Tips for great inclusive facilitation - Part 1

Based on my personal experience, my readings and some online resources, I have put together 3 blogs of some of the best-in-class practices for inclusive facilitation.

4 min readOct 7, 2019

The Latin word facili is the origin of facilitation. Facili means is “easy” or “to make easy”. However, if you had to run a team meeting, a working session, a workshop of any type of group activities you would know that definitely there is nothing facili about it.

In here I will share with you some of the best practices that I have come across and/or tried so far. I have also added a bit of focus on inclusivity and what you can do to make sure that all your participants are actually contributing and being heard.

I believe that the below can be applicable, with variant degrees of importance, to most types of team activities. Although I might refer to these using various names, that does not mean that any of these practices is limited to any particular activity. However I must admit, I personally often forget to follow all of them hence I decided to write them down🤫.

In this first blog, I will cover the basics of facilitation, the contextual definition of inclusivity, and the bit of homework the facilitator has to do before their session.

Basics

Let’s start by looking at some of the basic requirements for facilitation.

A facilitator controls time and space, they have the responsibility and power (to a certain extent 😛) to set the time needed for the session and to choose the location. They also have the ability to assist the group in arriving at their turning point, simply by being a neutral observer.

A facilitator ought to be patient with members who are less knowledgeable with the matter at hand and affirmative of the team members and their ideas.

Being a facilitator means being fair, empathic, empowering and holding the balance. It requires confidence in oneself and in the team. They need to be ready to be vulnerable and comfortable with the “awkward silence”.

Inclusive facilitation

The focus here is on how to be a great facilitator, and from my perspective, you can’t be one unless if you are ensuring and maintaining inclusivity. Below is one effective approach to start paving the way to an inclusive session.

Set the agenda and share it beforehand.

We all know that a good facilitator prepares for their meeting/session/workshop beforehand. So wouldn’t it be only fair to give the participants the ability to do so as well? By setting up a clear agenda beforehand, you would give all the attendees the chance to prepare themselves before they come to the room. This is essential and empowering for all team members but more so for the shy and introverted ones. It will give them the chance to think and be ready beforehand which increases their ability to actually participate in the session.

💡 Try to write your agenda in the form of questions, this will prompt the attendees to think.

Who should, could and want to be there

You must have heard a lot of people complaining about “one too many” meetings. I believe that this is not because people are having lots of meetings or because they just don’t like having them, rather it is because they are having unnecessary ones. “Well that was a waste of time!” how many times have you heard someone uttering something like this after a meeting, I have certainly heard it a lot.

Think long and hard about who should be invited. Ultimately, you should be inviting only people who can contribute. Use the ‘require’ and ‘optional’ invitees options if your calendar tool offers such a feature.

💡Use your agenda invite not only to explain what the meeting is about but also to actually invite people to decline the invite if they think that they don’t have anything to contribute.

Length is a vital decision

Time can also make a session an “utter waste of time!” if done wrongly. Time should be taken seriously, and trust me it is not an easy business to balance time correctly. Of course it is more difficult if you are running a particular session for the first time, but even if you have done it before, the team’s dynamic, people’s personalities, time of the day, time of the year and even the weather could affect the smoothness and hence the length of your session.

Time limitation has proved to often be a positive push for better efficiency, so if managed properly a shorter session can be more productive and more efficient leaving you and the team with a good sense of productivity.

⚠️ Yes, time limitation is great but could also mean more pressure on those who are less comfortable expressing themselves.

In brief

To summarise, in this piece we covered a few things that you need to remember to take into account, to plan for and to apply before your session. We laid out some of the basic rules for inclusive facilitation and we focused on the run-up to the session, how to get your invite and agenda ready, how to decide on invitees and how to account for time.

In Part Two of this series of blogs, I will cover the very first few minutes of the session and the things needed to be in check before you dive in into what might some think as the important part of the session, the session itself. Stay tuned!