How do they communicate? Eye-to-eye contact? Soft-spoken? Yelling? Gestures? etc.
- In what order do they speak? Primary, secondary, who backs who up? Who always gets interrupted?
- Which participant(s) appears to influence group direction the most?
- Who are these people talking to? Are they looking for supporters? Do they attack certain people or groups?
Meeting Designer in the Role of Session Leader
The meeting designer details the approach used by the meeting or workshop. Consequently, the meeting designer’s role typically changes throughout the project or product development. For example, in the planning phase, the meeting designer may be a strategic planner—someone who understands how to develop a consensual plan. In the analysis phase, the meeting designer may be a process expert, a business architect, or both. In the design phase, the meeting designer may be a workflow or design specialist.
Meeting or workshop responsibilities include:
- Helping the facilitator, business partner, and technical partner codify the deliverable and define the appropriate agenda steps to follow. Provides succinct questions to ask and the optimal order or sequence for the questions to be answered.
- Perhaps participating in workshops to ensure that the products produced satisfy the expected standards of quality and consistency—namely that others can act upon the deliverable effectively, such as the project team.
The meeting designer’s role is functional and not necessarily the role of an individual. The executive sponsor is sometimes the meeting designer with strategic planning. The session leader is frequently the meeting designer because they have MG RUSH structured facilitation training or experience. The facilitator can also fulfill this role because methods and approaches are generally neutral. Business or technical partners (i.e., project management) are sometimes methodologists. Therefore, look for the person or persons who is expert with the deliverable—who clearly understands the product to build and the approach to follow in building that product.
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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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- Considerations on How to Facilitate between Europeans and Asians (mgrush.com/blog)
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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.
