Group Facilitation

Once you are promoted to a group leadership role you will find yourself responsible for meeting or group facilitation as a regular part of your role.

Aside from routine team meetings, there are many other groups you may be called upon to facilitate. Group facilitation may be required for strategic planning workshops, incident debriefs, departmental meetings, external events or conferences and more. So it makes sense to ensure you know enough about group facilitation to decide whether you should facilitate the group yourself or bring in an external professional facilitator in a given situation.

Although it might sometimes look easy to facilitate a group, for many people the workshop facilitation skills required can be more of a challenge than they anticipated to achive a satisfactory outcome. If this is the case for you, professional group facilitation may be your answer.

As a workshop facilitator, you need to be conscious of group dynamics, including any pre-existing or emerging group conflict, and managing the process, along with the specific outcomes and results you are trying to achieve.

Preparing for Group Facilitation

Other things you may need to consider or prepare for include:

• Group conflict and specifically what to do when group dynamics are a problem
• Facilitator training and what the essential group facilitation skills are that you personally need to develop in order to facilitate your group most effectively
• Meeting facilitation requirements and how they vary depending on the type of meeting involved for best results, and
• How Professional facilitators (sometimes known as Business facilitators) can add value and when it is better to undertake your own group facilitation.