What can leaders learn from facilitators?
People in leadership roles can learn a lot from people who are great at facilitating co-creation.
When you’re in a position of authority, you often balance two sets of expectations. You need to meet the expectations of those who put you in that role, usually higher-ups with the power to appoint you. But you also need to live up to the expectations of the people you’re leading, so they’ll follow your lead. One set is about delivering targeted results, and the other is about motivation. This can create a conflict between the kind of leader you need to be to deliver results and the kind of leader you need to be to motivate people. If you fail to translate targeted results into meaningful goals that inspire your team, you may resort to a controlling form of leadership that erodes trust from both sides.
Facilitators and leaders both aim to get the best out of the people they lead, but facilitators never try to control people to achieve the best outcomes.
There are five key traits that leaders can learn from facilitators to inspire desired behavior instead of trying to control it. These traits can be adopted by anyone in a leadership position, even if they don’t have a formal leadership role or title.
The leadership act
I want to believe that we’re evolving our understanding of leadership from perceiving leadership as a person to perceiving it as an act. The leadership act happens when someone enables progress with a collective of people. The act of leadership exists on its own, whether it’s performed by someone with authority or not. The character of a leader is defined by their leadership act, not by their past achievements or title. The act of leadership is always a moment and should always be carried out with full dedication. A good leadership act can’t be assumed to happen because of past successes. Therefore, no one can claim leadership with a title because it would deprive others of the opportunity to perform the leadership act when necessary.
That doesn’t mean there can’t be different roles and responsibilities. It means that we shouldn’t always see those with the most responsibility and decision power as the only ones who can claim the act of leadership. A collective doesn’t thrive when it’s controlled, nor does it thrive naturally by itself. It thrives when someone can facilitate the best out of a unique constellation of people fueled by shared purpose and shared risks.
Five key traits of the leadership act
The five key traits are essential for effectively guiding a group of people to make progress towards their shared goals. The leadership act occurs during moments of interaction when people work together towards a common objective. For a facilitator, these moments of interaction occur during co-creation sessions, such as meetings or workshops. As for someone in a leadership role, there are many more opportunities for these moments of interaction to take place, such as one-on-one meetings, informal conversations, and coaching sessions.
The five traits of the leadership act promote coherence and unity among the participants in the collective, helping to merge individuals into a cohesive group that can work towards desired outcomes. The leadership act can be carried out by an installed leader in collaboration with anyone from the collective who acts as a facilitator during moments of co-creation. It is a collaborative act of leadership that unites the collective for as long as necessary to achieve their shared goals.
The five key traits of the leadership act are based on the following principles:
A collective can only exist if every participant is allowed to exist.
CREATE SPACEA collective can only be agile if every participant is agile.
MODEL AGILITYA collective can only connect if every participant engages.
LEVERAGE DIVERSITY FOR SYNERGYA collective can only create if every participant is aligned with purpose.
START WITH ACCEPTANCEA collective can only move forward if every participant invests.
BE AN AMBASSADOR
CREATE SPACE
No one accepts an act of leadership from a person they don’t trust. For a facilitator, gaining trust is a make-or-break situation. If participants don’t trust a facilitator to lead them as a collective through a co-creative journey like a workshop, they won’t bring synergy. The same applies to people in leadership positions. If their team does not see them as trustworthy, their only option may be to use control to achieve the desired behavior. It will never be a true collective. When team participants don’t trust their leader, it often results in a lack of openness.
Trust is existential. If you take away people’s freedom to be who they are, they will stop trusting you. They will feel a level of threat. You will lose their trust when they are only allowed to exist according to your expectations.
To build trust, you need to give people the “space” to be themselves. If you fill the space with your opinions, judgments, and directives, they won’t feel comfortable expressing their true selves. Trust is built by holding space for people to express themselves openly and honestly. Think about your closest friends. You trust them with your deepest secrets because they’ve always allowed you to be yourself, even during tough times. Doing the same for others is important if you want to build trust.
Facilitators hold the space for people in co-creation. People in leadership roles should hold the space for their team members to be who they are in the moment and to grow into whoever they want to be. Facilitators avoid imposing their opinions or directions and instead ask open questions to encourage new insights. If they provide answers, they are not trusted to facilitate. Similarly, leaders who always provide answers risk losing the trust of their team.
Trust is built by creating and holding space for people to be who they are in the moment. A good leader creates and holds space for their people in every interaction they have with them. That makes the leader trustworthy.
MODEL AGILITY
A collective, whether a team, a department, a group or an organization, can only be agile – meaning adapt swiftly to an environment – if every participant is agile in their approach. Agility can’t be achieved by applying a method or operating model. Doing so can even work against agility as it can bring rigidity, limiting how people are allowed to think and act.
