Facilitation

Facilitation is the process used by an external person to lead a team towards a pre-defined objective. The facilitator brings knowledge and skill of how to structure meetings or away days, how to lead a group, how to free up people’s thinking, as well as different techniques for group problem solving. An external facilitator allows all group members, including the leader of the group, to participate fully and to concentrate on the content of the discussion. Facilitators can be used for a one off event like a team building or strategy day or over a period of time to ensure implementation.

Facilitation can be used for:

Our Approach

Our facilitators will meet with the person responsible for initiating and organising an event to discuss the objectives as well as the current situation. Where appropriate we will also meet with all or part of the team to understand what the team members want to achieve, but also what kind of activities they enjoyed or disliked in the past.

Our consultant will then agree objectives, style and structure with the client. Our events are normally highly interactive and participative, drawing from a wide range of different activities and tools depending on the agreed objectives and the group. Wherever appropriate we include some fun activities to allow people to relax and get to know each other better while stimulating a positive atmosphere in which business topics and issues can then be addressed with fresh perspective and creativity. Each event is tailor made while benefiting from our facilitators’ experience of what activities and structure worked in which situation in the past.

Benefits of Facilitation

By using an experienced and external facilitator a more equal participation of quieter group members and more dominant group members is encouraged by using different techniques and activities. The leader of the team or group can fully contribute to the content of the discussion rather than having to manage the meeting. Facilitators bring techniques, activities and tools to structure a day with varied activities that create more productive meetings/away days that balance fun and work related topics.

A facilitator’s role is to ensure that a meeting/event stays on track, adheres to time schedules, decisions are reached and actions agreed on. Sometimes it easier for an external facilitator to handle and solve conflict within the team. The facilitator can bring their experience of other businesses in similar situations to the table.

Our Experience

All of our facilitators have been working in business settings as managers, trainers, HR specialist and are therefore very familiar with the challenges in the current business climate. All of our facilitators have many years experience working with individuals and groups in a wide spectrum of industries and organisational levels. They are equally comfortable to work with support staff and senior executives, teams from manufacturing industries to public bodies, reluctant teams and high performance teams. We draw the activities we use from varied sources like brain friendly learning, theatre, NLP, strategic planning, problem solving, experiential learning and are constantly adding to our toolbox.

Examples of Successful Facilitation

“Define vision and strategy for a team”
A management team had recently been joined by several new members and wanted to define their vision and to translate it into achievable objectives over the coming 12 months.

Creative visioning methods were used to encourage a more daring vision; strategic planning methods were employed to formulate objectives for each member of the management team and to collate them into team objectives. Systematic prioritisation was utilised to decide which projects to put on hold and which to implement with increased urgency and importance. External facilitation ensured very effective use of time. Follow up meetings tracked progress and ensured that the team would implement the plans as well as update them when changes arose.

“A team away day”
Two teams had been merged into a large team and not all team members were convinced that they needed to be a team. During the away day the team was invited to look at their stakeholders expectations within the context of major changes in the near and distant future and reflect on the changes they may need to undertake to be able to respond to these expectations. A fun activity broke up the day but also allowed team members to look at how they performed against certain criteria with their small group during the activity as well as a large team back at work. Actions to improve their team performance even further were defined and the team is now busy putting them into practice.

If you would like to talk to anyone about how Facilitation or any of our other services can help your business and HR objectives, please contact us.