Facilitation is essential to successful team and group work. That means it is also critical to organisational success, especially given the presence of conflict in organisations. Conflict is a natural part of working in a team. While conflict may at first seem destructive and may not feel very comfortable, it can be creative.
Conflict can help teams and organisations to take an innovative approach to products, services, processes and solutions. But conflict needs managing effectively so that it remains part of a creative rather than destructive process. This is where effective facilitation is extremely helpful to keep the team on track, keep relationships intact, and successful outcomes achieved for the business.
Facilitators have the role of easing a process. This is not always easy, especially if there are strong feelings on different sides. Facilitators should take a neutral position and focus on the process that gets a group, or even just two people to achieve an objective. Everyone in the organisation benefits from good facilitation skills. Those that benefit from most are likely to be team leaders and supervisors, or those leading projects. Facilitation skills enable a team to arrive at a satisfactory outcome with different stakeholders involved, different agendas and varied preferred outcomes, .
Why is facilitation important?
Organisations need people with great facilitation skills. Because without them, the organisation risks stagnation and unhelpful conflict. As a result, the person or group that shouts the loudest gets what they want. That’s not likely to be the optimal outcome for anyone involved, and it’s here that facilitation skills prove their worth. It’s surprisingly easy to fall into the trap where facilitation organisations ignore the need for effective facilitation and therefore don’t consider all possibilities. This can be extremely damaging to organisations and has the potential to develop a culture where no one challenges more assertive personalities in a group for fear of the repercussions. Without effective facilitation you’ll find it hard to mine the pool of intelligence and creativity within your group. Facilitation helps everyone to feel that they had their say, and worked together to achieve the best possible outcome. Clearly facilitation has an important role to play in business success. Furthermore, facilitation skills can also help team members to understand how to improve business communication. When learning how to improve speaking skills and how to improve presentation skills, facilitation skills are important. This is because these key skills help team members understand how to pitch a presentation appropriate to the needs of their audience, and how to communicate a message in a conciliatory manner. We offer a terrific range of facilitation skills workshops. From Facilitation Basics (it does what it says on the tin) to McQuaig Effective Teams. Download our Training & Development Brochure to find out more. Call us to discuss the best fit for your organisation.
