Case Study: How client-driven development led to effective facilitation skills training for leaders, for customer success, and for hybrid working.
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Some years ago, a client approached us with a request. He said that he had been reflecting on the range of learning experiences he had been through in his long career. And one had stood out most for him, in terms of its impact on him, and his enjoyment of it. That course had been facilitation skills training.
The need for facilitation skills training
He went on to explain that, he had been reviewing his next level of senior managers. Wherein, he identified that there was still a strong tendency to be directive and autocratic. Particularly when under pressure. And he had realised that much of this was to do with a lack of awareness, skills, and confidence in practical alternatives. Alternatives that he himself had found through the facilitation training he had received two decades earlier. Training that had changed his approach and his career.We had led that training, and he was asking whether we could do the same for his leadership team.
Twenty years is a long time. We had delivered that training as part of a Total Quality Programme which required major investment. And the training alone had cost currently unthinkable amounts of money and time – 6 weeks per trainee. Everybody’s thinking had moved on since that time, including ours.
But he was right. When the pressure is on, and the outcomes have to be right, people will resort to practices they know well and can count upon. If they have not: been equipped with facilitative approaches; applied them under pressure; and built their own confidence in them delivering a better outcome, they won’t use them. They will resort to more direct methods to get their way.
Also, reflecting back, we were confident that we had a much broader range of understanding, insight and resources. We could now do much better with far less time. And we could make the course more efficient, more intensive for all concerned, and more experiential.
Defining the facilitation skills required
We started by interviewing members of his senior team in some depth. Exploring the situations where they had been directive. What they were trying to achieve. And what they saw their options as being. We asked what they had seen in the leaders they most admired and what they wished they could emulate. (In this, they frequently cited our client.) And we explored what they knew and what they didn’t.As a result of analysing the interviews, we clarified that we needed to develop the groups skills and confidence in:
- Understanding what facilitation is and why it is used
- Supporting a group in determining clear objectives, and the process to achieve them
- Guiding a group to keep to the process & redevelop that process as needed
- Coaching new skills & attitudes (behaviours) in individuals
- Knowing when facilitation is appropriate (& the options to it when it isn’t)
- Adopting and adapting current business processes to better utilise facilitation
- Evaluating and assessing their own and their teams’ facilitative performance
- Driving further understanding of facilitation in themselves and in others
And of course that they should enjoy themselves in learning and employing all of this.
Designing an efficient programme
We decided, early on, that the course should run in two blocks approximately six weeks apart. This would give the attendees a period in which to apply and experience the facilitation skills for real. And then, in block two, to formally learn from their experience. With an optional third block after six months to pick up further learning.
We also decided that the length of the training should be five days. This would be three days in the first block and then two in the second. This reflected a good balance between the ‘cost’ of the programme, and the change that could be achieved within it.
not training but facilitated group learning
We structured the programme as intensive, interwoven experiences and self-discovery. It was not so much a training course as facilitated group learning. As a result it needed precisely 12 candidates to be at its optimum. But the result was that people learned at multiple levels all at the same time. They learned facilitation skills from the content, from experiencing facilitation, and from enacting it themselves. In fact the programme almost ran itself.
Programme performance
And the reaction of the candidates was better than we could have hoped. We used a scoring scale where 4 represents ‘expectations completely fulfilled’ and 5 represents ‘expectations exceeded’. The course averaged 4.6 across the 12 participants and over seven criteria.Although the interviews were all from the first client’s organisation, we repeated the training programme for several other clients in other organisations, and discovered that the course itself applied equally well to all. The feedback scores were consistent across all courses.
In the intervening ten years, this course has remained our staple approach to equipping people with facilitative leadership skills. Over the years, we have improved it, and accommodated a number of new ideas.
We have also adapted it into two other variants to meet the needs of an evolving facilitation market.
Customer facilitation
The first has been the development of a more flexible two-day version aimed at equipping client staff to facilitate their own customer workshops.
With the growth of cloud based services and the goal of better consumption, we have seen the emergence of Customer Success professionals as a core strategy of software organisations. The role of these specialists is to help their customers ensure they rapidly realise the full benefits of their software purchases. It concerns facilitating the customer in: developing a vision for those benefits; understanding the behavioural changes requires to realise that vision; establishing a programme to bring that about; measuring progress and keeping things on track.
facilitating customer success
Of course, the Customer Success professional has no authority within the customer space, so their success depends on constructing questions and debates that enable their customer’s leadership to self-discover a change management strategy which will most rapidly deliver the results they both want. And facilitation is the core skill in enabling this to happen.Two things were clear at the outset. The first was that the world of software vendors is more volatile than most organisations, and their paradigm for spending time on training is more restrictive. However, the level of skills to be transferred is significantly less than for facilitative leadership, particularly where the customer engagement process is clearly defined.
Our first client was a well known Global software business in the vanguard of Customer Success thinking. The courses we ran for them averaged 30-36 people per course, working in groups of six. They proved very successful, and helped sustain the reputation of this client in this field.
Online facilitation skills
The second emerged in response to the restrictions occasioned by the Covid pandemic. This accelerated people’s use of online methods to collaborate, communicate and manage at a distance.
We originally developed our offering of facilitation skills for online meetings a decade previously, but take-up had been poor. Back in 2008, people tended to seek to recreate their experience of physical round the table meetings in their virtual equivalents. As a result, people saw little need to change the nature of what they did – only the vehicle for it. Accordingly, only some of the more enlightened organisations took up our offer.
new environments bring new possibilities
However, a new environment brings new possibilities, and successive lockdowns have meant that there has been a much greater take up and use of online meetings and virtual collaboration software. It has also provided a greater challenge in ensuring engagement of people at a distance. And it has opened up new ways of thinking about working in this way: better global partnerships; wfh and hybrid working; digital nomads; …We have taken the opportunity to adapt a combination of our successful facilitative leadership programmes into a four-day digital programme.
better than physical meetings
Using best-practice online facilitative approaches, participants are more absorbed and stimulated than they commonly experience, even in physical meetings. As a result it avoids the fatigue and disengagement typical of virtual meetings. Because of this, we can deliver it in full day, which makes it more efficient and easier to schedule into peoples calendars.The programme is highly visual. It uses ten vast virtual whiteboards (similar to the one on the right) to both engage participation and to provide a lasting reference to the learning experience. The boards created in the programme are available to participants after the programme completes as a resource for recall, for extending their practice, and for their own meetings and teamwork.
These programmes are all delivered on a client by client basis. If you are interested in discussing how you might adopt the programme for your own business, please contact us.
Author: Mike Clargo | Culturistics
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