Facilitation Skills Ensure Quicker and Fewer Meetings that Get Results

Successful leaders have one thing in common: Strong facilitation skills. What are the core facilitation skills (or, facilitator skills)? Which skills do you need to lead a successful meeting? Depending on who you ask, there may be:

Strong Facilitation Skills

  • 6 Essential Facilitator Skills
  • 9 Meeting Facilitation Skills
  • 9 Facilitation Skill Competencies
  • Top 11 Facilitator Skills
  • and of course, many, many others

20,000+ hours of experience as facilitators and trainers of professional facilitators have taught us about one indispensable facilitation skill: the ability to remove distractions. Meeting leadership behavior can be guided by the simple question, “Is it a distraction, or not?” Subject matter experts will actively contribute when they all focus on the same thing, at the same time. Getting a group to focus provides a common challenge for any meeting leader.

We break down meeting effectiveness into three domain-general areas of skills. Each contains other, domain-specific skills. The three general areas include meeting leadership, facilitation, and meeting design—in that order. The mandala shows these primary skills. You provide other skills while confirming the group goal. Also, ensure that your people find the agenda acceptable.

Facilitation Skills

Facilitation Skills

Core Facilitation Skills

  • Active listening

    • Contacting and absorbing—noting both verbal and nonverbal behaviors
    • Feedback—responding to participant’s contribution
    • Clarifying—both expanding and focusing discussion
    • Confirming—the validity of the content
    • Challenging—meaning and assumptions

  • Behavior changing

    • Assessing the current behavior—what are the risks, why they persist, what are environmental factors that may hinder progress
    • Agreeing on goals for new behavior—what the new behavior will look like
    • Forming a strategy for change—finding sources of support for speeding up the change
    • Monitoring the success of new behaviors
    • Feeding back to continuously improve the process

  • Challenging

    • Noting emotions, logic, and intuition in participants—being aware of their experience
    • Describing and sharing beliefs
    • Challenging opinions
    • Managing—conflict

  • Crisis intervention

    • Appraising the nature and severity of the crisis
    • Serving in a helpful way—helping to expand each participant’s vision of options, to mobilize each person’s sense of strength and coping
    • Reinforcing actions—that which has been determined to be the answer to the crisis

  • Leading

    • Indirect—getting started (e.g., logistics)
    • Direct—encouraging dialogue
    • Focusing—limiting confusion and vagueness
    • Questioning—guiding inquiries

  • Problem-solving and decision-making

    • Stating the problem/ issue and turning it into a goal statement
    • Helping people express doubts or fears about why an idea “won’t work”
    • Documenting options/ action plans
    • Gathering information about resources, constraints, related goals or issues, etc.
    • Helping them develop decision criteria
    • Selecting a backup
    • Archiving learning

  • Reflecting

    • Opinions and beliefs
    • Experience and evidence
    • Using content—repeating the main message for clarity

  • Rhetoric (word choice)

    • Parsimony—i.e., expressing the most with the least
    • Language command—properly applying the parts of speech
    • Capturing meaning in terms used and understood by the participants

  • Summarizing

    • Pulling themes together
    • Reinforcing the big picture

  • Supporting

    • Creating a climate of trust and respect
    • Aiding in a healing method that helps to counter any attacking forces

We break down each domain-general skill into domain-specific skills. Most of our blogs further explain each. Here we provide a simple listing.

Domain-specific Facilitation Skills

The domain-specific skills below have been sorted alphabetically, as opposed to frequency, importance, etc.

