Facilitation Excellence
- PatriciaKeays
- Jan 6
- 8 min read
Introduction
What does it mean to be excellent at facilitation? Unlike a static skill or single competence, facilitation excellence is dynamic - like a kaleidoscope pattern. The core dimensions of the role recombine into a unique form for each event, group and purpose. This means excellence is both context-specific and pattern-based.
Purpose is the compass: results are the lodestar
Purpose and goal-level results are at the heart of excellent facilitation. For this reason, they are also at the core of the facilitation spiral, the basis of the Facilitate It methodology.
Purpose and results are key to successful facilitation of all types. While this may seem obvious, in practice, purpose can slide into the background and results slip out of reach, especially when private agendas compete with collective goals.
Excellence requires crystal clarity on purpose and results. This often takes more time than organizers or facilitators allow. We assume organizers of an event or process are clear about the why and what. Sometimes they are. Sometimes not so much. And many times a range of purposes apply. In such a case, a facilitator’s job includes co-developing a shared sense of priorities and “holding it” on behalf of the group and process. A best practice is to integrate key checkpoints into design to take stock of alignment with purpose and progress towards goals.
A common pitfall: purpose and results are set at the start of planning, then rarely referenced again as “must dos” take over. Risks are magnified when no explicit agreement exists on purpose and results are weakly framed.
Excellence in action: a requirements checklist
Standards of facilitation excellence depend on an event’s purpose, a facilitator’s primary role, and stakeholder expectations. Against this purpose-driven foundation, excellence manifests across the full cycle: design, preparation, execution, and follow-up.
The facilitator’s role can vary widely, as outlined in the post on The Discipline of Facilitation. It can cover everything from managing meetings to mediating complex interactions, from executing a specific decision to supporting a change process. Each role requires a different blend of requirements for excellence, for example:
Consult what excellence means to lead organizers and seniors, influencers; tailor it
Set high expectations for excellence, even if they aren’t met: don’t under-estimate people
Set purpose as the lodestar and results as the destination: don’t get sidetracked
Design a strong agenda for the available time, aligned to the purpose and participants
Set clear session objectives and outputs, as a linked pair – these inform methods
Select or design varied methods and techniques linked to objectives; hold interest
Ensure engagement through interactive planning and methods selection
Select and set up a room to support goals, objectives and plans
Integrate maximum interaction – in pairs, groups of 3, small groups, task teams
Integrate reflection through a programme and agenda; treat it as a leadership practice
Adjust flexibly if the agenda or plans don’t unfold as expected; have plans B, C and D ready
Ensure a strong co-facilitation team and back-up plans, especially for complexity
Integrate a human, social theme – people need to connect, not only engage.
Achieve facilitation excellence by listening
Build excellence by actively seeking and listening to participant feedback – before, during and after an event. Integrate informal check-ins and structured points for different types of input. Actively listen to and consolidate what you hear, debriefing it with your co-facilitation team. Balance this feedback with your own observations of group dynamics.
Participant feedback can be positive, reinforcing and encouraging. Or it can be critical and negative. Be open to and recognize it all, even the parts that make you uncomfortable. Model the ways you want participants to be engaging with each other: “argue the point, not the person”.
The confidence boost of positive feedback
The welcome post to the Facilitate It website, Process Meets Impact, contains examples of participant feedback that illustrate how valuable it can be for strengthening capacity and aspiring to excellence. Rarely will all the people in a group be equally satisfied with everything. Those who aren’t satisfied are telling us something important.
The following examples contain the kind of feedback that facilitators strive for.
Facilitators build excellence by respecting all participant feedback and taking it seriously – the good, the bad and the ugly. Reinforce your confidence with the positive.
The gift of negative feedback
Use less positive feedback to a) adjust in the moment, when feedback is requested by session or daily, and b) transfer forward to lessons for the future. Integrated feedback underpins a dynamic, responsive process that adapts to reality as it unfolds, without losing sight of purpose and results.
These feedback points all define room for improvement. You will get such candid feedback when you have helped create a safe and positive environment. Facilitation excellence includes pre-emptive measures and process management measures that avoid such experiences, such as:
Model strong design: advocate for and model strong design with enough time for methods and objectives
Directly address unrealistic thinking: throughout planning and preparation, be explicit about unrealistic and magical thinking about time. Avoid pressure to pack in too much. "If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it again?"
Set clear time limits as part of planning: set clear time limits for presentations as part of wider methods and sequences and brief resource people and participants well
Be flexible with options for continuing discussion: have several options ready to continue discussion when time runs out and hands are up. For example: transfer the conversation to lunch; convene an informal session after close of day; transfer continuing attention to the theme to mainstream work processes
Enforce agreed norms firmly and politely: This requires a firm hand, to cut off monologues and prevent domination of discussion. These skills grow with expertise. Consistent time management benefits the whole group, even if it may disappoint an individual.
Redirect downward spirals: When discussion devolves into micro-issues, suggest new topics to redirect the group or reinforce its positive prior work as a base on which to build. Remind people of purpose and results. Serve as the group’s choreographer to keep collective ‘eyes on the prize’.
