You’ve heard plenty about what to do, but the Seven Deadly Sins of Facilitating also suggest what NOT to do.

The following are real, powerful, and sequenced alphabetically.

• Assuming:

Simply because the facilitator hears what was said does not imply everyone heard what was said. The key to active listening is thorough reflection. Whether it’s audio (i.e., spoken) or visual (i.e., written down), the facilitator’s role is to ensure common understanding, not assume that common understanding exists simply because something was spoken.

• Modifiers:

  

  Deadly Sins of Facilitating

Nouns and verbs are a facilitator’s friend. Modifiers such as adjectives and adverbs cause dissent. For example, we may all be eating the same bowl of chili, but it may be both hot (i.e., spicy) and not so hot to different people, both correct in their assessment. Most arguments are caused by how spicy the chili is, not by whether or not it is chili.

• Neutrality (or lack thereof):

A session leader who offers content and judgment appears to the participants to have the “answer”. They will go quiet as they listen to what the leader believes to be true, comparing and contrasting the espoused point of view with their own truth. In the role of facilitator, do not offer up or evaluate content during the session.

• Plurality:

Ask one question at a time. Do not try to facilitate more than one issue at once. Close it out before moving on to the next issue. Most groups will succeed if they are facilitated to a position where the issue is clear and properly managed, one issue at a time.

• Precision:

Prefer substance to style. Avoid impersonal pronouns such as it, this, and those. Speak clearly and substitute words like “bunch” or “lots” for consultese like “plethora.” Strive to speak in a manner that would be understood by your grandmothers.

• Processing:

Session leaders who analyze the content fill their minds with analysis that places a large stress on their ability to hear what others are saying. Analyzing participant input makes it very difficult to provide a comprehensive reflection of what was said.

• Unprepared:

There is no secret or “silver bullet” to effective facilitation if the session leader shows up ill-prepared. Aside from active listening, with a strong emphasis on reflection, there aren’t any skills to help a facilitator during a session who shows up unprepared.

______

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.