Why a facilitator can help you grow your business

In the last year everything I knew and thought about business and consulting has been turned upside down and flipped around. Why? Because I am studying Digital Business at Hyper Island.

In comparison to my education at Copenhagen Business School, Hyper Island is a creative business school that focuses on experience-based learning and making you question everything and everyone all the time. This has of course made me question what I know about business, what businesses need and also do consultants really help companies grow?

When I was in business school I imagined I would become a consultant. The Oxford dictionary states that a consultant is in “the business of giving expert advice to other professionals”. What I’ve always wanted is to help businesses grow, and back then I thought being a consultant was it.

Today, I no longer want to be a consultant. I want to be a facilitator (Or maybe a consultant who in an expert on facilitation — let’s not get too hung up on fancy job titles).

I want to use facilitation as a tool grow the business and to empower the employees. You have to make your employees love the work they do — not only the fun side project they do after work.

President and founder of Grove Consultants International, David Sibbet, explains facilitation as “the art of leading people through processes towards agreed upon objectives, in a way that fosters participation, creativity and ownership from all involved”.

In a workshop, sprint or longer process, a facilitator never tell participants what their new strategy should be or what the new industry trend you should be working with is. A facilitator tries to understand the needs in order to create a process using tools that engage all the potential in the room. A good facilitator can help design better work experiences and more efficient processes.

I have seen how the work of a great facilitator can do for team development and engagement. I have tried to facilitate myself. I love seeing employees at all levels of an organization come together and have small aha moments and seeing each others hidden expert knowledge.

A lot of businesses need help to look internally and find tools and ways to get the advice of all their awesome employees instead of thinking that hiring outside experts in the answer to all the problems. Research shows that 70% of the US workforce are not reaching their full potential (Gallup, State of the American Workplace Report 2013). That’s a lot of unused potential, already on the payroll.

Imagine what it could do your bottom line, if a facilitator could help your business seize the 70% of unused potential!