Facilitation is, essentially, a balancing act between controlling a process and encouraging everyone to get involved. A positive set of facilitation skills can be a huge advantage and will benefit all those in the room when you’re in control. When there is a skilled facilitator in charge everyone gets the opportunity to contribute and processes are productive and engaging. Conversely, the opposite can be true when facilitation skills are low - outcomes aren’t achieved and processes can feel out of control. If facilitation is something that you do - or want to do - how can you improve your current skill set?
● Make sure you’re clear about session parameters from the start. Take the time to give people information, from how long you expect the sesion to last to how you want them to get involved.
● Spend some time preparing your opening comments. This should include the goals that you’ve defined for the session, as well as what you want to accomplish with the people there. Participants are much more likely to be willing to contribute if they know exactly how, and when, they should do that.
● Start with easy questions. You could even opt for an ice breaker game or informal introductions. The idea of this is to get people talking from the very beginning of the session so that they don’t have time to start worrying about whether they should speak up, they just do.
● Stay focused on outcomes. Regularly remind people why you’re all there by stopping occasionally to focus on the bigger picture so that you don’t get too mired down in the detail.
● Maintain energy. The more energetic and enthusiastic you are throughout the sesion, the more your participants are likely to be too.
● Learn how to head off tangents. You can simply park topics or arguments that aren’t contributing to the overall goals for the session - write them on a whiteboard for future use.
● Work on your eye contact. Visually focus individually on the session participants so that they feel this as an invitation to join in and make a contribution. This tends to be much more effective than simply sweeping the room when it comes to eye contact.
● If you want to regain control then use closed questions. These are questions that will either have a “yes” or a “no” answer. This will naturally slow down a buoyant discussion.
● Make use of all the available space. Any space will offer opportunities to keep people’s attention and make the session more interesting so look for ways that you can move around more (though not excessively) and hold everyone’s interest.
● Don’t let your session run over. Being a good facilitator means ensuring that you’re valuing the time of the participants and finishing at the agreed point. If you’ve reached the goal of the sesion, or the discussion is no longer productive, that can also be a moment to bring things to a close.
Being a great facilitator isn’t rocket science but it does require a focus on improving some of these essential skills. Find out more by booking on to our Introduction to Facilitation Skills Training Course...