The Practice of Facilitative Leadership

Facilitation is a key leadership practice in the fast paced, complex and changing environment we live in today. The Systems Thinker Newsletter discusses the importance of adopting a facilitative leadership style, in their article, “The Art of Facilitative Leadership: Maximizing Others’ Contributions” by Jeffrey Cufaude.

Leadership traditionally has been thought of as “doing the right thing” while management has been defined as “doing things right.” Contemporary leadership combines these two distinctions with an emphasis on “doing the right thing . . . right.” As Jim Collins and Jerry Porras noted in the seminal work, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (Harper Business Essentials), no longer can effective leaders frame choices in dualistic either-or frameworks; rather they must learn to embrace the and, considering both what needs to be done and how that choice can best be implemented. But no one individual, however talented or knowledgeable, can single-handedly lead an organization to success. In order to advance their organizations’ efforts, leaders must be able to actively engage others so their talents and contributions are fully leveraged.

Facilitative leadership can be summarized in six major themes:

• Facilitative leaders make connections and help others make meaning. Facilitative leaders listen for and seek to make (or help others make) the connection between what is occurring in a conversation and what has occurred in other places or at other times….. Facilitative leaders also seek to connect comments made by various individuals in a meeting.
• Facilitative leaders provide direction without totally taking the reins. When group members do not share ownership of decisions and their outcomes, they are less likely to follow through on commitments. Too often, individuals abdicate their responsibility to the leader; that is, they fail to acknowledge that ensuring a group’s effectiveness is the responsibility of all members. In order for groups to realize their full potential, every individual must be concerned with the good of the whole. For this reason, facilitative leaders more often ask rather than tell groups what they need to be doing and help them move forward rather than control their movement.
• Facilitative leaders balance managing content and process. Individuals using a facilitative approach are concerned with both what the group is discussing or deciding and how they are actually doing it. They appreciate and understand that the team may need to use different processes to achieve different desired outcomes. An important part of these efforts involves thoughtfully considering how the group might reach a certain result.
• Facilitative leaders invite disclosure and feedback to help surface unacknowledged or invisible beliefs, thoughts, and patterns. Call it what you want-the dead cow on the table, the elephant in the middle of the room, or the skunk smelling up the place-most groups have certain topics they need to discuss in order to move forward on key decisions and efforts. Facilitative leaders work with individuals and groups to identify and discuss the important issues they may be unaware of or unwilling to address. These may be issues that are perceived as being too “hot” or fraught with potential conflict to be brought into the open.
• Facilitative leaders focus on building the capacity of individuals and groups to accomplish more on their own, now and in the future. Facilitative leadership is not just about the immediate task. It is also about helping a group or team learn together so they might become more productive in the future….. This long-term definition of success helps keep facilitative leaders from assuming too much responsibility for a group.
• Facilitative leaders operate from a position of restraint. Because facilitative leaders want to maximize others’ contributions, they tend to operate first from a position of restraint, carefully measuring what, if any, action they need to take.

Professional literature often draws rigid lines between leadership and management, seeming to suggest that one is right and one is wrong. In reality, organizations need individuals who both do the right thing and are capable of doing things right. They need people who can help individuals and groups do the right things right-the very nature of facilitative leadership.

Technorati Tags: Leadership, Management, Facilitation, Collaboration, Teams, Teamwork

Related posts:

1. Groups perform better than the best individual at solving complex problems
2. The Practice of Mindfulness
3. Best practice leadership development
4. Passion and deliberate practice results in great leadership
5. Systems Thinking as a Leadership Practice

Tagged as: Collaboration