An agile mindset comes from resilience and cognitive flexibility. Resilience means you don’t get paralyzed in your thinking and doing because of fear and concern. Cognitive flexibility means you can leave all options open and don’t limit your thinking because of fear and concern. Agility is based on the type of reaction to fear and concern often ignited by change.
If you are a trusted leader, people will follow your lead. This even happens literally; they will mirror you. They will mirror your thinking and behavior. That is where leading by example comes from. If you don’t show resilience and cognitive flexibility, don’t expect your team members to. If a facilitator doesn’t create and hold a “safe” space where there is no fear or concern, there will be no creation, only a repetition of the old ways of thinking. People in leadership positions model fearlessness so their team can be fearless. Ask yourself, how can a team fail fast to learn and adapt quickly if their leader fears change and failure?
Because leaders have to lead by example for agility, they need to understand how they build resilience and maintain cognitive flexibility themselves first. Luckily, most people in leadership positions already intuitively know how. You might see them run marathons, climb mountains or set difficult goals in their private lives. They are training their body to remain balanced even when threatened by difficult situations.
Let me explain what this means. A stress response happens in your body by having a surge of hormones like cortisol and adrenaline in your bloodstream. A stressed body is experiencing a sympathetic response from the autonomic nervous system. This stressed state might be caused by a certain way of thinking, but it definitely induces a stressed way of thinking. If you are in a state of stress, you will think from a place of self-preservation. This means when you are stressed, you are less creative and will rely more on the safest bet, the “knowns”. You become rigid in your way of thinking and perceiving the world. To avoid this stressed state, you have to teach your body not to turn on the sympathetic response too easily or to quickly switch back to a parasympathetic response when it does. As your body does not know whether the stress comes from a difficult meeting or an ice bath, you can train your bodily response by inducing stress in a controlled way and consciously managing the response.
Slowly breathing through a difficult pose in yoga, regulating your breath to maintain your energy during a marathon, keeping your cool while taking an ice-cold shower teaches your nervous system to remain balanced in situations of stress. When you train your body this way, it will not so easily switch to survival mode; this also works when you perceive a threat in your professional life. Because you can remain balanced in tough situations, you can be resilient and cognitively flexible.
As a leader, you are an example for others to follow. Suppose you want your team members to manage their state for resilience and cognitive flexibility. In that case, you have to learn how to manage your own state. Look for moments of tension in hobbies and adventures where you can train your body to remain balanced between a sympathetic and a parasympathetic response. Take your team on adventures where they come up against their limits, and teach them how to manage their state by managing your own.
A facilitator always manages his or her state to remain creative and sensitive to the team throughout the moment of co-creation. This rock-solid state of a facilitator is what takes a team through moments of controversy. It allows the facilitator to look for moments of controversy and tension because they are usually breakthrough moments. Leaders can learn this from facilitation and become the role model for an agile mindset.
LEVERAGE DIVERSITY FOR SYNERGY
A facilitator knows there will be better outcomes from a moment of co-creation if the participants have diverse perspectives. Co-creation benefits greatly from diversity. A lack of diversity usually results in the same old thinking and the same old outcomes. Co-creation is a celebration of differences in ways of working and problem-solving.
We all benefit when the best ideas are chosen, regardless of whether they are ours or not. When a collective exists to achieve something together, it exists to arrive at higher interpretations together, not compromises, because of battles of the ego. Competition serves the ego. Cooperation supports the highest outcome.
When someone gives in and settles for a lesser option in order to move forward, everyone loses.
“Great decisions aren’t made in a spirit of sacrifice. They are made by the mutual recognition of the best solution available. If one collaborator likes choice A and another prefers choice B, then the solution is not to choose A or B. It is to keep working until a choice C is developed that all involved feel is superior. Choice C may incorporate elements of A, B or both, or neither.”
- Rick Rubin, The Creative Act
A lot of facilitators fail at facilitating to achieve a higher interpretation from different points of view. You see them apply voting mechanisms to get to a group decision quickly, often built on compromises. People in leadership positions often make that same mistake when they force their opinion to move forward or favor the opinion of the majority or the one closest to their opinion.
It would be a mistake to create a team of people who think, act and work the same way as their leader. The best ideas often come out of controversy and tension as long as all the team members are presenting their best work in the spirit of co-creation. A facilitator knows how to direct the attention of each participant in a way where all different perspectives are considered when co-creating a new collective perspective. In the same way, people in leadership positions should ensure the diversity in their team is fully leveraged by directing energy and attention of the team to incorporate every member’s unique talent and point of view.
A leader nurtures synergy by holding the space for not only each unique perspective to emerge but also for a collective new perspective to emerge, a higher interpretation. An effective leader does this within their team and doesn’t shy away from including collaborators from outside the team. Every new perspective at the table can lead to better conversation and eventually a higher understanding for all.
While trust is required to model agility, agility is required to facilitate synergetic cooperation. Synergies in cooperation can be achieved when a leader seeks out and leverages diversity, just as a facilitator does.
