Useful Tips for Team Facilitations

We as coaches and facilitators of are charged with getting the teams we are working with to where they want to go. How do you get teams to open up and get to the challenging task of remaking themselves into the team they wanted to be?

Use your wisdom to determine where the team you are working with is in their development. Questionnaires and interviews are a great way to start but what do you do if the client does not ‘have the time’ or the budget.

Here are few points to keep in mind:

Divide your workshops into a series of two or three sessions. In the first session, draw the team out with specific questions. Lay the ground work for creative collaboration and establish trust in you. Make sure they understand that they are responsible for they’re outcomes. You are merely there to determine what they want and help them devise strategies to get there.

Ask a lot of questions during the first and second sessions. Invite them to tell you what they would change if they could change anything they wanted. And most importantly, listen for those little clues.

One of my recent clients made reference to ‘falling back into their patterns’. This was a useful bit of information. This led to a conversation about what patterns they wanted to avoid and what new patterns they wanted. Now this team was really cooking and looking forward to another session. By paying attention to how they were responding to my questions, the language they were using and how little or how much fidgeting there was in seats (fidgeting, and other bodily signs are clues to how much buried conflict there is in a team), I could determine hot spots and issues for them. Look at these signs as change portals – leaping off points for getting to what the team really wants.

You’ve got to relax and gently draw them out. You have to be cool and not hurried. Team facilitation is much different than team training. It’s a lot more organic and it often it takes more than one session with you to get them talking about what really matters to them. Don’t force anything. Keep inviting them to participate. Use re-emerging methods to invite conversation, fun and humour.

Know how to improvise. You could spend a lot of time collecting information on the team but until you actually spend face time with them you might know about them but won’t really know them. You may have a lot of knowledge but little understanding until you engage them.

In the last session they are ready for business. They see, feel and know what they want to do and are eager to get strategies in place. They are eager because by working with you, they naturally want to make changes. They have a feeling for the kind of team they want to be. You now relax even more, because the team is now riding on their own momentum. Put your oar in once in a while to guide them and give clarity to their goals and the actions they have identified as improvisations (the steps they are committed to experiment with) to get them where they want to go.

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