What Is Facilitation?

Facilitation is a process where a person assists a group to work together to achieve a goal by managing discussion, encouraging collaboration, and fostering participation from all members of the group. The facilitator ensures everyone is heard, shares their point of view and helps the group get the most out of their discussion.

What Is the Purpose of Facilitation?

The reality is that not everyone possesses the aptitude and desire to collaborate and share candid perspective about business decisions, topics and issues. Moreover, when individuals of differing personalities and viewpoints come together, tensions can arise creating an inability for groups to effectively come to a consensus. During a facilitated session, some individuals may dominate the dialogue, some may choose not to engage, or others may get lost or feel excluded in the discussion.

Effective facilitation provides appropriate structure and guidance to a discussion. Facilitators monitor and manage any challenges, conflict, personalities, issues and dissent that occurs when a group deliberates over important issues. The intention is to maximize the available time to involve team members and collaborate most effectively and leverage the participants’ minds and talents equally.

How to Prepare for a Successful Facilitated Meeting

Superior facilitation requires understanding people and group dynamics, communication styles, and strengths and weaknesses of the audience; greater insights into these areas will enable you to more successfully facilitate and manage important discussions.

It is important to remember that facilitation is not delivering a presentation. Rather, a facilitator must prepare to lead and regulate group interaction. In summary, this requires:

• Identifying how to provide appropriate guidance and support based on the group’s needs
• Planning the session to ensure critical points of the topic will be covered within the timeframe
• Determining the communication style(s) of people in meetings will enable you to maximize participation
• Designing a game plan for the meeting that will help team members brainstorm, think critically, and solve problems collectively
• Finding innovative ways to encourage participants to contribute and engage in deeper dialogue

When looking at the bigger picture in detail, facilitation preparation can be broken down into three main parts. We encourage group leaders, trainers, and coaches to use this approach to prepare accordingly.

1. Understanding Your Audience

Because every group consists of unique personalities along with strengths and weaknesses, it is essential to tap in and connect with your audience effectively to achieve the desired outcomes for your facilitation session.

This requires:

• Pre-Session Planning: Identify the session’s specific learning objectives and desired results. This is to inject the right focus into your preparation process and ensure the upcoming discussion is productive and constructive. Determine the preferred communication styles of participants to tailor your facilitation approach and meet people where they are.
• Evaluating Group Dynamics and Individual Personalities: Assess the participants’ knowledge and skills to help you anticipate and determine your role as the facilitator. Your role as facilitator may be more active or more passive based on your assessment of group members’ experience, personalities, strengths, and weaknesses.

2. Designing the Session

If the phrase “the devil is in the details” is true, then a facilitation game plan identifying scope, outcomes, potential disruptions, and structure, with a set of alternative plans is a necessity. To effectively design the session, consider these elements in your plan:

• Clear objectives: Clearly define the session’s purpose, goals or intention. You may mention data you evaluated during your needs assessment (step #1) to help communicate the objectives.
• Engaging agenda: Write a structured agenda that includes time for discussion, activities, and breaks. Fulfilling these three areas will help minimize participants’ distractions while creating space for active listening and contribution.
• Interactive elements: Design activities that encourage participation, brainstorming, critical thinking, and problem-solving.
• Visual content: Use images, presentations, and handouts to enhance understanding and engagement.

3. Encouraging Participation

Meeting participation comes in all shapes and sizes. To enable and maximize the effectiveness of participation, here are a few tactics to help participant engagement during the facilitation session:

• Create a welcoming atmosphere: Establish a comfortable and inclusive environment where participants feel safe to share thoughts and ideas.
• Ask open-ended questions: Encourage discussion and participation by preparing open-ended questions to ask throughout the meeting.
• Provide positive reinforcement: Be specific with positive feedback that acknowledges and appreciates participants’ contributions to the discussion.
• Manage group dynamics: Be aware of any complex group dynamics (past conflicts or power imbalances). Use your judgement and instincts to adapt your facilitation approach and deploy pre-planned strategies to help combat any negative group dynamic issues that may surface during the meeting.

Explore our comprehensive guide for facilitator training.

Additional Facilitation Ideas and Tips

Other actions to consider when facilitating discussions are:

1. Maintaining Focus and Engagement

It can get challenging to encourage everyone to stay focused and engaged throughout a discussion. In these instances when focus and attention begins to wander, you may rely on:

• Active listening: Pay close attention to participants’ comments and questions. Use their feedback to ask follow-up questions and dive deeper into the topic. Encourage team members to do the same.
• Time management: Use clear timekeeping to keep the discussion focused and on schedule.
• Redirecting tangents: Gently steer the conversation back to the main topic when it veers off course with a pre-planned statement or two that gets the group discussion back on track.
• Summarizing key points: Periodically summarize the discussion throughout the meeting to reinforce key points and ensure everyone is on the same page. Use questions like “what have we missed” or “do we agree” to enable more opportunity for discussion.

2. Managing Difficult Participants

When individuals come together to discuss business issues and topics in a meeting, unproductive behaviors and difficult personalities can make facilitation challenging. With the right strategies, you can create a productive and positive environment for discussion.

Here’s what you can do:

• Set clear expectations: Establish ground rules for behavior at the beginning of the meeting to combat potential difficult personalities and unproductive behavior.
• Stay calm: Maintain your composure and respond to difficult behavior calmly and professionally. Avoid getting emotional or defensive.
• Address issues privately: If a participant is disruptive, address the issue privately during breaks to help ensure that the group maintains momentum.

3. Overcoming Nervousness

It’s natural to be nervous before or during the facilitated discussion. Rest assured, as long as you are authentic, remain focused and intentional in your approach, the meeting will go smoothly.

Lean on:

• Practice and preparation: The more prepared you are, the more confident and relaxed you will feel.
• Positive visualization: Imagine a successful facilitation session to boost your confidence and to maintain a positive mindset.
• Deep breathing exercises: Take deep breaths to calm your nerves and focus on the present moment.
• Seek support: If you are feeling particularly anxious, seek support from a mentor or colleague who is an experienced facilitator. Consider having them look over your facilitation agenda to provide feedback, suggestions and ensure you are ready to go.
• Create a safe and inclusive environment: Encourage respectful dialogue and avoid judgmental or dismissive comments.

Learn and Grow Your Facilitation Skills with CMOE

Consider investing in your Facilitation Skills by utilizing training sessions and tools from CMOE. Our organization offers facilitation training that identifies skills gaps and provides how-to skills, ready to use tools, and growth and development activities to enhance your facilitation effectiveness. As research shows, didactic methods by themselves are insufficient for truly effective facilitation training.

CMOE provides a broad range of learning methods to ensure facilitators walk away ready to lead dynamic and interactive group meetings.

Learn more about our workshops:

• Leading Groups to Solutions: Facilitation Skills for Team Leaders
• Facilitator Training Workshop