The only 5 collaboration leadership skills you will ever need

The only five collaboration facilitation skills you'll ever need

 

To be a great ‘collaboration facilitator’ is a superpower - and a lifetime’s work.

And I’m not talking about workshop facilitators or trainers whose job it is to run collaborative events.

I mean people like you who are leading sessions every single day, bringing together people to achieve a goal - without any formal training.

People like:

- Team leads

- Project managers

- Product managers

- Technical leads

- Programme leads

And by 'leading sessions', I don't just mean meetings - I mean all the collaborative touch points across a range of modalities. The full connective tissue of collaboration.

Facilitating these touch points for the "participative era" needs a specific skillset. Few are taught it.

Here are core five skills you need.

 

Skill 1: Scoping a clear playing field

Work is messy. Teams are humany. Context is soupy.

Your superpower is to create a clear enough playing field where people:

- Understand where they can work

- Feel confident in the ‘rules’

- Are not second guessing everything, every session

- Feel like they trust you, each other, themselves and the process

- Help people understand and moderate their own styles (nice example from Kerri Price here)

- Have enough clear runway to move forward and do stuff
 

That doesn’t mean locking everything down. If that were possible, you wouldn’t be needed as a collaboration facilitator.

Instead it means, laying out the foundations: core purpose, questions to answer, roles to play.

It means connecting this to the bigger picture.

It means making explicit what’s on the table in this piece of work - and what’s still unknown or unclear.

It means establishing some clear norms so that people are not guessing.

My top choice is to use a team contracting session to share and co-design this playing field at the start.

If that ship has already sailed, I would do it in chunks over the course of meetings and sessions.

  

Skill 2: Designing positive, coherent collaboration experiences

Without design, it’s a free-for-all. Or (worse) an experience that is logical for you but makes no sense to anyone else.

In the first year of my PhD, I created a poster titled: “Are meetings worthy of design thinking?”

One Smart Alec dear friend replied simply: ‘No’

🙂

Luckily, I ignored him. What goes on when we work together (from meetings to async chat) is a design challenge of the first order.

Your superpower is to:

- Create sessions that flow people through collaboration stages such as connecting, sense-making, scoping, disagreeing, resolving and so on.

- Create an ecosystem of meetings and comms that connect together and support the team's work with minimal effort and duplication.

- Deliberately develop the collaborative environment - in the room, on group chat, over the day, week, year, across the project and the programme...

- Develop your own ecology of tools and techniques that you can use in different situations

- Model yourself what you want people to do

- Know when to it’s time to pivot your design!

  

Skill 3: Asking great questions

Good** questions open up, probe, sharpen, intrigue and crucially locate power and agency in the group.

A great question is a provocateur.

 

Your superpower is to:

- Ask questions that welcome people to safely share more of who they are and what they think

- Ask questions that liberate or unblock

- Ask questions that inspire and challenge

- Ask questions that create 100% accountability with 0% blame

- Ask questions that invite progress and action

 

For weekly inspiration, try Steph Vidal-Hall, the Minister for Great Questions

 

**Beware of bad questions which interrogate, blame or override. It the question locates power in you, it’s a bad question.

  

Skill 4: Mastering stepping forward and stepping back

Collaboration is a dance. Sometimes you need to lead this dance, other times to let go and support.

Often you are shifting between the two many times in the course of a single session.

It is this interplay between stepping forward and stepping back which provides the opportunity for the group to take shared responsibility and develop powerful solutions and rituals of their own.

As you step forward and step back, the overall direction of travel is always leading less and supporting more.

You may provide more scaffolding and leadership at the start. Over time, the group starts to establish its own norms.

 

Your super power is to:

- Learn to listen to the room* and turn down the volume of your own thoughts - (there is lots of advice on how to 'get better at listening' but Ian Heaton’s suggests a more accessible starting point: “Spot existing moments when it's time to listen” and Jude Sclater has a technique for stopping yourself talking in the moment)

- Judge when to step forward and when to step back

- Flex a range of styles across the course of a session or conversation (and know when to do so)

- Invite - not compel or ambush

 

*Interesting question: what is ‘the room’ anyway?

  

Skill 5: Radical Acceptance

The most important skill of all. We cannot facilitate a group to the outcome, approach, timing or action we want.

We cannot make anyone in the room think or do something.

We can only create a setting which this is possible and issue an invitation.

Roy Marriott says “If you want less resistance, do less pushing!”

Collaborative progress is made in messy, interactive stumbles - not neat and tidy exercises.

They get it when they’ve kicked it around between them, not just when they hear your soundbite.

You don’t get to pick the exact timing of progress. “They will get there when they are ready”

If you’re not letting people stumble around a bit together and accepting their pace, not yours, you’re in command and control.

Radical acceptance is standing in your power and accepting the situation exactly as it is. Trying to force it to be different is an argument with reality.

 

How to work on these skills

- Have a think about who you are - what’s your style of collaborative facilitation?

- Start with some scaffolding - techniques you use, routines and rituals, templates you start from. Develop your style deliberately.

- Develop some mantras you say in your own head e.g. “They will get there when they are ready"

- Practice stepping forward (e.g. getting good at interrupting in helpful ways) or stepping back 

- Get lots of feedback. Ask the Big Three at the end of each session.