The Change Facilitator: Dynamic Group Facilitation Skills

One of my clients, a learning and development manager from a major mobile company, stopped me recently (after I’d been facilitating a strategy session for a group of her senior executives), “How did you do that Neil? There are so many big egos in that room. How did you read them? They’re not normally creative, how did you get them working together to come up with all those innovative ideas? And then, what magic did you use to get them to align and agree to a path forward? That’s never happened before. I wish I could learn to do that.“You could do it easily” I replied, knowing her skill as a coach and L & D consultant, “I’m happy to mentor you if you like.“She looked a little confused. “Mentor? You mean teach don’t you?” She knew, after all, that I run one of the UK’s most successful change facilitation schools.“No, I think mentoring is much more appropriate for developing facilitation skills, don’t you? The trick, I believe, is ’trying on skills and attitudes’, assimilating the ones that work for you until you become a very best facilitator you can be. It’s a continual learning process. It’s not just about just learning skills or a set formula, it’s about ‘being’ and ‘doing’. That way you have true behavioural flexibility when you’re working with a group and you can flex to their needs rather than forcing them to play by your rules. Like great coaching, great facilitation is a conversation with a purpose. It’s more a set of ideas and principles working together, rather than a rigid plan. I’m willing to share the bits that I think make the most difference if you like.“My client was delighted and over the next few months I mentored her to become a really effective facilitator. And I’d like to make the same offer to you here on Udemy. I’d really love to have the opportunity to share what I believe are the most important ideas, tools and distinctions for a facilitator to have at their disposal. And I’d like to encourage you to try them on. I really do believe that if you throw yourself into this programme you can significantly increase your effectiveness in working with groups and in facilitating learning or change. Mentoring, after all, is simply about me saying ‘I’ve walked this path before. And I’ve been pretty successful at it. I’ve learnt a great deal, and have tried on even more. Would you be interested in hearing about the best bits of what I’ve learnt? And would you then, like to try on those ideas to see if you can get similar results in your professional life?‘If this sounds of interest, then I’d love to get to know you better and do my very best through these videos to help you accelerate your facilitation journey. Now, you may have already noticed that this isn’t the shortest course on Udemy. In fact it runs to over 7 hours of video and that’s without time for the exercises and practice that we suggest throughout. This isn’t for the fainthearted. It’s for people who really want to step up and facilitate. We’ve put in a huge amount of effort to develop a programme that layers skills in much the same ways as I’d do it face to face if we had the opportunity to work together in person. If you are only curious about facilitation and want a bluffers guide, or you want someone to be prescriptive and tell you what to do, then this course probably isn’t for you - you’d possibly be better off starting with one of the lighter, shorter courses available on Udemy. Then, after that, if you want to ramp up your skills and accelerate your skills, then we’d be delighted to welcome you here onto our mentoring programme. Why have we made it so long? Well the simple answer is we had a lot to say. But that doesn’t really do the question justice. It would have made more commercial sense to make it shorter or to chop it into four courses, but we have a bigger mission. I really do believe that the world needs incredible facilitators right now and this course is intended to add value to people who share our vision and want to be part of making a positive difference in the world. I believe that facilitation skills really are that powerful. The world and business is changing at an ever increasing pace and highly skilled facilitators are already at the heart of helping people navigate change and find ways to thrive personally and professionally. You are very welcome to join us if you’re a complete beginner as long as you have a facilitation project in mind that you can apply the learning to. This material comes to life through application. It isn’t intended as just theoretical knowledge. And also please remember this is mentoring not a formulaic programme. You need to be willing to layer your own learning and experiment to build your skills. Of course having some sort of experience as a coach, trainer, consultant, youth worker, manager, counsellor, learning and development professional, charity support worker, change activist, project manager, or similar, will be massively useful. There are five key categories of student that we tend to attract to this programme. Coaches, consultants, L & D profes