Premise
We are living in a world that is constantly changing and we are leading teams that are engaged in knowledge work. This means that the team members are already experts at what they do.
This also means that we are not always the smartest person in the rooms we are in. In addition, we will soon have AI agents joining the teams, if they are not there already.
We need to rethink our role as a leader and find ways to evolve to continue to stay relevant and continue to create value.
One way we can continue to stay relevant is to become the glue that holds the team together and enables free flow of information between people and ensure that the AI agents and the team work well together.
The more specialised the knowledge of the people we lead, the more difficult it becomes for us to be the person that they go to for technical advice and the more important our role becomes as the glue that holds all the team members together.
We can do that by becoming expert facilitators.
Expert facilitators do four things really well – they are well prepared (know exactly what every interaction is for), they follow a process (different processes lead to different results), they are not only present but exhibit presence and lastly they are great at spotting patterns and respond to them.
Lets explore one by one what this means for us as leaders.
Prepared
Any good facilitator knows exactly what they need to achieve from every interaction that they facilitate. This clarity on the goal is what differentiates good facilitators from the best.
They do the background prep work to understand the context, the problem that they are trying to solve, the idea they are trying to flesh out, the interpersonal issue they are trying to address.
In short, they know what they are walking into, they know what is expected out of them and they are aware of the dynamics at play.
As leaders, we would do well by being as prepared as expert facilitators are. We need to treat each interaction with our team (in group), as an opportunity to hold space, know the dynamics at play.
We need to know with clarity, the goal that all of us need to move towards. We need to understand the strengths that each participant (human or AI) brings with them and have a plan on how to leverage it.
We need to have a clear plan on how to bring the strengths of each participant to the fore while masking or addressing the weaknesses, in a way that as a team, we are better positioned to achieve our goals.
Just like expert facilitators work on themselves and how they show up in any interaction, we need to do our self-work and show up in any of our interactions in the best state for that interaction.
Process
Expert facilitators have a number of processes in their facilatators toolkit that they can bring out based on the goal that they are trying to achieve. The International Association of Facilitators has put together a list of more than 50 different kinds of processes that facilitators can pick and chose from, in order to facilitate any conversation.
Each process is geared towards addressing a specific kind of conversation. There are process frameworks to enable engagement, methods to solve problems, methods to generate ideas or have difficult conversations.
As leaders, we can benefit a lot by learning about these methods and processes and leverage them in our work with our teams. Any 1-many conversation needs to have an intentionality to it – a goal we are moving towards and based on that a specific method we are deploying to achieve it.
Presence
The key skill of facilitators is their ability to hold space for all the people in the room. They exhibit presence – they are not only fully present (physically, intellectually and spiritually), they are fully aware of what is happening in the room.
They are aware of who is contributing, who is holding back and whose voice hasnt been heard. They can sense resistance or shifts in energy in the room. They are aware of the inter-personal dynamics playing out in the room.
They also understand when someone is speaking from their strength and when someone is jockeying for power and status. They have an intuitive understanding of who needs to contribute in any given moment.
They also understand when they should hold space for the participants to contribute and when they should intervene and hold space for people to reflect on what was discussed.
As leaders, if we can learn to do this, we would benefit enormously as a leader and the effectiveness of the entire team can go up a notch.
Specifically, in a world where we will have people and AI agents working together, we need to know when to bring in the humans to play and when to bring in the AI Agents to play.
We need to know how to leverage the power of the AI agents, how to leverage the power of the human intuition, imagination and the knowledge of the real world and blend them together to come up with the best idea as a team.
We would do well by understanding their strengths and amplify them, know when they are weak and supplement them. Know when to hold space and when to intervene.
Patterns
Great facilitators know and understand that all communications and interactions follow patterns. Jockeying for power follows a pattern. There is a difference between the silence of an introvert, the silence of someone not having anything worthwhile to contribute and the silence of resistance.
They understand what good interaction looks and feels like, what great interaction looks and feels like and what stale interaction looks and feels like.
They are able to gauge the shifts in energy in the room based on the patterns that the participants exhibit and through their own presence. When they see these patterns play out, they are not only able to catch it, but also understand how to address them in a way that we continue to move towards our stated goal and not away from it.
Similarly, if we want to be effective leaders, we need to learn to identify such patterns of behaviours and learn how to interrupt and break the patterns when necessary and amplify the patterns when that serves the needs of the team.
In conclusion
In conclusion, the only difference between expert facilitators and leaders worth following is that expert facilitators do not have a skin in the game. They are usually neutral and all the content for the interaction and discussion comes from the team.
However, as a leader, we still have skin in the game and we are not completely neutral as we are leading the team towards a specific kind of outcome and have relevant information to share in the conversation.
This makes it even more important for us to be able to bring the full focus of an expert facilitator in all our interactions, while knowing that we run the risk of baising the interaction based on our own points of view.
It is also the reason, we should be the last to share our own opinion or point of view, only if it hasn’t come up in the interaction organically. If it has, we dont have any business of reiterating the same.
This ensures that the decisions made in the discussion cover all the distinct points of view of our team, well considered. And the decision made is by the team and for the benefit of the team. We have just held the space for the team to debate and let the best idea win.
This increases employee engagement, creates a sense of ownership and gives us the ability to groom our team into becoming better leaders, thereby making us a leader worth following.
This is how I believe we can move from being a commander to becoming a conductor and lead our teams of human experts and AI Agents to become a high performing team.
