Internal Facilitation School. Why not?

Hello there! This is Maryna and Kate, ManyChat Scrum Masters, and we want to share with you our experience of conducting four online classes for a total of 48 people.

This article will be valuable to you if:

• You are looking for a way to sharpen your soft skills
• You are looking for a boost to launch internal training in your company
• You wish to find out why facilitation skill matters in a business environment

Working with more than 70 people in the Product Group as Scrum Masters we had to facilitate two or three events almost every day. Soon we realized we were taking on most of the meeting ownership ourselves, and it was high time we started sharing the responsibility and began facilitating skill sharing with the people in our company.

People often perceive facilitation as an ability to simply run a meeting. However, running a meeting is just moderation, facilitation is much more than that. Since we develop innovations, we have to experiment and make difficult decisions every day. When we need to make them together in a group, facilitation saves the day.

Facilitation is the combination of practices and skills that help create a safe and self-organizing environment for a group to achieve its goals in a meeting.

It demonstrates that meetings can be much more than merely an occasion for solving a problem or creating a plan. Every well-facilitated meeting is also an opportunity to stretch and develop the perspectives of the individual members, thereby building the strength and capacity of the group as a whole.

Sam Keiner. Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making

Why invest in facilitation in a business environment?

We go to meetings with our colleagues each day and spend approximately 10 hours a week in meetings. So having a clear answer to the “why” behind each meeting is essential to us.

First, facilitation skills help us dive deep into the “why” behind each meeting or event we intend to hold. You have no idea how many hours at unnecessary meetings one can save when considering this question consciously. At our school, students realized that the best meeting is the one you can do without.

Second, if a satisfactory answer to the “why” behind the meeting is clear to all, then we go into the meeting with a well-prepared agenda, goals, and expected results. And most importantly, we try to have a separate facilitator role in each meeting. This helps to actually achieve the expected results at the meetings.

Thirdly, the facilitator actively listens the whole time and is responsible for unleashing the potential of group thinking, guiding the group with a structure, and at the same time delegating the ownership to the group for shared results. Thus it improves the overall quality of the meetings and makes them safe and pleasant to visit and collaborate with.

Facilitation isn’t knowledge, it’s more like a skill set. We realized that It’s impossible to become a facilitator just by watching a one-hour webinar, so we decided to create a program of six lessons at our school to have an in-depth practice.

We have a maximum capacity of 12 people in each of our classes. Thus our lessons have a unique personal touch, where students can learn from each other in a safe space. We have a lot of practice in groups of two to six people, so we can say that 12 people is a perfect number of students for self-organizing in small groups.

Here’s the flow of our learning program on how to acquire basic facilitation skills in six steps:

Step 1: Prepare for a meeting by clarifying goals, expected results, and outcomes.

We believe that 60% of a meeting’s success is careful preparation. So at the first lesson, we focused on the following topics:

• Meeting Flow Understanding: We ask our students to map facilitator actions to the phases each meeting has: Before Meeting, Opening, During Meeting, Closing, After Meeting.
• Creating a Contract: This is where our students get to conduct their own interviews with each other and create a meeting contract with a stakeholder. They clarify goals, expected results, impact, and necessary people to invite. At this point, our students’ main takeaway is that some meetings are not needed.

Step 2: Create a self-organizing environment for the group with a proper facilitation plan, clear goals, timing, and format.

There is much value in understanding how facilitators can help set up boundaries for self-organization. In our second lesson, we reveal some secrets to students on pre-work activities for increasing meeting efficiency:

• Creating Facilitation Map: Students learn to create both a plan and a meeting agenda to reach meeting goals by combining different formats and activities.
• Practicing Invitations: Learners get to practice facilitation instructions on activities during a meeting.

Steps 3–4: Turn on your active listening skills.

In lessons 3 and 4, we teach our students active listening skills, which we consider to be essential for good facilitation. An effective group facilitator pays close attention to all the communications of the group as a whole so that people feel heard and cared for. In our opinion, beginners should focus on these four skills:

• Paraphrasing: A fundamental skill that helps people in a meeting to think aloud and reassure participants that their ideas are worth hearing.
• Summarizing: Restating key themes as the conversation proceeds to confirm and solidify your grasp of the other person’s point of view. It also helps both parties to be clear on mutual responsibilities and follow-up.
• Tracking: Keeping track of every discussion thread going on parallel during a meeting.
• Stacking: The process of facilitating an even platform for everyone who is willing to put out an input, to hear.

