Tag Archives: servant leadership

Skills for a Facilitative Leader

toolbox

As folks know, I have been noodling on what a style of leadership I’ve deemed as facilitative leadership.  Some may be wondering, what skills do I need to be a facilitative leader.  I’ve given it some thought; it’s certainly not exhaustive and still may need some tweaking, but here’s some basics I’ve thought of so far…

  • An ability to engage co-workers in a manner that is both egalitarian and fruitful; co-workers includes peers, subordinates, and superiors – granted non-equal in authority people have to also release that relationship on their side to be wholly effective, suspend it if you were, but you as the facilitative leader should not be holding onto that relationship.
  • An ability to serve others and help fulfill their agenda over yours as long as it thoughtfully considers others points of view in a non-destructive manner.
  • An ability to elevate the assumptions of others in a non-threatening manner, whether it be about their agendas, intentions, or ideas.
  • An ability to humbly inquire on the path or agenda being taken to ensure it is right for the moment.

These four abilities/skills are my current essential feelings as to what is necessary for being a successful facilitative leader. There may be others. What would you add or change?

Everyone Can Be Facilitative Leaders

tree_of_diversity

One may wonder why in my Leadership Quadrant post I mentioned that there is more room for people to be leaders when based on facilitative leadership thinking.  This is explained by the two dimensions…

When leadership is based on power, this promotes hierarchical formal power relationships; only so many can report to a leader under this arrangement.  An organization may choose a flatter structure, but ultimately decision-making authority rests in appointed or elected people at the top of a pyramid structure.  Only people in these positions get to wield authority.

When directing is the preferred mode of operating, there is a limit to how many directors one can have.  So even though a Utopian Benevolent Dictatorial Leader wants to help others, there is very little room for others to lead in their viewpoint. They have a sincere belief they know what is best.

In “Becoming a Technical Leader: An Organic Problem-Solving Approach” by Gerald Weinberg, he talks about how anyone can become a leader through helping others. This is at the core of Servant Leadership and when this is done in a participative manner, it becomes facilitative in nature. Leadership derived in this manner happens irrespective of what formal structures are in place.  Everyone has expertise and can lend assistance in some area and thus at any time one can be a leader; authority is derived from people’s sustained willingness to follow.

Leaders that then get appointed or elected to some formal authority role (supervisor, manager, etc.) that were already using a facilitative leadership approach gain much more capacity to get things done; people were already willingly giving them authority, the new position just confirms that belief.  As long as the individual doesn’t switch too far to other extremes in the dimensions, they should be able to sustain this willingly given authority.

Facilitative Leadership Overview

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In my last post I brought up the concept of a facilitative leader; so what do facilitative leaders do and how do the effectively lead?

What facilitative leaders do

I won’t go into exhaustive details here as this itself could be several posts, however it is important to have some idea what makes a facilitative leader distinct and that is the behaviors they exhibit. We’ll discuss this as if the behaviors are in the upper right of the Leadership Quadrant.

So in this space, a facilitative leader exhibits a desire to serve others, much like a servant leader as described by Robert Greenleaf. They also are participatory in nature, thus rather than say define a plan for a group to do work towards a goal, she or he will help the people create the plan so that is theirs. Thus a facilitative leader is one who helps the group collectively solicit and select creative ideas for the work and committing to complete it.

They also help individuals cope with their ever-changing roles and responsibilities as the team organizes and executes the work. They act as outside observers and offer improvements to the group and overall organization at large. They help the group gain clarity in the goal. They lead through influence.

How facilitative leaders effectively lead

As we explored in the last post, in order to be an effective leader, particularly when using influence as your primary mechanism, one must maintain good will with those you are leading.

Will_Equation

When your actions are opposite of what you say you will do, they work against each other and your will approaches zero. Since influence is based on will, this reduces your leadership effectiveness.

Here’s a few examples, I say I have an open door policy and will listen and attend to people’s needs. If people bring these to me and I never listen, perhaps always finding ways to dismiss their needs, or I never take action when I say I will, I am undermining my will and thus my ability to influence behaviors, my primary mechanism to lead.

If on the other hand, I state I will observe where people appear to have roadblocks and help them through them, followed by attending stand-ups hearing of impediments outside a team’s control and visibly taking action on them, I gain will to get things done.

Side note: for most of this article, I called people a group, that was to emphasize two aspects – 1) this can be done in a non-team environment, particularly if you are a leader that has authority. And 2) you actually don’t need to have authority to influence folks through will; this generally not true where you are directive in nature, there you needed to have been granted authority in some manner.

Leadership Quadrants & the Facilitative Leader

Helping_Someone_ClimbIts been awhile since I posted…

I’ve been noodling on a many dozen things, but one that is resonating currently with me is leadership styles.  there are dozens of books on this topic and so I have decided to ignore them momentarily to give you a simple framework based on two dimensions: participation directing and focus on power others.

To help us visualize this, here is the two dimensions shown on a graph:

Leadership_Quadrants

Each dimension is a spectrum; these aren’t discrete spaces and people may move on these dimensions based on comfort level, experiences, and a whole host of other factors.  If I considered only the X-axis, the right side would those that want to be servant-leaders and the left side would be controlling leaders.  These have behaviors; the Y-axis adds in other behaviors.  For clarity, let me repeat something that Robert Greenleaf said in his book “The Servant as Leader”;

The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. That person is sharply different from one who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions…The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types. Between them there are shadings and blends that are part of the infinite variety of human nature.

With this is mind, and adding in the degree of participation to directing, which are another form of style, we can see that a mix of behaviors begin appearing in how I execute being a leader. Greenleaf’s book focuses on motives IMHO, but the manifestation/execution also matters a lot.  While a Utopian Benevolent Dictatorial Leader wants to help people, how they do it is entirely different.  They are going to direct what they think is best and not seek input from others. This may reduce their effectiveness overtime as people gain more awareness in the fact they don’t have say; this is regardless of the leader’s intentions.

I want to emphasize that a Facilitative Leader is one that has the Facilitation Kernel at their core – they are not only serving others, but doing so entirely on behalf of the group with their participation.  They treat those they lead as peers.  Facilitative leaders lead through sheer will and thus are clear in ensuring their actions and statements match.  When they don’t, then most likely they lose power as it is all based on influence.

Will_Equation

What’s nice is there exists more room for Facilitative Leaders within an organization than there can be for the other three styles.

I have some more thoughts on what Facilitative Leaders do, but I’ll save that for another post.