facilitate tr.v.

Make easy or easier or less difficult or more easily achieved

facilitated, facilitating, facilitates

facilitator n.

One who makes progress easier

For once, at least, the dictionary definition says it all. And so succinctly, too. The words come into English, apparently, through the Old French faciliter from the Latin facilis. (Thanks to The Concise Oxford Dictionary for that information)

Being a facilitator requires some special skills and is a role most usually associated with seminars and important meetings, often occasions where a basic chairman isn't considered to be enough! Being facilitator to a business process team requires some special skills, too. Some of them are the same as required to run meetings (there are, of course, going to be meetings to run) and some are specific to the team-support role. There is certainly more grunt work to do as a team's facilitator!

This piece looks at how a facilitator can make a team more effective and why a facilitated team can achieve more. It also reviews some of the team facilitator's key how-to's and suggests some contents for the facilitator's toolkit.

It is often the case that a team gets a facilitator only when things start to go wrong - It's another mouth to feed, after all, and saving the cost of a facilitator until it seems essential is a justifiable short cut in some minds. I think the position taken in writing this article suggests that using a facilitator simply to firefight is wrong: Having a facilitator at the start and into the early stages of a team's lifecycle will allow the team to take the benefits early, to become a high-performance entity - The facilitator then breaking away from the team and the savings made later. And no crisis required!

What is a team facilitator?

A team's facilitator is part of the team structure but not a member of the team: Each team member must be committed to the team's vision and to the team's purpose. The facilitator's commitment is to the team itself, to ensuring the realisation of the purpose and not the purpose itself.

The facilitator must nurture the team.

What does a facilitator do to build an effective team?

• See the team's vision
• Know what has to be delivered
• Define the team's standards and monitor them
• Monitor deadlines and project milestones
• Get sponsorship for the team
• Select team members/Participate in team selection
• Organise and run the kick-off meeting
• Build performance challenges
• Manage team meetings
• Coach team members
• Overcome team barriers
• Manage issues
• Manage the team's communications

How to get sponsorship and keep it

Pre-position and sell!

• Create a top-down vision
• Identify profit opportunities
• Identify and quantify benefits
• Get buy-in from the sponsor's peers
• Build terms of reference
• Resolve issues
• Remove barriers
• Manage conflicts

look the other way

run away

supress true feelings

surrender

delay confrontation

address only the minor issues

high fog factor

clear problem identification

problem solving task

different perspectives: restatement of problem

punishment

bribery

threat

coercion

low satisfaction

mere survival

unresolved issues

delays solution

energy drain

unresolved issues

action plans agreed

resolution of the real issues

hostility

no concensus

short-term fudges

unresolved issues