Make Things Happen offers a full range of facilitation services. We provide facilitation services that allow you to participate in the meeting that you would normally be leading. We can extend your HR department by providing skills you don’t have, or don’t have enough of. Operating as outside contractors, we protect the confidentiality of issues that are not ready to be discussed more broadly within your organization.

Make Things Happen can facilitate your meeting whether its purpose is to plan a better future or speak the unspeakable.

What Is a Facilitator?

A facilitator is someone you engage to lead a meeting with the responsibility to help your group reach its goals and objectives. A facilitator should be acceptable to all members of your group and be perceived as a neutral person. We usually have no formal decision making authority. Instead, our main function is to help your group increase its effectiveness by staying on track and improving its process.

Kinds of Groups Facilitators Work With

Facilitation skills are ubiquitous and an important aspect of training, consulting, mediation and coaching. Even if they don’t formally serve in the role of facilitator, each of these professions require some level of facilitation ability to help the groups or individuals they work with articulate the reasons for their actions. Make Things Happen works with these kinds of groups.

• Top management teams
• Business-owning families
• Employee management groups
• Work teams
• Task forces
• Not-for-profit organizations
• Boards of Directirs
• Committees, and
• Coalitions.

Different Kinds of Facilitation Assignments

There are several types of facilitation work: basic, developmental and advanced facilitation.

Basic facilitation is just that — leading the meeting. Basic facilitation helps a group to temporarily improve its process long enough to solve a specific problem and reach its objective. Examples of this kind of facilitation are information sharing meetings, strategic planning and establishment of long-term goals.

Developmental facilitation helps a group learn how to continually and permanently improve its process so that it can solve problems on its own in the future. There is a training aspect to this type of facilitation where the client takes on some of the responsibilities of facilitation while we shift our role to that of providing real-time feedback and performance coaching.

Advanced facilitation is more challenging because the goals and relationships increase in complexity. We also refer to this as group process consulting. Advanced practitioners, skilled at working with interpersonal relationships and emotions, bring conflict resolution, mediation and remedial teambuilding skills to the process.

Responsibilities of a Facilitator

As facilitators, we are responsible for “how” the meeting goes and we call this the “process.” The process has two parts: tasks and relationships. We have the responsibility to understand the complexity of your goals so we can lead you across the finish line. Facilitator task responsibilities include:

• Agenda setting
• Regulating time frames
• Establishing behavioral guidelines
• Idea generation techniques
• Decision-making methods
• Problem-solving steps, and
• Testing for agreement.

Facilitators are responsible for the interpersonal dynamics in the room by maintaining good relationships during the meeting through observing, moderating, encouraging and/or interrupting:

• Participation
• Inclusion
• Power dynamics
• Influence factors
• Dysfunctional behaviors
• Problem members
• Risk taking, and
• Anger management

Responsibilities of the Client

As the client, you’re responsible for the “content” of the meeting and commitment to the process. You set the goals, objectives and tasks of the group. In addition you have ownership of the outcome of the meeting(s). We call this the “what.” Generally, facilitators don’t make contributions to the content unless they have relevant professional credentials such as in organization development, industry specialty or subject matter expertise.

Tools Used by Facilitators In Their Work

All facilitation begins by interviewing significant stakeholders to gather relevant information, objectives, and expectations and set the agenda. This could mean speaking with one or all individuals involved with the meeting.
Facilitators can increase a group’s awareness, develop skills and/or change behaviors by using self-knowledge instruments and experiential learning exercises.

Self-knowledge instruments are used to help groups understand some aspect of their interpersonal dynamics. Questionnaires can increase awareness, create understanding and engender respect for individuals’ similarities or differences within the group around personality, social identity, learning preferences, thinking styles, leadership, conflict resolution, problem-solving and decision-making styles.
Experiential learning activities are ones designed to provide insight about how the group works together. There is an educational component created to teach new skills, behaviors and perspectives that are relevant to the current situation or issue and build capacity for the group to solve its own problems in the future. Some of the topics suited to these activities are communication skills, decision-making, problem solving, and simulations — really, there is no limit.

Group Process Consultants

Make Things Happen has additional special skills and refers to itself as “group process consultants.” Group process consultants are advanced practitioners who make reasoned and intentional inputs into the ongoing events and dynamics of the group with the purpose of helping it to expand its awareness of dysfunctional and unproductive behaviors.

Group process facilitation is not group therapy. Over time, when, the energy required to suppress negative feelings is not available to the individual or the organization it can result in a buildup of resentment or interpersonal conflict and loss of productivity. The purpose of dealing with emotions in facilitation is to free the stuck energy and help the group in becoming more effective at its work. In this type of facilitation resolving interpersonal conflict is the group’s sole objective.

Skills and Competencies Required by a Group Process Consultant

We have additional special training, skills and experience to work responsibly and appropriately with emotional issues.

A highly skilled group process consultant will have competencies in academic theory, behavioral skills, intervention skills and a significant amount of self-knowledge. Why self-knowledge? Because a facilitator cannot lead a group anywhere that he or she is unwilling to go him or herself. For example, a facilitator who has unresolved issues with anger or strong emotions will have great discomfort working with yours.
 

Academic Theory in

• Learning
• Organization development
• Group dynamics
• Group process consultation
• Evaluation

Behavioral Skills

• Client contracting
• Observation
• Training
• Organization structure
• Assessment

Intervention Skills

• Task and relationship maintenance areas
• Conflict management

Self Knowledge

• Personal development
• Values
• Personality style
• Giving and receiving feedback
• Managing diversity
• Gender issues
• Strengths and limitations
• Intuition

Good facilitators can make the difference between meetings that are status quo and those that produce high performance groups and transformational change.

Call Make Things Happen today to see how we can help you improve the performance of your meetings!