Helpful Guidance and Advice for Facilitators
This section is full of useful guidance and advice for Facilitators and managers who facilitate teams and groups as part of their management or specialist role.
These ‘packets’ contain the combined wisdom and experience of numerous years facilitating ‘real life’ events, workshops and change management activities.
They represent sound principles and clear guidance to new and experienced facilitators alike. Each individual ‘tip’ is a gem which will give you insight and understanding. Each ‘packet’ gives you the opportunity to put best practice in place. The whole ‘packet’ provides you with a valuable resource to help you become more effective and successful as a facilitator.
Choose the Tips
(below) and try them. We are confident that you will find it extremely useful and helpful. Everyone who has ever been trained by Resource has said that these two are essential process skills for a facilitator.
Buy several (there are 4 ‘Packets’, containing 10 Tips in each) and see the difference in makes in your facilitation skills and expertise. You can choose from any of the lists below:
Also see the
Models and Tools which provide you with a framework for key activities.
Process Skills
There are a number of key process (intervention) skills which a Facilitator should be familiar with.
The primary Process skill is using the
Feedback Model. It provides a simple, yet effective means of ensuring understanding and building awareness amongst the group. It can be used together with
Analogy, which can also be used to bring understanding when the subject is specialist and people are finding it hard to understand the jargon and concepts.
Yes … and is a discipline which if acquired will help build harmony in a group and prevent building trying to ‘out do’ each other.
Quite often in a group, a stage can be reached where things begin to break down. This can happen for any number of reasons:
- bad organisation or running of the meeting
- unclear objectives
- people not listening
- domination by one or two people
Whatever the reason, it is essential that a timely intervention be made in order to put the group back on track.
Summarise, Propose, Output (SPO) is the use of a skill that can be used successfully in these circumstances.
Finally,
Out of the Box is designed to manage contributions, which are useful but maybe at the inappropriate time in the process.
| No |
Tip |
Situations |
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| 9 |
Feedback Model
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Feedback is used ALL the time. It is effective in one-to-one and in group situations. It is useful for clarifying technical inputs and for ‘climbing out of uncertainty’. There may not be any key words, which reveal the need for this Tool. However, a lack of understanding amongst the group will suggest the need for this Model. |
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| 10 |
SPO |
Use this whenever you or anyone wants to change the process and introduce another tool, technique or format
It is usually driven by a change in direction of the task, so you need to monitor the task and listen for changes in task direction/need.
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| 10 |
Analogy |
Analogy is used to explain a difficult concept, to make a technical issue easy to understand, to explain something which isn’t readily understood. It is sometimes better than more explanation because it offers a new way of describing the subject matter.
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