Facilitative Leadership – Leading by Adventure

Shared individual ownership of change is the most powerful mechanism of making your vision happen. It empowers a huge increase in good timely decisions at the coalface of the organisation’s operations. Such is the power of good facilitative leadership.

Furthermore, facilitative leadership massively reduces the need for overhead decisions and delays that would otherwise attend these in an unempowered model. Basically, it enables Agile.

Consequently, facilitative leadership allows for the millions of daily autonomous local decisions that are required to respond to the complexity and change around us. And it also helps to ensure that they all point in the direction the organisation is intending.

Conversely, without it, the danger is that one of two things happen. Either the restrictions placed on local autonomy limit the realisation of unexpected opportunities. Or we deflect such decisions upward and risk inefficiency, delay, stress and mental health issues, as the pace of change increases.

The impact of digital

The reality is that the future of work will require new paradigms of leadership. And a totally different set of skills to support it.

Digitalisation and AI will increasingly automate all routine activity and free us from repetitive tasks and mundane patterns of work. Paradoxically, the increase in computerisation will free people to be more ‘human’ in their roles. Such that they can focus away from machine-like drudgery and toward the things to which humans are intrinsically better suited. Such as relationships, caring ideas, empathy, insights, spontaneity, …

As roles shift, change will become an increasing factor in all our people’s work. Change in their own roles, and change in what is required to support others’ changing roles. As such, roles will become more autonomous and self-directed to respond effectively. And leadership of these roles will need to adjust to accommodate this.

A new way of leading

Key to our leadership success will be maintaining our people’s individual ownership of their own self-direction and learning. And to achieve this, we will need to ‘draw answers out’ rather than ‘push them in’. The principle of self-discovery will be vital.

Designing and facilitating situations to achieve this will become the core leadership skill. Our responsibility as leaders will be for the meta-level. The level that thinks about what might need to change to enable our people to better work out their answers for themselves. Not just once, but on an ongoing basis.

The facilitative approach to leadership is all about building understanding and ownership through participation. And about drawing others into their potential through engaging their ownership for results and strategy (strategy engagement).

Our success in facilitating self-directed growth effectively will be determined by the extent to which we can release a sense of adventure in our people.

Increasing change is a fact of our working lives. And, even now, people are either adventuring into it, or falling victim to it. The latter with all the inevitable impact on mental well-being each entails.

Every new challenge that our teams encounter is not just an opportunity to grow or protect our business performance as the team works on the problem, it is also an opportunity to grow the potential of our people, as the problem works on the team.

Every challenge can be a new adventure to someone – whether in finding the answer directly, or in coaching and developing those that will.

And utilising this opportunity for adventure will help our talent not only learn, but also thrive, enjoy, inspire, and become of greater value to those around them.

Increasingly, we are seeing leaders move away from directive styles, to a more facilitative approach . But for many, this is largely self-taught, and barely scratches the surface of the wide range of  facilitative tools and techniques that are available. As such, many are neither particularly well equipped, or confident beyond a basic level, in the facilitative approach.

However, as the rate of change and the level of stress increases within existing structures, managers tend to fall back on what they know and what has worked for them before. These are usually more directive styles and tend to create the problems described in the previous paragraph.

One particular aspect of the facilitative approach that is currently underutilised  is the use of participative tools and templates.

Tools and templates are effective in progressing dialogue by naturally enabling a facilitative situation through attracting active participation.

However, despite their effectiveness, and their free availability, they are very little used, and this illustrates an important point.

The fact is, some level of facilitation is usually necessary to shift the leadership paradigm, build confidence levels, and establish new norms.

Culturistics’ wide range of resources include readily available tools and techniques to achieve everything facilitative leaders require. They work both online and in-person. Helping your people lead both physically and remotely whenever it is required. And our Facilitative Leadership Training provides the insight, experience and skill building to support this. And to create a shared vocabulary at all levels of your leadership team that enable them to continue to grow and develop together – remotely and in-person.

Furthermore, our approach supports the emerging concept of every person leadership. The idea that leadership is a choice, open to all, all the time. Our Facilitation Training equips all of your staff with the skills and approaches to realise this idea practically. Both for themselves and their colleagues. It equips everyone with approaches they can use to offer servant leadership, and to see it accepted. For more on this, visit our case study.

Basically, facilitative leadership approaches are the most effective means of ensuring your leadership levels:

You can discover more about facilitative leadership and a few of the more basic techniques that support this by clicking on the links in this sentence. Or, to explore this topic further, feel free to contact us. We find our own thinking is continually sharpened and enriched by the questions people ask. And by the discussions that emerge from it.