 1. Meeting Leadership

1.1. Awareness of local culture, life cycle, and terminology

1.2. Consciousness of roles in meeting

1.3. Understanding the holarchy and reason for meeting

2. Group Facilitation

2.1. Active listening and reflecting rationale

2.2. Biases: challenging participants and questioning

2.3. Communications and rhetorical precision

2.4. Consensus building and shared ownership

2.5. Context versus content

2.6. Environmental control and real estate management

2.7. Ground rules and participant behavior

2.8. Group development and performance

2.9. Interventions: Managing conflict and distractions

2.10. Neutrality, non-verbal, and observation

2.11. Output capture and visual stimulation

2.12. Thinking styles and heuristics

3. Meeting Approach, Design, and Methodology

    1. Agenda building and tool identification
    2. Constraints: ease, resources, and timing
    3. Continuous improvement and participant feedback
    4. Creativity and innovation
    5. Daily Scrum and Retrospectives
    6. Decision-making continuum
    7. Decision-matrix and decision quality testing
    8. Definitions, glossaries, and lexicons
    9. Distributed teams and virtual participation (e.g., video presence)
    10. Documenting
    11. Experience adapting and backup planning
    12. External resources
    13. Focus: Avoiding many to many
    14. Interviewing and participant preparation
    15. Introductory activities (e.g., icebreakers)
    16. Managing content while maintaining neutrality
    17. Meeting purpose, scope, deliverable
    18. Planning, analysis, and design approaches
    19. Preparation using an annotated agenda
    20. Prioritization options
    21. Problem-solving prototypes
    22. Risk assessment and measurement
    23. Scoping
    24. Scrubbing nouns and verbs and mitigating modifiers
    25. Tools selection and use (repeatability, scalability, and versatility) especially:
    26. Work breakdown structure and team charters
    27. Wrap or review activities (e.g., Parking Lot)

Why Do Facilitators with Skills Fail?

There remain a lot of talented facilitators who fail in their sessions. Poor meeting design explains the primary reason for meeting failures. Most groups want to show up, want to contribute, and want to do a good job—yet meetings frequently fail. Why? They don’t know how. Meeting design remains the secret to structured meetings.

A good facilitator could operate successfully in various environments and cultures. To be successful, they need the right agenda, method, and tools. Unfortunately, most organizations do not teach meeting design and the facilitator is forced to take on a role they are not trained to handle.

Our alumni know that we frequently compare facilitation skills and attributes to those of a Navy SEAL. We stress the importance of remaining invisible (ie, neutral), focusing externally (ie, NOT on one’s self), and embracing a strong sense of service to help others—to make it easy.

This is the first time we have recommended a hit in the face.

This extract derives from an article written by Chris Sajnog, a retired U.S. Navy SEAL Master Firearms Instructor and a Neural-Pathway Training Expert. For the entire article, turn your browser to Twelve Ways to Live Like a Navy SEAL.

Mr. Sajnog stresses freedom and independence to help others through collaboration and focus. Thank you Mr. Sajnog for your service, inspiring thoughts, and articulate words. Special thanks to Gr8fullsoul for his inspiring blogs, and pointing out Mr. Sajnog’s article.

Hit in the Face Traits

Use this list of traits found in a competent facilitator. Continue to the list of actions you can take to improve yourself.

  • Active — You need to be moving, doing, or functioning at all times. Ideas and theories are great, but action gets things done.
  • Brave — Brave doesn’t mean you aren’t afraid. It means YOU ARE, but you continue despite your fears.
  • Confident — A warrior is sure of himself and has no uncertainty about his abilities.
  • Decisive — Displaying no hesitation in battle is vital to survival.
  • Disciplined — Once you have a plan and confidence you can fulfill it, and have the discipline required to stick with it.
  • Loving — A warrior has confronted death and understands the value of life. Warriors whose lives are in balance are peaceful, unselfish, and compassionate of others. The love of others gives the warrior the energy to constantly train for battle and the strength to survive once he’s there.
  • Loyal — A warrior needs direction, and that comes from being faithful to a cause, ideal, or group. Loyalty keeps you guided along your path.
  • Patient — Having patience means bearing pains or trials calmly and without complaint.
  • Skillful — Having the right mindset is vital, but learn a skill set to match.
  • Strong — Have a determined will in all that you do. A strong mind can make up for a weak body, but not the other way around.
  • Vigilant — You never know when danger is going to come knocking, and you need to be prepared to react appropriately.

Facilitator Actions

Thus, actions you can take to become a better facilitator include:

  • Become a master at what you do. Everything in life is either worth doing well or it’s not worth doing at all.
  • Embrace competition. Sign up for a race, a fight, or just challenge someone to arm wrestle. Prove that you’re better than someone else at something or work until you are.
  • Find something you’re afraid of and go do it. Everyone has fears — warriors (facilitators) overcome them.
  • Have a set of NUTs (Non-negotiable, Unalterable Terms) and live by them! Things you’re not willing to compromise in life, period.
  • Start establishing routines and habits in everything you do. We are what we repeatedly do.
  • Start practicing some form of martial arts — if you’ve never been hit in the face, go find out what it’s like.
  • Work out. It doesn’t matter what you do. Breathe hard and sweat.
  • Write down your goals and core values. If you don’t have a map for your life, how will you get where you want to go?

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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 daily 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 free timer along with four other of our favorite facilitation tools.

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