Facilitative Leadership

A Facilitative Leader is one who develops practical collaborative skills and tools for tapping the creativity, experience, and commitment of staff and colleagues. It is a powerful leadership practice that, when fully embraced, creates the conditions for people to move together from vision to action in extraordinary new ways.  Want to know what some of the best tools are?

The definition of facilitate is "to make easy" or "ease a process." What a facilitator does is plan, guide and manage a group ‘event’ to ensure that the group's objectives are met effectively, with clear thinking, good participation and full buy-in from everyone who is involved.  
 
Facilitative Leadership is based around practical frameworks, skills and tools to: 

• See patterns and systems by analysing a situation from a systems perspective in order to leverage transformational change; 
• Maximise appropriate involvement of key stakeholders in order to make well-informed decisions and build commitment to successful implementation; 
• Facilitate agreement across potentially diverse perspectives in order to generate breakthrough decisions and actions; 
• Focus on results, process, and relationship in order to ensure sustainable success; 
• Discover shared meaning in order to build alignment for concerted action; and 
• Design meeting agendas that achieve high levels of results, process, and relationship satisfaction. 

For the leader of any group, facilitation can take a lot of mental effort, meaning that it can be difficult to think about and contribute content while facilitating.  Neutrality is also important. So, if you have an interest in the outcome, or have skills, experience, information or authority which is important for a successful outcome, then consider bringing in an external facilitator. 

Some examples of the practical and high return-for-effort facilitation tools we use include:
For…

• Strategic Visioning we might use Exploring the Future, Backwards
• Increasing Team Engagement & Results we might use Crucial Accountability Themes
• Effective Team Meetings we might use “Why am I Here?”
• New Proposal Risk Assessment we might use Ritual Dissent Process
• Brainstorming & Grouping ideas we might use An Affinity Process
• Thinking Critically about an Issue we might use The Ladder of Inference
• Embedding Culture & Values we might use Photo Language & case studies
• Team Development we might use Harrison Assessments
• Improving the ROI from e-learn courses we might use Sticky Learning Method
• Creative Problem Solving we might use 6 Thinking Hats

What's in your facilitation toolkit that works well for tapping the creativity, experience, and commitment of staff and colleagues?