You Need A Facilitator. Really.
Teams make better decisions than individuals 75% of the time. We all instinctively know that. However, did you know that when leaders facilitate, this benefit is greatly diminished due to power dynamics and decision-making rights? This doesn’t only apply to directly managed teams, it also includes project teams and cross-functional teams.
A facilitator’s role is to make sure that the conversation is flowing, that everyone gets an opportunity to contribute and that all of the agenda items are covered. It can be difficult to do some (ok, ALL) of those things if you have a vested interest in the outcome. I learned this a few years ago while brainstorming with my team. While I was trying to facilitate the brainstorm effectively, I also wanted everyone to also know how amazing my ideas were and the results were, well…. Let’s just say everyone got to hear about my great ideas, but at the expense of leveraging the collective genius of the team.
After that, we began rotating facilitator roles during a brainstorm and the facilitator does not also try to be a participant. That may sound extreme, but facilitating and participating are both full-brain tasks and to ask one person to do both at the same time is nearly impossible.
Because they are the highest ranking person in the room, a leader’s opinion already carries extra implicit weight. Voicing their ideas could have the unintentional effect of shutting down other ideas or discouraging debate. Facilitators can help level the room by asking for other participants to contribute and asking questions to draw out how the team feels about the topic in a safe way.
Great leadership qualities are frequently at odds with great facilitator qualities, yet our great leaders keep trying to facilitate everything from team meetings to retreats to brainstorming sessions. Because you are the leader does not make you the best option to facilitate. And in fact it skews the outcomes greatly.
Here are some options to help solve the problem:
Ask someone outside the team to facilitate: This will alleviate the pressure of having to both facilitate and participate. Make sure you ask someone who you know to be a good facilitator for this role and offer to help them facilitate their next meeting in exchange. You can also invite someone from another team who is good at facilitating or see if there’s another department such as HR or Organizational Effectiveness that can support.
Facilitate, don’t participate: This option usually works if you rotate the role of facilitator on the team so the same person isn’t always opting out of the discussion.
Hire an external facilitator: This option works best if you have a team that is newly formed or experiencing significant obstacles (internally or externally) and you need everyone on the team to fully participate.
At pod, we’d love to help you facilitate your next offsite, goal planning and prioritization, retreat or brainstorming session. Reach out for a free consultation to chat about what’s the best solution for you - whether that’s pod’s help or not! Even if we’re not the right fit, we can recommend some resources to help and we love making new friends.