Facilitative Leadership - Leading the Way

Facilitative leadership is a process where goal achievement is realized through effective relationship building.

The Leader’s Role

The success of facilitative leadership is in direct proportion to the effectiveness of the leader. Your relationship with your supervisor or manager is the most important determinant of employee productivity.

Like most employees, you want your supervisor to do the following: give clear expectations, value your special skills and offer to be a coach or mentor to you so that you can advance your career opportunities.

The efficient leader will understand how to improve group dynamics. This is demonstrated by keeping group discussion focused and productive. Tangents are just a time waster.

The group leader will clearly define expectations to you and the rest of your team. You will be asked to become involved in critical decision making issues. The leader will head meetings when opposing viewpoints are presented and respectfully acknowledge both sides.

Fair Process

Another component of facilitative leadership is fair process. Fair process is concerned with fairness as it relates to the way a company makes and implements decisions.

Leaders should request your opinions in decisions that will directly affect you. This allows you to bring up any problems that changing a process might bring. Sometimes, the management is not aware of the particulars of a given task.

For example, if management changes a report deadline without consulting with the actual employees doing the task, they may run into barriers. Some of the information listed on the report is not available from Corporate until 2 days after the new deadline.

The current deadline takes into account the minimum amount of time in order to compile all the necessary information and to submit the report.

Fair process allows manager to solicit you and other team members for your input and recommendations. It creates an atmosphere of a partnership where you feel valued. This is certain to raise morale and increase productivity.

Dynamics of Interaction

The dynamics of interaction also plays a critical role in facilitative leadership. In all group discussions, there is content, process and emotion. The content is the actual subject matter or issue that is being discussed.

The process is how you work with others and how you are talking about the subject matter. Emotion is what you express about work and each other. Active listening and queries greatly assist the dynamics of interaction.

For example, there are techniques and skills that help the dynamics. Open-ended questions, instead of questions that require a yes or no answer, encourage more in-depth replies.

Questions such as how, what or why will elicit a more detailed and informative response. Other techniques include: paraphrase, summarize, reframing and body language.

Reaching Consensus

Once the process has moved beyond information gathering and advanced discussions, the leader will attempt to finalize a decision. Consensus is the way in which a solution or proposal acceptable to all members is negotiated.

The leaders gets the group to agree on the consensus, set a time limit for making the decision, have an alternate decision in place and have the members vote.

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Victor Ghebre is the editor of settinggoals101.com where you get practical tips and information on goal setting, motivation, leadership and more.