percentage of facilitators

[Max_Schupbach]

Dear colleagues,
I have a question for you, which came recently up in a discussion with colleagues. Let's suppose you had a company of 100,000 people in the engineering section, and they decide to become a "facilitative" organizations, meaning to use facilitators for meetings, teambuilding, etc, and they also decide not to use external facilitators, but instead develop a pool of in house facilitators. And lets suppose the majority of them would not be full time facilitators, but be involved in other activities, like HR, training, etc. Also suppose they are located on all continents and have a diverse workforce. How many facilitators would you train, and what are the reasons you are suggesting this number?

Thanks and enjoy the summer, if you are like me in the northern hemisphere Max

[Rosa_Zubizarreta]

Hi Max...

What an interesting question!

If I were managing such a company, I'd want to offer the opportunity to learn facilitation to anyone who is interested, maybe as an enhancement to a broader leadership development program that might already be in place.

In terms of numbers, I guess I'd aim for eventually reaching somewhere between 1-in-20 or 1-in-10 employees... but a more realistic starting point might be 1-in-50 or 1-in-100!

Since I see facilitation as a crucial leadership skill, I'd be encouraging folks in those positions to develop these abilities as part of their repertoire...

However, I would not limit the opportunity to people who are already in management roles, nor just to people who are already in HR and training, but instead open it up more broadly.

[Jim_Troxel]

Fun question, Max!
I'd say 100 on the ratio of 1:100.
Jim

[Max_Schupbach]

thanks Rosa and Jim for your help. I appreciate it.
best
max

www.maxfxx.net
www.deepdemocracyinstitute.org

[Mary_Jackson]

Max, I would consider making a class like Leadership Strategies' "Masterful Meetings" available to every manager in the organization, from the top down. That would give you a ratio based on the management structure of your organization. I would pick the managers because they have to be on board, and they model the expected behavior for their teams. There is also a problem once people understand what good facilitation is like, embrace the idea that everyone can do it...and recognize that their superiors don't have the skills.

You can have a smaller number of people who take full-blown facilitation training as needed. "As needed" will be easier to identify if you have a strong baseline.

Most facilitation classes are targeted toward people who facilitate as their primary skill set, so they can miss the mark when you try to push that skill out to people who are primarily focused (and measured) in different ways. "Masterful Meetings" teaches people to be effective in group process settings, which is really what we want.

I have a story (always...). I had a meeting scheduled for 2:30 on a day when the meeting organizer was taking the "Masterful Meetings" class until 2:00. Three of the participants had other meetings until 2:30 in another part of the building, and we had all said we would be late, but had accepted. In the middle of the morning, on a break from the class, I received an Outlook Calendar update -- the guy had rescheduled the meeting to 2:45, when we could all get there. The update also included an agenda that told us what to bring to the meeting, and what decisions would be made. That was only the first step.

The meeting started with the agenda. A couple of people said they didn't see how we could get through the business in the time allotted...but we did. I had been in this guy's meetings before, and this was a transformation. At the end of the meeting, we had time to evaluate the process.

I'm pretty sure Leadership Strategies markets this as a two-day class. They won't thank me for spreading this around, but I got them to squeeze it down to 6 hours (with a lot of protest). Was that enough time? No -- but students were willing to commit. At the end of class, I got requests for more, instead of complaints about wasting time. Part of the deal is getting people to admit that they have a problem that is worth spending time on, and a vision of what success looks like.

[Jon_Jenkins]

Hi all

I think we are overly enamoured with training. While I agree that training is needed, I think there are more effective ways of acquiring facilitation competencies. It is pretty clear that a basis created with some kind of training program is a start. The first additional way of acquiring these competencies is co-facilitating with master facilitators and being coached by him or her. I think the coaching should take place the day or evening of the facilitation. I would see this co-facilitating being done with a number of master facilitators. The second is a system through which people have an opportunity to facilitate meetings as many times as possible. I would see something like a minimum of once a month and more often better . The third is to encourage self-learning teams to develop. These would meet as often as possible to help each other by trying out new techniques, designing workshops and discussing other issues that come up. Fourth, I would enable people to attend external training programs especially those that are based on different philosophies of facilitation. For example if you are trainig people in Open Space Technilogy you might encourage that they take things like ToP methods or Appreciative Inquiry or The Skilled Facilitator approach.

To answer the numbers question. I would see about 100 master facilitators. They would be capable of handling any facilitation problem that comes up. They need to be competent in a number of approaches to facilitation and they need to assist in the design and development of facilitated events. There would need to be 1000 journeyman/woman facilitators.

You will need about 5000 facilitators in training.

Naturally, all of this depends on the structure of the organization and what kind of facilitation you would like to use.

I would see every team and project leader and all managers have some basic knowledge and skills in leading meetings.

What do others think?

best

Jon Jenkins
Imaginal Training, and
Hanze University of Applied Sciences
Groningen, The Netherlands
http://www.iaf-methods.org (http://www.iaf-methods.org/)
http://www.imaginal.nl (http://www.imaginal.nl/)