Step 5: Learn approaches to group decision-making.

The most difficult part of every complex meeting is coming to a group decision. During lesson 5, our students learn about different types of decision-making agreements and practice them within a group. The approaches vary by engagement level, time resources, and the importance of the decision at hand.

Step 6: Be able to deal with complex group dynamics.

No matter how practical and real-life-like, our lessons still create a safe and trustful environment that is not met everywhere in day-to-day work. This is why we teach future facilitators some tips and tricks on how to manage complex group dynamics. Such dynamics are ubiquitous and can be caused by a lack of common knowledge and context, internal conflicts, low engagement levels, etc. During the last lesson, our students practice with cases like silent attendees, timing issues, low energy level, parallel discussions, etc.

After completing six lessons, we encourage our students with brand certificates and share with them our Facilitation Handbook with highlights from the whole course and secrets to facilitation we have come up with in our practice.

What techniques do we use to design each lesson as instructors?

Technique #1: All the lessons are based on the practices described in Training From the Back of the Room. These practices allow us to design lessons by having a comprehensive structure called 4C. This structure enables us to create “learning by doing,” a process where instructors are not lecturing the group the whole time and instead engage the students in a variety of practical activities. 4C structure stands for:

• Connection: What does the learner already know about the topic?
• Concept: What does the learner need to know about it?
• Concrete Practice: Can the learner do it or teach it to someone else?
• Conclusion: How does the learner plan to use it?

Technique #2: Moreover, each of our lessons is designed in a way that enables a self-organizing environment for students through:

• A clear agenda for each lesson
• A little theory and tons of hands-on activities
• Small groups and dynamic format changing
• Transparent invitations for each activity, etc.

Technique #3: Each of our six lessons has a certain learning objective created as an expected outcome of the lesson from the perspective of a student. Here are some actual examples of such learning objectives:

• Contracting: “After this lesson, I am capable of creating a facilitation contract with a stakeholder of a meeting. I can find out if a meeting is actually necessary. I can set the expectations, rules, and format of the meeting.”
• Facilitator Skill. Active Listening: “After this lesson, I see the value of a separate role of a facilitator at meetings and I can shift to a facilitator stance when necessary by using the active listening skill.”

Technique #4: Practice makes perfect. Our lesson structure always has a point where learners can get hands-on practice with each other. Meeting contracting with each other is a great example of this: We give the students a list of recommended questions to ask and have them clarify goals, expected results, attendees, etc. Our students get to pick any meeting they are planning to have and play the role of an organizer, while their partner puts themselves into the facilitator’s shoes and asks the questions from the list to create a contract together.

After almost every lesson, we give a small homework exercise for the students to be able to self-organize around one task with their group mates where they peer review each other’s work. This also helps them learn by having spaced repetition in learning and thus builds stronger neural connections in the brain.

To make our school even more profound and based on empirical facilitation practices all over the world, we used these books to create the learning program:

• Sam Keiner’s Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making
• Michael Wilkinson’s The Secrets of Facilitation: The S.M.A.R.T. Guide to Getting Results With Groups

It is always difficult to measure the effectiveness of educational programs, since implementing new skills takes time. This is why we gather feedback from our students three times: immediately after completing the program, and then again one and three months later. Some results of our surveys showed us surprising outcomes.

What outcomes did we get from organizing and training Facilitation skills for four groups of 48 ManyChat employees in total?

• Students started using active listening skills, even in participation roles, which helped them build trust and share understandings.
• The quality of the meetings and events in the company has increased since a lot of the graduates started to consciously use facilitation skills and techniques to prepare agendas, track meeting goals, and achieve expected results.
• Having facilitation skills as part of the skillset in the Performance Review process turned out to be yet another incentive for investing in this soft skill in a company.
• Inviting the students who graduated from school to co-facilitate big events in our company helped to create even more value in this investment since they receive hands-on experience and see their personal contribution and value in it. Offering thorough factual feedback has given the students even more of an appreciation of the skill.
• The unique setup of working in small mixed groups in each lesson created a safe space to learn together by making mistakes and giving and receiving feedback. Unconsciously, we created an opportunity for people from different departments or teams to collaborate better and build stronger relationships with their colleagues.

Our facilitation influencers who co-facilitated our company retreat activity

Let us know in the comments below how this article was useful to you.