Meet expectations proactively: anticipate and meet needs where you can, and clearly communicate the ‘why’ when you cannot.
Meet basic needs – e.g. water, coffee, well-time breaks. "No coffee before breakfast available" may seem like a minor complaint or criticism. But if participants don’t feel their basic needs have been met, including coffee, it can colour their engagement and perceptions of other parts of a process.
Set realistic standards for “excellence” – in some situations, “good enough” is excellent
For complex events with diverse perspective and potential spoilers, facilitators can rightly be satisfied with evaluation ratings that are mostly positive, while capturing diverse opinions.
Invite disaggregated feedback, so you can focus on sources of less positive feedback and assess contributing factors. Interpreting evaluation feedback requires more than a simple read and knowing the source group of specific input can help you calibrate it as part of the whole picture.
Facilitation ratings, on scale of 1-10 with 1 as very poor and 10 as excellent
Sample feedback distribution across stakeholder groups showing majority “Excellent” ratings
For all event and process evaluations, combine rating questions with narrative questions and use specifics in the narrative questions to give depth and specificity to the ratings. Include questions about the experience and about priorities for follow-up and next steps, transfer to action.
Aggregate percentages of total ratings with descriptors, as well as group specific profiles of feedback by source.
Percentages of total ratings on facilitation
10 – Excellent 53.5%
9 – Very good 26.3%
8 – Good 12.7%
7 – Satisfactory 6.8%
6 – Adequate: 0.7%
How do we get this kind of positive feedback?
Some people have natural charisma and aptitude for bringing people together in productive ways. “The human touch” is irreplaceable.
People who are productively engaged with themes tend to enjoy themselves and are generally satisfied, particularly when their inputs and priorities have been integrated into design.
For most of us, highly positive feedback is earned the hard way: through learning, testing, practicing, and sometimes failing. Some parts of facilitation inevitably involve risk and the unknown. We improve by studying, becoming more organized as we manage everything from granular details to the big picture, and committing to a deliberately collaborative and co-facilitated approach that distributes key tasks throughout a group.
Across all types and aspects of facilitation covered in this post, each of us can strengthen and elevate specific competencies. Sometimes experienced facilitators get over-confident. Sometimes less experienced ones aren’t able to gauge their own capacity.
A key lesson from experience is that facilitators get this kind of positive facilitation feedback by enabling others to be excellent: resource people, co-facilitators, the participants.
Beyond the solo facilitator: build a facilitation team’s capacity to be excellent
Individual facilitator competence is “necessary but insufficient” because effective facilitation is collaborative work, collective work. Facilitation team members support each other and give feedback when gaps in the process fabric are compromising the whole tapestry.
The larger and more significant the event, the more you need team members who are able and capacitated to lead on specific themes within a unified design. A co-facilitation team is a strongly recommended best practice. It takes more preparatory work than hiring a facilitator and assigning that person “the job”, but the benefits show in smooth flow and distributed tasks.
Set clear Terms of Reference for key functions on a co-facilitation team. Support collaboration and build capacity around common purpose, results and standards. Schedule daily co-facilitation team meetings and require that all key people attend, including organizers who may often over-book.
Without a strong, informed facilitation team to collectively raise all key parts of a process or event towards shared purpose, plans may not come to life or rise off a page. Certain people and agendas may dominate with negative impact on the group process and results over-all.
Engage everyone in process facilitation: strengthen capacity of participants to be excellent
Building team and collective facilitation competence includes building the capacity of participants to maximize both what they contribute to a process and what they take away from it. An example is ensuring process norms / rules of engagement are finalized together as an agreement at the beginning of a process or event, and all facilitation team members and participants are empowered to help the group keep to them. Other key ones are ensuring crystal clear instructions and guidance for working group activities, and adequate time for chosen methods.
Provide instructions in multiple formats: visual, verbal and printed, to accommodate different processing styles. Project guiding questions for table discussion and keep them visible. Encourage participants to take photographs of projected instructions so if they move to break out groups or a slide disappears, they can stay on track. Provide printed reference copies of instructions or another slide in each break-out room. Ensure that co-facilitation members are well prepared and briefed, ready to bring consistent interpretation to instructions and guidance.
These points illustrate why a robust facilitation methodology requires a comprehensive facilitation model.
The Facilitate It learning spiral methodology helps people systematically strengthen their individual and collective facilitation capacity to a gold standard of excellence and beyond. The proof is in the impact and lasting change that result from well designed and well facilitated events and processes.
In closing
Facilitation excellence is marked by the impact you support a group to have. It is nurtured through the systematic alignment of purpose, results, design, resources, methods, teamwork and equitable inclusion. Excellence manifests in the capacity built and the sustainable change enabled in, with and for others.
Facilitation is a practice, a discipline, and a spiral of continuous learning through which the true measures of excellence are the lasting results and change you help a group achieve.
More immediately visible measures include whether people fully engage and build on each other’s work towards a collective result, and how they are supported to enjoy themselves as they contribute their best. If you can confidently relax into a process and enjoy yourself, you give participants permission to do the same.