Facilitation: What is a Neutral Stance and Why is it Important?
If you are part of the Agile coaching community, or an active facilitator or team coach, you may have come across the idea of a ‘neutral stance’ or ‘impartial stance’, especially during facilitation. But what does this term actually mean, and why is it important?
Why a Neutral Stance is Important
Jake Calabrese summarises it well in his article where he takes a look at what facilitation means:
“Facilitation is about holding that impartial stance. You may facilitate the team through a retrospective, but you are impartial. Your goal is to hold them to the agreed-on guidelines, but you do not have a specific expected outcome. When you come across a person who is supposed to be facilitating and is also supposed to ‘manage’ the team — you can quickly see why this creates conflict. They are not impartial.”
This explanation also hints at why an impartial stance when coaching or facilitating is important. For both of these competencies, practitioners create a space for the people they are helping, and let them bring the content (rather than a teacher or mentor whose job it is to impart education and information). An impartial stance means being in a place of non-judgement, of holding a space of psychological safety, and maintaining an equal voice to all those taking part.
What a Neutral Stance Looks Like
In sessions where a coach or facilitator isn’t maintaining a neutral stance, you will see behaviours such as timeboxes lapsing because no-one was paying attention, people not being given equal chance to offer their thoughts or opinions, or facilitators pushing their own agenda or coercing other attendees to their way of thinking.
If you have a practitioner holding a good impartial stance, you may not notice them so much: they will be the ones sitting quietly, perhaps reminding you of a timebox, perhaps introducing a technique for brainstorming ideas or prioritising discussion points fairly, or occasionally asking powerful questions that get the whole group reflecting on their progress so far.
This can be tough in a world where often the loudest voice in the room wins, and some practitioners may find themselves under pressure to ‘perform’, to be more active and more visible in these sessions.
Tips to Improve your Own Neutral Stance
So what can you do to practice this impartial stance and better serve the teams you are working for? There are a number of different techniques that may help you recognise your own judgemental thoughts or conditioned need for action, and give you the tools to reflect on these feelings and control them instead.
Learn to Listen
Listening is truly a superpower, and is a skill we can all consciously work to develop. If you listen well to a room you will understand when to ask powerful questions, when to give a voice to people who need it, and when teams may be digressing or diving too deep too soon. There are lots of articles around on active listening and how you can improve your skills.
Ask Powerful Questions
Powerful questions are open, curious and reflective: they come from a place of interest and of no agenda. Lyssa Adkins has a great section on powerful questions in her book ‘Coaching Agile Teams’ — learn some of them and recognise when you can bring them into your facilitation sessions.
Plan your Session
A good facilitator will plan a session beforehand. This might include timeboxes, activities, icebreakers, or other ideas depending on what you are facilitating. Check out Derby and Larsen’s book ‘Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great’ for ideas on tools and exercises you can run.
Ask Someone to Coach You
If you have the opportunity, consider having an experienced facilitator join you for a session to watch you perform and offer coaching. They may spend the session observing and making notes on your performance, and then reflect back to you your behaviours they noticed afterwards to help you be aware of them and improve on.
Ask Someone Else to Facilitate
If you know you are going to be facilitating a session where you are going to break the neutral stance (because you have product expertise that is useful or a vested interest in the outcome of the session for example) then ask someone else to facilitate for you!
Maintaining a neutral stance when facilitating can be hard, but it is such a valuable skill to have as an agile or team coach. With practice it gets easier, and hopefully this article has helped to clear up what we mean by a neutral stance. Now it’s up to you to get out there and practice it.
