What Does A Facilitator Do?

Key Takeaways

so I'm a facilitator but what does a facilitator actually do on the inside being a facilitator for over 10 years it's easy to forget that it's just not a really super common job and so I'm going to start out by reading a definition that I like from somebody else so this is a definition from the ICA UK just what is facilitation facilitation is a set of skills to be used in working with a group enabling and supporting them to achieve their objectives in a way that involves and respects all contributions builds ownership and releases the potential of the group and its members so I think that's quite a nice definition even though it's a bit wordy but essentially what a facilitator is doing it's a person who can come into a group scenario where something needs to get done and facilitates the actual getting Dess of the whole thing what a really bad definition essentially you know I'll get a call from a company they'll say you know we've been working on this challenge for a couple of months with a group it's going nowhere can you come in and F facilitate a workshop for us so we have an outcome essentially what I'll do as a facilitator is I'll build a workshop you know we've got tons of books and free everything's free just go to work shopper.com you can learn how to build workshops I build a workshop I go there and I facilitate the session with the team or on zoom and I help them solve these problems make these decisions in a much smoother and camer way than they would be able to do if it was just an open meeting and essentially it's a facilitator it's someone who could come in and just just help people get stuff done that's really what I do that that's really the sort of thing I do and people often ask in the comments like literally what types of things I'm doing as a as a facilitator or the other facilitators we train what do they do well you know I run leadership Retreats leadership Retreats are you know where executive level people at a company will ask me to come and run a 3-day Leadership Retreat with them to come up with their strategy for the year or just to get to know each other a little bit better or to help bring departments together and share information it could be um going to a company in Silicon Valley who has a product Challenge and working with their product team to help them figure out what to do next when there's lots and lots of different options it could even be doing a retrospective with my own team here at AJ and smart about what went well and what didn't go so well on a specific project rather than just doing that as a meeting where there might be some tension and you know facilitating a session like that really make sure all of the information gets out and is visualized I mean that's one of the best parts of doing Workshop whether you're doing it remote or in person you're visualizing the data so you can actually make decisions and essentially by rooll as a as a facilitator is to be the guide in these situations I'm not always coming in and Consulting and saying this is what you should be doing I'm the guide I'm taking a step back I'm just offering the framework for getting things done as a facilitator and by designing workshops I'm not saying this is the answer to the question and that's something people get confused with facilitators are not necessar neily Consultants sometimes I take that role sometimes I take the role of the facilitator and the consultant who's also giving advice but in many cases for example at a Leadership Retreat when someone's asking me to facilitate and design a Leadership Retreat for someone I find it really hard to say Leadership Retreat as an Irish person by the way that there's too many ores in there but if I'm doing a Leadership Retreat um you know I'm not there to tell these people this is what they should do I'm just there to provide a nice framework and a nice custom workshop for them to be able to run this and so that team can unlock their superpowers and unlock their ideas and feel heard and actually enjoy the session together so another thing people ask is like what types of facilitators are there and because this is not a really well defined role at the moment I think in a couple years when people are watching these videos they'll be like rolling their eyes because it's just so common but today as we're recording this in 2021 it's still kind of not clear there's a lot of different types of facilitators you know there's facilitators working in corporate environments they might not be called facil ators right now they might be called agile coaches designthinking coaches even sometimes project leads or project managers or product managers take these roles as a facilitator within a company we are starting to see a lot more just facilitators and Innovation facilitators or getting things done Specialists within companies at the moment but right now it's a bit of a mix all over the place it could be really you know like I said an agile coach scrum Master it really can be anything it's anyone who's essentially facilitating conversations with teams at companies to help them get more things done in a more calm way now on the outside of companies there's freelance Consultants like you know a lot of the people we train at AJ and smart and they can really be facilitators that can pretty much do anything like running leadership Retreats or helping companies with their product challenges or running for example team building exercises or whatever company parties like they're they're essentially generalist facilitators and there are also then facilitators who specialize in specific areas like I did in the beginning I specialized in the area of product design because that's what my company AJ and smart in the beginning was Focus focused on we were a product design agency right now we're more into strategy but we were 100% product design focused that was my specialty which was product design I accidentally got into facilitation so I would say if I would think about my specialization where I'm like strongest it's when I'm working with product teams so I'm someone who sort of leans a little bit to more uh a a little bit more towards product teams we've got a lot of people in our communities who are organizational psychologists people who are better at like focusing on medical industry people who are focused with on working with governments it's kind of all over the place and for me that's why facilitation so exciting is because you can kind of jump to a different industry jump to a different kind of slice or vertical where you want to work like gaming or Finance because this facilitation skill is something that sort of underpins all of those things and just makes you super super flexible and with facilitation you you can add it on to what you do already I mentioned that I sort of added it on to my product design skills and product strategy skills but we have people in our community who've added it on to completely random skills like someone who's a developer has added facilitation onto themselves someone who's a psychologist has added facilitation there's a lot of people from different backgrounds who decided okay I like what I do but I want to add this other layer where I can you know increase my day rate or do more interesting things and or even quit the company I'm in and and do a lot more freelancing so it's really something you can just add on on top of what you already do and it's you know it's a it's a soft skill there are some like very clear tactics on how to be a good facilitator and how to build workshops but it is a soft skill versus something like programming which is actually very difficult I would never come on YouTube and say oh yeah you know it's just just read this simple tiny book and then you'll know how to do C++ or whatever facilitation is something where with a little bit of practice and with a little bit of knowledge and you know hopefully even some things from our Channel or our ebook down below you can learn it pretty quickly and start applying it pretty quickly to what you already do today so I think that's really everything I can think about to tell you about like what is a facilitator um and what is facilitation I hope that answers a lot of these questions if you have any other questions let us know in the comments if you like this video give us a like and if you also want to learn more about facilitation down below this video we have a free facilitation guide download that read that will give you a bit of a Kickstart into the world of facilitation so thanks a lot for watching this video see you later [Music]