Leadership dilemma of the facilitator > Part 1
Today most of corporations and start-ups emphasize one thing: the iconic leader. His role is complex, as he has to convince people to follow new directions and buy into new decisions. He needs to identify his team motivation levers that will ensure they spend dedicated time and effort to deliver results to the organisation. Today control and command do not work anymore, leaders have to move into a more participative style, addressing the right topic to the right person.
To be more efficient, leaders have developed a facilitative leadership. Building effective teams is achieved by motivating them through creative problem solving, by engaging them for planning the strategy. They achieve a high level by developing collaboration and having a safe environment that allows to quickly resolve conflicts. Leaders need also their teams to think, they need to offer them time and space dedicated for discussion and ideation. Moreover, leaders need to develop their teams, emphasize their heterogeneity, engage them in a collaborative way, reflect strong support on teamwork outcomes.
To achieve this, leaders embrace Facilitative Leadership as an art. In a whitepaper Jeffrey Cufaude explain the core of this concept is a mix of consulting and coaching skills. It starts with a process to maximize the collective intelligence of the team and empower them on the decision they make. Today, with corporations becoming global, the working environment has gained diversity of cultures and talents. This increase the need to have efficient collaborative decision making in complex settings of people such as cross-functional teams or such as consortium of internal and external partners. To achieve this growing need for collaboration in a mix pool of talents, leaders can apply the “Facilitative Leadership Fundamentals” introduced by Jeffrey Cufaude:
- Encourage participative discussion in groups
- Help stimulate creative thinking through idea-generation processes
- Stimulate consideration of alternatives and strategic decision-making
- Offer safe place for opinions confrontation, challenge of perspectives
- Intervene passively in groups to guide without taking control
- Design groupwork processes to accomplish diverse goals and deliverable
- Support team dynamics and ensure different leaders rise along the progression of the project
- Help teams to capture learning when reflecting on their experiences
- Design inclusive and integrative group processes emphasize individuals participation
- Challenge team and rise expectation for powerful strategic exploration
The facilitator role is to help the team members to become Collaborative Leaders. Team members engagement, involvement in decision make them feel they are valued. Instead of saying “yes” to any management decision, they will formulate solutions to problems, give directions and help making the right decisions. With leaders having active listening, team members have more room to present their views. Leaders can therefore extend their thinking or refocus some thoughts by absorbing new ideas. This step helps leaders to diverge from their initial thoughts. Leader can also share their ideas to the team to seek for alignment or consensus adding thoughts from the group. This step help leader to converge, reaching team agreement on how to move forward.
To learn more about collaborative and facilitative leadership read > Part 2 of this article: Link
