Turning Facilitation Guidelines Into Gold

In the role of facilitator, you can be worth your weight in gold by following these fifteen simple, yet critical facilitation guidelines.

15 Facilitation Guidelines

1. Session leaders must observe and listen to all that the group says and does. Be there! Immerse your body, mind, and spirit in the method of the group.
2. Recognize all group input and encourage participation. Your ability to convey interest and enthusiasm in the group about the importance of the deliverable will be critical to your success as a session leader.
3. Scan the group for nonverbal responses (including observers).
4. Facilitation represents a helping mechanism. Ask questions rather than lecturing the workshop participants. Listen and keep your group involved.
5. Stay on the task. Never lose sight of the holarchy. Avoid straying to other topics no matter how informative the topic may be or how much it may interest you or the group. Let the participants help keep the group on course if you are a weak process policeman.

6. Of all the facilitation guidelines, the most important may be to stay neutral. Do not lose your neutrality. Eliminate your personal bias and opinions from the discussion. The goal remains for the participants to provide answers or options, not you.

7. Learn to expect hostility, but do not become hostile with your group or any participant. You must develop an attitude of acceptance. You may not agree necessarily with what is being said, but you can listen, accept, and record their answers and opinions. Let the group evaluate the content.
8. Avoid being the expert authority on the subject. You can be an authority figure, but your role is to listen, question, enforce the method, or offer tools and options.
9. Put the participants on break at no longer than 90-minute intervals. Be specific about the length of breaks, typically ten minutes. Adhere to your times and always be punctual.
10. Use breaks to free a discussion when it is deadlocked. Breaks give the participants a chance to clear their minds and come to a new understanding.
11. Do not let your prejudices interfere with your role as a session leader. Let go of the need to win everyone over to your point of view. The group will do the work. You are there to serve the group. Assist them in reaching the outcome.
12. During breaks, arrange the flip chart pages, taped on the wall, to build a histogram of progress made in the workshop.
13. During transitions and before you break for lunch or the end of the day, summarize the workshop progress and next steps. Give the group a thought to ponder and commend them for the amount of work they have completed.
14. Do not keep people too long (eight to nine hours are about as long as people can remain productive).
15. Stop a workshop if the group is sluggish and difficult to control, even if they wish to continue. Explain that, when people are burnt out, no progress occurs.

Additionally, there are three guiding principles of effective facilitation.

The fifteen guidelines above may come and go, taking breaks for example. Throughout any ceremony, event, meeting, or workshop, however, the following principles stay in place from start to finish. They include:

• First and foremost the principle of No Harm, and where used, explaining the purpose behind Safety Moments. For diversity and other messages, some embrace OE Moments as well (i.e., Operational Excellence).
• The second is focus and staying vigilant to remove distractions.
• The third is managing and stressing perspective or point of view and leaving egos in the hallway.

No Harm Demands Collaboration

NO HARM

The principle of No Harm provides an essential basis for a group of people coming together to work and decide collaboratively. The facilitator must be both conscious of the principle and its enforcement in the role of process policeman. Nothing is more important to encourage full participation than having the feeling (from a participant’s point of view) that you will not be harmed by what you say.

Let us never forget that the reason for meetings is to generate deliverables but the reason for deliverables is to serve the people. People always come first.

FOCUS

It is virtually impossible to get a group to focus by telling them to focus. We must be wise enough, as facilitators, to remove all the distractions. By removing distractions the only items remaining are those that demand the group make traction and progress to get DONE.

Distractions come in many varieties including physical (e.g., temperature), emotional (e.g., job security), intellectual (e.g., future impact), intuitional (e.g., impact on others), etc. Removing distractions is the biggest hurdle faced by facilitators. Doing so creates traction.

Traction cannot be developed by telling a group to focus. Facilitators must remove distractions so that the only thing remaining for the group is to focus on the issue at hand. Scope creep occurs when discussion advances beyond the scope of the deliverable, and frequently becomes a distraction, causing non-productive meetings.

PERSPECTIVE

When working for a company, organization, NGO, or other entity, participants must be reminded that they represent others through their role. Roles dictate diverse types of behavior and mannerisms. For example, most people treat a parent differently than a child or a cousin. Because they are in different roles, facilitators must remind participants about their role and the duty (fiduciary responsibility) to speak on behalf of others, whether current or future stakeholders.

______

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.)

Want a free 10-minute break timer? Sign up for our once-monthly newsletter HERE and receive a timer along with four other of our favorite facilitation tools, free.

Facilitation Expert

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.