I recently facilitated a mid-size gathering for a former colleague who is themselves a very skilled facilitator and convener of events. Objectively, they have just as many skills and capacities as I do to hold space for a group wanting to dig into strategy and to create a space for the kinds of conversations that need a little more warming up to. When we talked about what this group were looking for, I asked why she was reaching out to me, and she told me that she wanted to be able to fully participate and contribute into the conversations, without having to pay attention to the dynamics and ensuring that everyone else was able to join in.
I quite often get asked by leaders, how they can justify spending resources to bring in an outside facilitator – whether for a strategy meeting, team development, or having candid conversations – particularly when there are experienced facilitators in the team already. So recent experience got me thinking about why you might want to choose to find someone and I came up with the following reasons:
1. Participation. You want everyone in the group to be able to fully participate in their capacity as a team member (as per the experience above). It’s really hard to be able to fully input into the content of the meeting, or be ready to say something that may cause tension, if you are also charged with keeping the agenda moving and ensuring that the activities meet the needs of the group.
2. The Value of an Outside Perspective. An external facilitator is able to ask the obvious questions that a team member may not want to ask for fear of seeming ‘stupid’ or ‘not a team player’. They can also spot dynamics that you have stopped paying attention to because they are so much part of the oxygen you breathe from day to day. We can say things more directly sometimes, because we aren’t worried about damaging relationships and the power dynamics that come in reporting relationships aren’t there. One of my long time mentors, Robin Alfred, has a wonderful way of speaking out loud when things are tense saying, ‘It feels as though this silence is maybe hiding something that isn’t being said’ and then waiting to see what comes forward.
3. Freshness. All facilitators have their own set of tools and techniques for engaging a group. And we know that our brains ‘wake up’ when they are stimulated differently. So the presence of someone else, bringing in new energizers, or ways of creating group discussion, signals to everyone’s brains that this is not just ‘business’ as usual which can be helpful to jump start a group. There are other ways to do this too – holding a meeting in a different space to usual, creating a different type of process or agenda.
4. Accountability. I wrote a while back of the importance of seeing meetings as a means to an end rather than an end in themselves (link). But the reality is that leaders are busy and it is so easy after a gathering or event to quickly default to the old patterns of doing things. In my experience, the best facilitators I have worked with have found ways to help me stay accountable to the outcomes from the meeting.
So these four points are reasons why you might want to consider a facilitator – and can provide a great evaluative checklist afterwards to see whether it was a good investment of resources:
– Was everyone able to fully participate (team members, the ‘usual’ facilitating suspect, those who have more and those who have less power within the group)?
– Was there agreement that an outside perspective allowed the group to get further/deeper than they normally would?
– Did the conversation feel fresh or different to normal? Were there insights and breakthroughs that felt as though they wouldn’t come up in the normal chain of events?
– Is there follow through happening in the way you would like?
I promised my top reason for not hiring a facilitator too…
Outsourcing. My biggest challenges in facilitation (and where I probably feel that I have added the least value to a group), have been when (understandably) overwhelmed leaders have engaged me to facilitate an event but without the bandwidth to be able to engage in an exploration what it is that they are looking for, clearly enough for me to be able to design a process to support it. Or where they are hosting an event out of an obligation of some sort and don’t really see it as fitting in with the cadence of their work. Or feeling ownership of the results. Now, when I get a sense of this, I try to find space to slow the conversation down to help all of us understand what is really needed. When budgeting my time for events I estimate usually on a ratio of 2:1 (twice as much prep time for every day/hour of gathering). As an organizer/convener of a gathering, I invite you to ask how much time you think you need to put in beforehand – probably not 2:1 but certainly not zero – and understand how that fits with everything else you have going on. Meetings and gatherings are an investment and you want to make sure you invest well in the preciousness of time together.
If you are considering a gathering and whether or not this needs external support, or simply a quick outside reality check before diving in, feel free to reach out to a free consult. And if you are looking for some reading of your own (along with a couple of great assessments to help gauge what your time might need in terms of process), I can’t recommend Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy and Facilitation by Adrienne Maree Brown, highly enough.
