What Is Facilitation? Who Is A Facilitator?
#17 episode of the Tachless show with Kira Tchernikovsky. Show about people who succeed by doing things differently.
Tamara Eberle, one of the leading facilitators in Canada, with two decades of team leadership and organizational development experience, coaches us on the basics of facilitation - as a skill and as a profession.
WHAT IS FACILITATION?
What a facilitator does is easing the path.
Making the past more smooth for the group that you're working with now.
Facilitators, unlike someone who maybe as a professional coach, works with groups of people. That's one of the distinctive characteristics of facilitation.
some facilitators might specialize in smaller groups or teams. It could be anywhere from five to 20 people that you're facilitating. And other facilitators might specialize in large group facilitation. So it could be hundreds of people, for example, at a conference or a big event.
WHO NEEDS A FACILITATOR?
You need a facilitator when you're feeling stuck.
You're feeling stuck as a group, you're having difficulty moving forward. Perhaps your challenge at collaborating together or communicating well together. You might need a facilitator when there are multiple perspectives that are required to be part of a process or a decision, a program or a plan, and you want to be able to ensure that all of those voices and perspectives are well heard and are well integrated into whatever the outcome is.
EXAMPLES OF FACILITATED SITUATIONS
Board meeting
Customer focus group
Creative problem solving
Event
Strategic planning
Program development
Marketing research
New company brand development
HOW FACILITATOR IS DIFFERENT FROM A CONSULTANT?
There is a significant difference, especially if you're a professional facilitator.
Facilitators don't come in as experts on the content itself. Professional facilitators are experts on the process.
HOW DO YOU DO STAY RELEVANT IF YOU ARE NOT A COMPANY INSIDER?
one of the first questions that we ask is who needs to be in the room? So we're quite interested in ensuring that all the voices that need to be in the room are there. All the different perspectives that are required to make the program successful are there.
And in many cases, that means ensuring that people at all levels of the organization, perhaps, are involved.
when you're trained up as a professional facilitator, you learn a lot of different frameworks, methodologies, techniques, theories and a whole bunch of other kinds of skills that help you design processes so that even if you are not an insider in the company, technically, you could almost facilitate anything because you're not there for content.
But that doesn't mean you don't need to understand what's happening.
IS THERE SPECIALIZATION INSIDE THE FACILITATION WORLD?
-- There are people who are pure process facilitators. They don't touch content in any way, and they're highly, highly skilled at designing processes for any type of situation.
-- There are also people who come into the profession because they were already experts in something. Maybe somebody who is a project manager and then wanted to focus more on facilitation.
IS CONFLICT MANAGEMENT A FACILITATION?
you might have facilitators who specialize in high heat situations, dispute resolution, conflict resolution, scenarios where it's really specific about that. An example of that might be a facilitator who is a specialist in public engagement. And so you imagine these sort of big kind of town halls or different kinds of public participation events where you might have people who are maybe it's about an environmental topic.
WHERE DO YOU LEARN FACILITATION?
International Association of Facilitators (IAF). https://www.iaf-world.org/site/
This is our professional Association. It's global. There are facilitators from all over the world who are involved, and it's also the body through which you can receive certification.
There are different levels of certification that you can go through. And it's quite a robust process to go through that.
It's a great place to get introduced to the world of facilitation because there are lots of local and global learning events.
HOW TO FIND A GOOD FACILITATOR?
On the IAF website, you will find a facilitator database. These are all members of the IAF.
If you're a member, you are asked to adhere to a certain set of ethics code of ethics as a facilitator.
You can search within your region. And then explore what is that facilitator specializes in or what's the thing that is their thing.
** THANK YOU, MY GUEST **
Tamara Eberle
Certified professional facilitator in Canada, working globally.
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