Responsibilities of Facilitators

I think of facilitation as an umbrella term. To me it includes any time we’re in an interpersonal support role. So this includes counselors, therapists, mediators, and anyone leading a group process.

Here are a few example kinds of facilitation, listed by the overarching category of purpose the experience is meant to serve:

Class, workshop, coaching – to learn, or practice around specified topic(s)
Counseling – to help navigate an emotional process, support mental health, work on personal healing and growth, etc.
Dialogue – to come together around one or more differences and hear and understand each other
Game – to have fun, bond, express
Listening session – to gather information or hear a community
Mediation – specific, legally defined type. Multiple schools such as facilitative, narrative, and transformative
Meeting (typical variety) – to dispense information and/or make decisions
Relationship counseling – to help friends, partners, co-workers shift relational dynamics
Restorative – to repair relationship(s) after a breech
Support group – to come together along shared experience(s) or identity(ies) and support healing or growth
Transformative – to change a system or set of relationships

(Many events can actually require moving back and forth between different kinds of facilitation.)

As you can see, participants in these kinds of events may at times be quite vulnerable. As a student of facilitation and groups, I see that given the power facilitators sometimes have, they can do and have done a lot of harm when not being responsible. Therefore, I think it’s critical that facilitators consider their social and ethical responsibilities. I’m not saying we can be or should be perfect, but rather striving for integrity.

Part of why I’m focusing on responsibilities is that I have made harmful mistakes because I didn’t know many of the responsibilities to track. And it’s true that in doing complex work like this we’ll all make mistakes. We can’t avoid that, but we can try to move toward greater integrity. Another reason is that I’ve observed a proliferation of irresponsible and predatory facilitators/coaches/organizations, accelerated by the age of digital marketing.

Responsibilities vary with the group’s goals and context, including cultural context. So here I’ll share examples of responsibilities I attempt to track.

Prior to a facilitation

Preparation
●Intake. Group’s purpose. Relevant context. What do they hope for from me? Can I frame what constructive participation might look like?
●What possible challenges might the group face and how might I support them? What might I do if I can’t?
●Do I need to practice anything?
●Who am I coordinating with? Who’s handling logistics?

Self–care
●What do I need to facilitate well?
●I don’t just think about my physical needs, but also things like: does everyone I take care of in my regular life have care while I’m occupied?; can I get enough rest?; and do I want emotional support for myself ahead of the facilitation?

Container
●What would participants want to know ahead of time?
●What level of safety is important for the group? How able do I feel to create that level of safety?
●Don’t overpromise safety!

Knowledge
●Do I understand the domain well enough to provide support?
●Do I know the history and integrity of the practices, ideas, terms, and resources I’m using and suggesting? Am I aware of their context, flaws and weak areas, possibly even moral problems with their development?
●Do I use technical terms with a deep understanding rather than to sound cool or be associated with what’s in fashion?

During a facilitation

Relationship
●How do I support participants’ connection to their own power?
●How do I encourage reasonable expectations?
●How am I encouraging agency and independence from me?
●How am I making it easier for people to disagree with me?

Humility
●How do I avoid presenting with false confidence?
●How can I make it harder for participants to position me a pedestal?
●How do I guard against the tendency to bullshit? (Being on the spot in front of a group makes it a seductive option and makes people more vulnerable to believing it.)
●Am I encouraging feedback, especially negative feedback?

Clarity, Honesty, and Transparency
●Am I giving participants information about what I’m doing and why?
●Have I disclosed relevant biases or conflicts of interest?
●Selling products and making a brand are incompatible with many kinds of facilitation.

Consent
●How am I supporting participants’ agency and their boundaries?
●Am I encouraging participants to sense what they want to participate in and opt out of?
●Am I trying to notice if someone may be saying yes when they may feel pressured or have fallen into fawning?

Focused attention
●I need to track many things including: purpose, process, implicit content, emotions, energy, morale, and time.
●I also need to adapt to changes in the group’s purpose or present needs.

Process
●What level of control/direction supports the purpose?
●Am I leading away from harmful dynamics, such as coercion, bullying, false equivalency?
●Watch assumptions: it won’t always serve to “keep things calm” or “share time equally”

After a facilitation

Follow up
●Does my role inherently require follow up?
●Given how things went, does the group need it?

After care
●Did anyone get to a place where they may need particular care?
●How can I encourage that to happen?

Iteration of practice
●What mistakes might I have made?
●What can I learn from what happened?
●How am I going forward with a more resilient, thoughtful, and responsible practice?