START WITH ACCEPTANCE
Everything is fluid. Everything changes. Every moment and every collective is unique, and everything is temporary. A facilitator knows that the outcome varies with every aspect that is changed in the collaborative set-up. If a person is replaced, the co-creation is moved to a different day, or someone else is interviewed during research, different results are yielded.
In a leadership position, it is important to understand that there is no one truth. We are only navigating entropy with a brain that is habitually looking for patterns in whatever comes into consciousness. Therefore, there is no reason to resist anything, judge anything, or become attached to anything. We are continuously creating as everything is constantly changing. As the pace of change has drastically increased, we have experienced that becoming attached or resisting change has led to companies even becoming completely irrelevant and going bankrupt. As we need to create, invent and reinvent continuously, we can only have great outcomes if they come from a place of acceptance.
Aligning and re-aligning a collective on its purpose is one of the most important tasks of a facilitator and anyone in a leadership role. Aligning and re-aligning with purpose is the very practice of acceptance. Doing this provides the energy to co-create, the reason the collective exists.
Just like a facilitator, a leader is the guardian of purpose. If there is anything they should commit to for the collective, it is the promise of keeping everyone emotionally connected to the reason why the collective exists. Being the guardian of purpose means helping every participant or team member understand and accept what happened in the past and what the current situation is to be able to create the future.
Acceptance of what was and what is allows for cooperating around what can come, building on trust in each other and in leadership, adopting an agile mindset, and leveraging each other’s unique points of view.
BE AN AMBASSADOR
As a facilitator, I have learned about two kinds of obstacles people can face in taking ownership of an outcome in a workshop:
They can fail to act on the outcome because they are prioritizing other tasks.
They are reluctant to act because they don’t believe they can make a difference.
As a facilitator and as a leader, you can help with prioritization. It is a matter of agreeing on the impact, the approach and the timeline. This is not the most difficult obstacle to overcome.
Believing they can make a difference is often a bit harder for each participant. They might not see how they have the capability to contribute. Or they might not believe that any action will have the desired effect because there is no support from higher management to create the right environment for change to happen.
Both a facilitator and a leader can coach team members to believe in their capacity to contribute to the cause. A facilitator can do this by coaching subtly during the moment of co-creation. When you compliment someone about their ideas, they will feel like coming up with more ideas. People who get peer recognition for their shared thoughts will want to share and engage more. A facilitator can create a subculture during a workshop where everyone feels recognized and encouraged to collaborate. People in leadership positions can achieve the same subculture in their team if they authentically recognize their team members for their efforts. They can stretch people to do more than they thought capable of by providing opportunities and believing openly in their capabilities. Leading and facilitating both contain an important element of coaching.
So both facilitators and people in leadership positions can help with prioritization and empowering their teams. But participants and facilitators need to count on people in leadership positions to ensure the organization is ready for the actions to be taken. The biggest frustrations that hamper ownership include when people feel there is overlap with work from another team; when nobody seems to care or adopt anything they are putting forward; or when higher management does not acknowledge or reinforce the work they are doing. It is up to people in leadership positions to understand the dynamic in the organizational system their team members are working in and to help embed their work into the system so that it gets traction and impact becomes visible.
Leaders are the ambassadors of work coming from their teams and the networkers who can help embed the work in the organization. That is why facilitators need great leaders to drive change.
In sum …
Great facilitators apply the five key traits of leadership during co-creation. This is a pure form of leadership – no titles are needed to recognize a facilitative leader.
People in leadership positions can test their leadership skills by facilitating a workshop with their team. They can learn about their effectiveness as a leader by leading a co-creative effort. In doing so, they will experience whether or not they are garnering the right level of participation, engagement and, eventually, commitment to act on the results. They can test whether they master the five key traits by facilitating co-creation. Many leaders will be surprised by how quiet their team is in co-creation and how hard it is to achieve the necessary psychological safety.
These five key traits of the leadership act intrinsically motivate people to take action. I have observed many organizations struggling with getting ideas off the table and executing them into reality. I think people in leadership positions should assess whether they are exercising control for desired behavior or practicing these traits to intrinsically motivate desired behavior.
A leader shouldn’t need to control behavior. They should spend most of their effort making sure their team’s work counts by connecting it in the right way in the organizational system.
If they can hold enough space for each team member to bring their best, model agility to help free them of limitations, nurture synergy by embracing diversity, then they only have to make sure that everyone invests their energy in forward-thinking by accepting and understanding what was and what is, in order to co-create what can come. If those first four traits are in place, they will need to become THE AMBASSADOR for their team; they must be their team’s biggest fan and promotor in the organizational system.
A leader only really earns their leadership position when they get the best out of their team, just as a facilitator earns their role when they can get the best out of the team in co-creation.
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Happy Captaineering,
Alwin
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