Photo Credit: Unsplash/Vitaly Gariev
Ask five board members what a facilitator does and you’ll get five different answers. One will say they run the meeting. Another will say they’re the person who shows up with the sticky notes. A third will describe a consultant who somehow never gives advice. A fourth will picture a referee for the board’s tougher conversations. And the fifth will shrug and admit they’ve never been entirely sure.
I’ve been on both sides of that confusion. I’ve hired outside help as an association executive, and I’ve been the person at the front of the room holding the marker. From either seat, the worst problems I’ve seen didn’t start in the session. They started weeks earlier, when nobody had agreed on what a facilitator was supposed to do.
That’s what this series is about. Aaron Wolowiec and I are going to walk through how to find, hire, and work with a facilitator, and we’re going to do it with a dating metaphor that we think almost everyone can understand. We’ll start where every relationship starts, with first impressions.
The word comes from the Latin facilis, which means “easy.” A facilitator makes it easier for a group to do its own work. That’s the whole job, give or take some nuance, and it’s also why the role gets mixed up with four others that sound a lot like it.
Plenty of people wear more than one of these hats, and that’s fine. The trouble starts when a board thinks it hired one and gets another. If you wanted a strategic plan handed to you, a facilitator is the wrong call. If you wanted your board to build the plan and own it, a consultant who writes it for you can leave you with a lovely document that nobody feels responsible for.
When I say a facilitator is neutral, people sometimes picture someone in the corner, nodding politely while the loudest voice runs the room. That’s not neutral. That’s passive.
Neutral means the facilitator has no stake in which answer you land on. It doesn’t mean they have no opinion about how you get there. A good facilitator is working the entire time. They’re watching who hasn’t spoken yet, noticing when the group is circling the same point for the third time, deciding when to push and when to let a silence sit, and pulling everyone back when the conversation wanders into something that was supposed to wait for another day.
The group owns the what. The facilitator owns the how. And owning the how takes a lot of active, skilled and sometimes awkward effort.
Facilitators don’t all work the same way. Two spectrums are worth knowing about before you start talking to anyone.
Directive versus non-directive. A directive facilitator brings a structured method and walks the group through it step by step. A non-directive facilitator holds more open space and lets the conversation find its own shape. Neither one is better. A group stuck in a rut may need the momentum that structure brings. A group working through something sensitive may need room to breathe.
Process expert versus content expert. A process expert knows how to run a productive conversation. A content expert knows your field. Some people are both, but most lean one way or the other.
One more point, which Aaron picks up in Post 2: It is often completely fine, and sometimes better, to hire a facilitator who has never worked in your industry. They don’t know your acronyms, so they’ll ask what they mean, and half the time your own people discover they’ve been defining them differently for years. Your board already brings the content. It’s possible that what they need is someone who can run the process.
I’ve watched the same facilitator get very different results with two different groups, using the same design and the same energy. With one group, the room opened up. With the other, it went flat. Same person, same skill, different match.
Skill is required. It’s what gets you in the door. What decides whether the day works is whether the facilitator’s style suits your group’s culture, your history and your moment. A high-energy, highly structured facilitator can be exactly right for a board that tends to drift and exactly wrong for one that’s grieving a loss. Nobody did anything wrong in that second scenario. It was simply a mismatch.
Hiring a facilitator is a lot like dating. You aren’t looking for the most impressive profile or the longest list of accomplishments. You’re looking for the right fit for who you are, what you’re going through, and where you want to go.
We’ll follow three very different situations through this whole series, because the right match looks different depending on what’s happening in the room:
Most of the damage from a bad match happens before anyone is hired. It usually goes like this: Someone on the board says, “We should bring in a facilitator,” and several people nod. Everyone is picturing something different. One person imagines a half-day retreat. Another expects a finished plan. The chair is hoping it will finally get a certain board member to listen. Nobody says any of this out loud, so the search begins with several different unspoken job descriptions.
By the time you’re interviewing candidates, the misalignment is already part of the process, even though it’s unintentional. You can hire a skilled person and still end up disappointed, because the thing you were disappointed about was never part of the conversation. Worse, your board spends a full day and a decent chunk of the budget, then walks away believing facilitation doesn’t work, when what didn’t work was the match.
Facilitation is skilled, active and more specific than most people realize. Know what it is, know what it isn’t, and remember that the best facilitator for someone else’s board may not be the best one for yours.
Next up: Aaron takes on “Swiping Right,” how to choose a facilitator, beginning with naming where your group is stuck.
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Tara Puckey, MBA, FASAE, CAE, CMP, is President & CEO of RTDNA and the RTDNA Foundation, founder of GrayRails Consulting, and a facilitator who helps associations govern wisely, lead with courage, and build teams that last.
