What is a Facilitator?
A facilitator is a process expert who works with your organization to create a productive environment that supports your team to encourage original thinking to develop bold plans and solutions. Facilitators guide meaningful discussions that ensure everyone on your team’s opinions are heard, which encourages a wealth of ideas and dynamic points of view to achieve collective decisions, solutions, or conclusions. The facilitation process leads a team to accomplish objectives through planning, guiding their thought processes, cultivating active participation, with the ultimate goal of creating buy-in from all team members.
5 Times We Get Called to Facilitate
- When non-profit organizations, initiatives and groups of 10-20 are having Strategy Planning meetings and want to be more effective, organized and walk away with a timeline, action items and clearly defined goals
- When teams with lots of sameness or lots of differences; teams that experiencing conflict; teams that need to solve challenging problems have big agendas and little time to get it done
- When previous Strat Meetings didn’t produce results because your next meeting cannot build on the previous meeting. The strategic planning process keeps talking about the same issues without forward movement
- When a new team, initiative or committee has been formed and wants to flush out vision, mission, core values and beneficial purpose
What Does a Facilitator Do?
The best way to describe facilitation is to take a plane to 30,000 feet. From here you see landscape and all available airports. To map out your best travel experience you examine the terrain first and then decide where you land first, then second and third. Then we land the plane.
We believe that the information is already in the room when we start. Our job is simply to bring the relevant pieces out and connect and organize them into a strategic plan. As the pieces start to connect the group recognizes how their contributions are part of this new cohesive plan that they helped to create. And that means ownership of the process and better outcomes.
Groups that work with skilled facilitators walk away with renewed team spirit, better connection to their purpose, action items and clearly defined time lines. Everyone knows what the next steps are. Your benefit is that your strategic planning meetings can build on each other instead of doing the same thing again and again.
Partners to Uncover Needs, Create Team Spirit and Hear All Voices :
- Helps build relationships amongst participants to improve collaboration for common goals
- Provides impartial comments and encourages to go deeper
- Ensures equal time and input of all participants
- Designs and customizes a clear plan based on where the client is and where they want to be
- Uncovers the best strategy to meet the goals of the group
- Identifies big pieces, quick wins, long term initiatives and priorities
Plans Effectively:
- Identifies the needs in a prep-session
- Selects a precise, effective process method for each session
- Customizes and creates Strategy Outline handbook
Motivates the Team:
- Encourages ideas and input from all team members
- Builds trust by remaining neural
- Fosters self-discovery in the problem-solving process
Manages for Results
- Helps the team stay focused on the topic and task
- Manages conflict and redirects discussions
- Keeps the team on time
- Ensures equity of thought through open communication
Guides for Success
- Leads the group with clear models and strategies
- Guides the team in discovering alternative solutions
- Influences the team to reach problem-solving outcomes and consensus
How long is a typical facilitation?
A facilitation or strategy day is typically around 4-6 hours, depending on your organization’s needs. A full Strategic Planning Meeting can run an entire day or occur on multiple days if your organization is large and needs to get multiple people on the same page. The optimum group size for facilitation is between 10 to 20 people.
What is Beate’s approach and specialty to facilitation?
Beate places a strong emphasis on understanding the overall goals of the organization. She designed the 5 Star Success Blueprint that helps to grow and scale businesses and has a succinct focus on “what” you are doing now and “how” you will get to your desired outcomes. The first step in the facilitation will consist of connecting the client in an Uncovery Session to get clarity on the current status of the organization and a clear picture of their desired achievement goals. With these two markers, the starting point and future perfect, Beate can engineer the process and steps – the blueprint of what must be uncovered to get there. Within her blueprint, there is room to be creative, yet she keeps the guidelines clear to keep everyone on track. As a certified MBTI practitioner, Beate understands different personality types and ensures each team member contributes and feels heard. Each session she facilitates has a Strategy Guide (workbook) and visuals customized to the needs of your organization.
To find out more about facilitation please contact us.
