6 Tips for Successful Team Facilitation

In this episode, Brian and Linda Schubring share some of their insights and strategies for successful team facilitation. They also share a few valuable tips and tricks to engage your teams and help you learn how to navigate conversations with dexterity, foster meaningful connections, and facilitate productive discussions. If you’re in a rut or need to do something different, this episode can help you harness some of our methods and philosophy to maximize engagement and achieve your goals. Enjoy.

6 Tips for Successful Team Facilitation

In our experience, people have a poor perception of team training. Leaders often find themselves in situations where participants have low expectations due to previous experiences of super boring, unproductive, or passive training sessions. When people are actually engaged and given a chance to talk with their peers or reflect for themselves, it can open their mind and their heart to experience something in a way that they were not anticipating.

Here are six tips for successful team facilitation:

1. Be clear and concise in your message

Try to be specific about what you want to say and avoid unnecessary information. 

2. Connect with story

Provide a reason or brief story to help participants understand why your message is important.

3. Keep conversation moving

Encourage participants to have conversations with each other and really listen to what the other person is saying. You will demonstrate your expertise when you weave pieces together, not prove yourself the expert in the room.

4. Create an engaging and interactive environment

Engage a group by creating an environment where they’re invited to talk about themselves without boundaries and captures the attention and participation of all team members. The greatest demonstration of our care that we can show to people is our ability to listen, navigate around what we’re hearing, and deliver the content we’re responsible for sharing.

5. Do the work ahead of time

If you also have expertise in the subject matter you are discussing, you can focus on listening to and supporting the other people in the room, and rely on your skills as a facilitator to guide the conversation.

6. Start with the end in mind

Think about how you want the group to feel at the end of the meeting, and work backward from there. Do you want the time to fly by? Do you want them to feel like the meeting was worthwhile? Once you know what you want to achieve, you can start planning the meeting accordingly.

Your Team Facilitation

We would love to hear about successful or unsuccessful facilitation on your team. How can we help? Connect with me at nathan@leadershipvisionconsulting.com.