How to Integrate Facilitation with Your Consulting, Coaching, or Training Role – Without Being a Facilitator
If you’re a consultant, coach, or trainer who works with groups, you need facilitation skills—but you shouldn’t be a facilitator. This may sound like strange advice coming from me, given that I’m the author of The Skilled Facilitator, currently in its third edition. The reason you shouldn’t be a facilitator is that serving in the facilitator role will reduce your ability to be an effective consultant, coach, or trainer. Let me explain why you need facilitation skills in your helping role, then I’ll explain why you don’t want to be a facilitator.
If you serve in any of the following roles, here is how a facilitation mindset and skill set can help you increase your effectiveness with groups:
- You are an external or internal consultant, hired for your expertise in specific areas. You may be an expert in strategy, finance, accounting, IT, HR, marketing, logistics, organizational change, or any number of other areas. Your client isn’t hiring you only to help it improve their process for making decisions, they want your content expertise to improve the quality of the decisions they need to make. Still, you realize that you need facilitation skills to help a group when members have different reactions to your advice, don’t know how to discuss those differences productively, and it reduces the chance that they can effectively consider your advice.
- You are an external or internal consultant who helps groups improve their results by improving their process. You may specialize in process improvements such as Lean, Six Sigma, value engineering, quality improvement, or other related approaches. You may feel challenged when dealing with problems that stem from how group members interact, like group members disagreeing with each other or with you. Or you may specialize in a necessary element for effective groups such as managing conflict productively, building trust, or sharing leadership.
- You are a coach, now working with teams. You generally work with individuals but increasingly find yourself working with teams. You realize that helping a team requires more and different skills than working with someone one-on-one.
- You are a trainer who helps people develop knowledge and/or skills in a group setting. You need to actively engage people as you meet their learning needs while simultaneously making sure you stay on task and on time.
All these situations require a facilitation mindset and skill set, but you don’t need to—and shouldn’t—serve in a formal facilitator role. Consultants, team coaches, and trainers all have content expertise to share as part of their roles—even if the content expertise is about improving process.
But facilitators—by definition—are content-neutral. They don’t share their thoughts about the content of the group’s topic and don’t participate in solving problems and making decisions regarding the content. Facilitators often help groups that have strong and differing views on topics. By declaring themselves and remaining content-neutral, facilitators reduce group members’ concerns that the facilitators will support certain members’ views. Being content-neutral helps increase the group’s trust in the facilitator.
However, if you serve as a facilitator when you’re a consultant, team coach, or trainer, you will create a conflict between your content-neutral facilitator role and your content-expert role. That conflict will lead you to either (1) withhold important information that the group needs to be more effective or to (2) share that information in a way that likely frustrates group members and reduces their trust in you.
Let’s assume you’re an OD or HR consultant who helps teams. As part of your role, you’re asked to facilitate leadership team meetings. The meeting topics may be directly or indirectly related to OD or HR issues. If you have expertise in the topic and you don’t share your information, you’ll be acting consistent with the facilitator role, but you’ll likely be creating problems for the group and for yourself, especially if the group is considering making decisions that are not effective OD or HR practice. On the other hand, if you try to share your expert views, you will probably ask leading questions to subtly influence the team members’ views without saying so explicitly (for example, “Do you think it will create some problems implementing the plan that way?”). Or you may explicitly share your ideas after hearing others’ suggestions. In either case, you’ve left the content-neutral facilitator role. Team members may feel that they have been set up, believing that you’re not serving in the role you agreed to. Their trust in you may drop and so will your ability to help them.
You can avoid these problems by serving as a facilitative consultant, facilitative coach, or facilitative trainer. In these facilitative roles, you combine your consultant, coach, or trainer role with a facilitative mindset and skill set, but you don’t present yourself as a content-neutral facilitator. You might say something like this:
“I think I can best help you by serving as a facilitative consultant, which means I’ll be helping you in two ways. First, you hired me because I have expertise in the issues you need to address. I’ll share my expertise whenever I think it’s relevant and whenever you have questions, so you can make more informed decisions on these issues. Second, at the same time, I’ll help you have the most effective meetings possible. That includes helping you develop a clear purpose and process for the meeting; focusing on the topic you’re discussing; and ensuring that you’re getting all the relevant information on the table and exploring different views so you can make high-quality decisions that the team can fully support. Still, the decisions are entirely yours to make. What questions or concerns, if any, do you have about my serving in this dual role?”
Most consultants who need to use facilitation skills aren’t and shouldn’t be facilitators. If you’re one of them, you can provide more value to your clients by combining your expertise with facilitative skills and seeking agreement with your clients to play that dual role.
This article is adapted from the third edition of The Skilled Facilitator: A Comprehensive Resource for Consultants, Facilitators, Coaches, and Trainers
Originally published December 2012
