Delegation is a key skill for any leader. But delegation is only valuable if the employees you delegate to are empowered to make good decisions, and employ their talents in a way that maximises their output.
In other words, you don’t just need to trust talent to deliver results: you need to create an environment that enables them to do so.
This is where facilitative leadership comes in. Discussions around facilitation often focus on the ability to keep meetings on track, but the skill is much more broadly useful and widely applicable than this. By applying a facilitative leadership style throughout your work, you can have an outsized influence on company culture, and set the stage for talent to shine through.
What is facilitative leadership?
Developing talent and a positive company culture are hardly alien concepts. The difficulty is the way that work in the modern day can often pull focus, and prevent this kind of development from being undertaken in a structured way. The ongoing demands of project work and the challenges of the current economic environment mean that investing in these areas can fall by the wayside.
Facilitative leadership is designed to help leaders approach these challenges in a more structured way. In the context of meetings or negotiations, facilitation is a set of techniques designed to make these conversations as productive as possible. Leaders can achieve this by choosing their moments to interject, whether that’s bringing the conversation back on topic, setting clear boundaries in terms of time and subject matter, or defusing arguments or awkwardness.
Facilitative leadership extrapolates these techniques to the wider workplace. By applying facilitation to other areas of work, leaders can establish structures and methodologies that facilitate better work by their employees. The result is leadership as a guiding hand; providing direction to everyone throughout an organisation without assuming absolute control.
Applying facilitation to the workplace
While delegation isn’t the same as facilitation, it is a central part of it. Facilitative leadership is all about involving as many people as possible in meaningful decisions, at all levels of an organisation. This doesn’t mean directly involving everyone in the decisions you make as a leader, naturally. But wherever important decisions are taken—whether that is a piece of work within a project, or high level strategy—everyone contributing to that work should feel they have a stake in it.
Achieving this means forging connections between colleagues, but also connections with the work itself. The idea is to ensure that everyone is engaged enough with their work to be able to generate ideas and insights, and also to be empowered to contribute those ideas. It also means providing the context for those ideas to exist—ensuring that contributions do not exist in a vacuum, but are conscious of prior successes and failures, and the work being done by others.
Conversely—and maybe counterintuitively—facilitative leaders also need to know when to take a backseat. While it’s important to take action that supports everyone’s ability to contribute, these actions need to be well-judged. The hardest part of facilitative leadership is knowing when to take action, and judging what level of guidance and interjection is necessary to guide other people’s decision-making, and allow them the space they need to thrive.
Adopting facilitative leadership techniques
So how can you achieve this? Perhaps the first step towards effective facilitative leadership is changing your own behaviour and patterns of thinking. For all that meetings are not the be-all and end-all of facilitation, they can be a good place to hone the skills you need to facilitate better conversations and decision-making. Chairing Productive Meetings training can help to establish techniques for guiding behaviour, managing discussions, and making timely interventions, something you can extrapolate to larger groups and different circumstances.
Being able to invest your trust in others to come up with ideas and make good decisions also means enabling others to develop those skills. Problem Solving and Strategic Decision Making training explores the mechanics of creativity and innovation, and shares models and methods for encouraging creativity within an organisation, giving others the space and resources they need to succeed. This can also help you to measure your interventions and other key decisions that relate to the wellbeing and development of personnel.
Once you’re confident you have the tools needed to apply facilitative leadership concepts, it’s worth looking at how other leaders have applied the concept successfully, and considering which approaches might work within the unique context of your organisation and role. If you feel there is an ideas gap and that some people are not able or empowered to contribute, consider the different ways in which you could remedy this. The more you can tailor the solution to the strengths of individuals, the more people you will be able to involve.
This could for instance be something as simple as regular ideas meetings, or something as substantial as reflecting on the failures or challenges from previous projects. Cultural changes can also be as important as tangible ones, such as committing to a more empathetic approach, whereby open communication and transparency is prioritised; and individuals feel free to admit when they have made a mistake, or need further training or instruction on a subject. All of these options will help to get everyone on the same page, and give them the space and resources they need to increase and improve their contributions.
And finally…
Fundamentally, facilitation is about developing relationships between staff, and building a culture that allows everyone to add value to the organisation. Not everyone should be expected to do everything, and not everyone will have all the answers. The role of a leader is to ensure that everyone can contribute—facilitating faster, better, and more varied solutions.
By adopting a facilitative leadership style, you can start to improve your culture, personal leadership skills, and the skills of others to better identify and solve problems, from projects to customers to suppliers. Don’t just delegate your problems—adopt facilitative leadership, and build a collective ability to work through them.
