Anyone can be a facilitator as long as they know what kind of mindset, responsibilities, and tools they need for that role. The facilitator’s role can be rotated between meetings and, in a workshop, many people can share the facilitator’s role. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to differentiate the facilitator’s role from your current working position.
A facilitator’s main responsibility is to guide the collaborative process toward the goal. The facilitator designs the process beforehand and follows the plan in the meeting or workshop. The facilitator is also responsible for setting the guidelines for collaboration, paying attention, and keeping the participants’ energy level up – as well as finding ways to record the outcomes of collaboration.
On the other hand, participants have responsibilities too. They’re responsible for the content of the collaboration and focusing their effort on the collaboration.
The facilitator’s tasks during the workshop
A facilitator’s tasks include a lot of planning – and also instructing the participants and leading the workshop or the meeting toward its goal. Every facilitator behaves differently depending on their personality, skills, and strengths.
Here are some practical tasks the facilitator might have during a workshop:
Guiding the participants to the right place (physical or virtual)
Welcoming the participants to the meeting or the workshop
Giving instructions to the participants about exercises and tasks
Paying attention to what the participants are saying
Making notes of the discussion that are visible to everyone
Asking questions
Reading the energy levels of the participants and deciding on when to have breaks
Summarizing the participants’ discussions
Understanding the practicalities of facilitation is a skill that forms with time and experience. For instance, if you can only focus on giving the instructions in the beginning, make sure someone else is making the notes. Shared facilitation responsibilities help teams work together and give the different parties more ownership in the collaboration.
The facilitator’s role is neutral
The facilitator focuses on the process and the participants focus on the content. In the facilitator’s mindset, process means the group process or creative process that is needed to achieve the goals. The process answers the question: how will we get the desired results? And even though the facilitator works with the desired results in mind, the facilitator shouldn’t predict the results' content.
Sometimes this is referred to as neutrality. In the facilitator’s role, you should remain neutral regarding the content. In practice, it means a facilitator can’t give answers to the questions that are being asked of the participants. The facilitator should listen actively to what the participants say and be prepared to change plans if the content requires it.
Facilitator’s processes
Processes can be seen as a series of events that produce a predictable ending. However, a facilitator works with different kinds of processes.
Group process: When people start working together in a group, they start to interact with each other socially. A group starts to form with its own dynamic, roles, and challenges.
Learning process: Almost all facilitation has something to do with learning. During the collaboration, people learn more about the content and the people they are working with. You’ll learn about organizational learning in Chapter 5.
Creative thinking process: As a facilitator, you’ll guide the participants through different kinds of thinking processes that usually require creating something new and useful. Many facilitation techniques help the participants to follow different steps.
In these processes, the previous step always affects the next step. These processes are open-ended.
The relationship to the content is different when you look at it from the perspective of a consultant, project manager, or team leader. A consultant usually has the answers to the client’s questions. A project manager should know how the project will move forward. A team leader may have an idea of how the team should work. Still, it’s possible to adopt the role of facilitator in all of these roles.
Anyone can act as a facilitator in a collaborative situation. For example, you can agree on who’s in charge of giving instructions, taking notes, keeping time, or moderating the discussions.