Facilitative Leadership is all about connecting with team members and helping them discover solutions by asking effective questions.
I am part of a Commune called ILEAD (read more about ILEAD here) where Entrepreneurs meet twice a month to discuss their success, accomplishments, learning, solve challenges (both professional & personal) and enrich themselves with knowledge from experts. The goal is to have Continous and Sustainable Self-Development.
ILEAD is an intiative of the I Can I Will Foundation and has been supported by Shri Shyam Taneja ji (who is also my mentor but more on that later).
The Commune has multiple chapters and each chapter has groups each consisting of 7-8 leaders. One of those leaders is called a Group Facilitator or GF. The GF is responsible to facilitate the group members in overcoming any challenges and help the leaders improve their Growth Index. The Growth Index complies of posting Track Sheet (like a habit tracker) on our ILEAD Sampark App, attending ILEAD Sessions, attending Group Meetings, inviting visitors to the commune and converting them to members.
Being one of the Group Facilitator, I was part of a recurring meeting this Saturday to discuss on how to facilitate the development of leaders. And in this meeting, this topic of Facilitation came up.
For me this topic is quite new and being a Group Facilitator for the last 6 months, trust me, it is not simple. Some questions that are challenging me right now:
- How do you facilitate Entrepreneurs who are themselves leaders of their own organizations?
- How do you ensure that all the Entrepreneurs are aligned with the vision of the Commune?
- How do you motivate Entrepreneurs to improve their Growth Index?
During the discussion, Shyam Sir helped us explore the idea of developing Facilitation skills and what does it entail.
Through the training, I came to know that Facilitative Leadership is all about connecting with your team members and help them discover solutions by asking effective questions.
Now, as you must have understood, this is not about a situation where you can simply suggest solutions to employees, or where you can give them commands to follow. Also, in my situation (as part of a group of entrepreneurs), you cannot give them orders or reprimand them. Remember, they are fellow entrepreneurs, sometimes more experienced, more knowledgeable or running a company that is 2X or 10X times yours or more senior than you.
So how do you facilitate them? It is believed that facilitative leadership will work both ways in a setup such as ours where all members are equals or for a person who is in a leadership position in an organization.
Will give you a live example of how a member of the group, Vaishali Bansal, took the role of Facilitator in her stride and managed it quite well.
So it so happened that Vaishali was criticized for her handling of the proceedings of the last meeting of her chapter Valmiki that operates from Delhi & NCR. Vaishali took that criticism in her stride and decided to turn things around for the better.
The next chapter meeting, Vaishali was quite prepared, took the lead from the start, made it a point to ask questions to each of the leaders, appreciated when required and basically killed it. So what did she do?
It so happened, as per her own admission, what she did was quite natural. Before the meeting, she was asked to facilitate the success sharing session of all Leaders. So a day before, she called all leaders, individually, who had shown interest in sharing their success. She made it a point to note their success, asked if there is a background story to their success and took interest in what they were sharing.
During the session, she choose to dig deep in, asked queries where the leaders explained why they choose a particular goal and how was it related to their long term goal.
Success came because instead of giving suggestions, Vaishali was more involved in being on the same page with all leaders, asking them good quality questions and assist them in getting deep insights into their goals.
Facilitative Leadership would work equally well in all kinds of environment. It could something like a commune ILEAD or a family setup, an organization, an NGO. It could work when the top management wants to implement a new Marketing Plan, or a financial advisor is interested in improving the portfolio of their client through financial planning or a Father suggesting career planning to their kids.
After searching through some pages on internet, i came up with some ultimate learnings as far as Facilitative Leadership is concerned:
- Higher chances of getting success if the solutions agreed upon come from the people most impacted. (For eg. solutions given by employees, suggestions to improve market share given by sales managers, solutions suggested by clients to solve their problems).
- Facilitative Leadership is all about empowering the other person (For eg. empowering the employees, empowering the clients, empowering family members).
- Connecting with others and look for strengths to praise before asking questions to help them gain insights.
So ideally Facilitative Leadership style would involve a 4 step process (Source 2):
- Building Rapport
- Communicating effectively
- Active Listening
- Asking Empowering Questions
In a typical scenario the boss takes the decision and ask its subordinate to execute the plan. Here, the plan is owned by the boss and he has his own emotions attached to it but it will not be implemented 100% until individuals designated to implement the plan own it.
The degree of ownership would increase when the decisions come from among the individuals and through participation and discussion a consensus is built and actions accepted. Now, the plan is owned by the team and not the boss. So it will have a higher degree of execution and hence higher success rate.
Facilitative Leadership is unique in the sense that it takes into account the human side of managing people and create more buy-ins.
There are some challenges to Facilitative Leadership such as the solutions suggested by participants might not necessarily be strategic in nature or that it would require higher levels of facilitation skills to deal with chaos while arriving at a decision.
Hence, it is very crucial to put the following in perspective before taking up Facilitative Leadership:
- Describe the What and Why and create a purpose
- Create specific guidelines and define constraints
- Look for recommendations that are thoughtful and innovative but practical and implementable
I am currently practicing Facilitative Leadership and to be honest it is not easy. It comes with its own set of challenges where you have to manage people’s perceptions, conditioning, attitudes and at the same time ensure that the goal is reached.
I do hope that you would have got some insights on what Facilitative Leadership is all about and how you can apply them in your organization.
I would love to know more on how you would be applying this style of leadership or are already practicing this style in your organization or setup.
“Make daily small wins”
~RG~
Sources I referred are: