Six ways facilitation skills can improve cross-disciplinary team leadership

By Manal Affara

An Arabic version of this post is available.

What facilitation skills are useful for leading teams in cross-disciplinary projects?

Facilitation and leadership are usually considered to involve different skills, but in a recent article Carrie Addington (2020) examined how facilitation skills can improve leadership. I take this one step further to examine how facilitation skills can improve leadership of cross-disciplinary projects.

Collaboration is central to cross-disciplinary research, requiring facilitation to engage partners, unlock their potential, organize the project, and encourage continuous learning, as well as applying insights from that learning.

Addington argues that facilitators have the ability to:

• make content relevant to establish participant buy-in, including through examples, stories and analogies
• be well-organised and manage time in order to achieve outcomes
• present well and give clear instructions
• create opportunities for thoughts to flow freely
• be both focused and flexible
• manage group dynamics
• “ask engaging questions and build on comments to elevate the conversation” (p. 58).

I have identified six relevant ways in which facilitation skills can improve leadership of cross-disciplinary teams and projects.

1. Effectively lead team discussions
   Facilitation skills can help leaders enhance the flexibility of collaborations to achieve positive results, contribute towards social learning and change practice.
   Authentic communication leads to better discussion and can help leaders build a team of contributors and thinkers. Facilitation skills can also boost team engagement, and ensure that team members feel empowered about their ideas, which in turn helps in fostering a culture of innovation.
2. Organise team processes
   Facilitation skills can help leaders establish agreed timelines and regular meetings to help maintain team motivation to achieve project goals. Facilitation skills can also help leaders boost team morale and engagement by employing tools to foster creativity.
3. Conduct interactive meetings
   Facilitation skills can help leaders guide teams in design thinking and in developing shared mental models. Facilitation skills ensure that people are heard and that they are asked questions before responders share their ideas; they also ensure that there are pauses to allow assimilation of information.
   Facilitation skills help leaders foster co-innovation and mutual understanding across disciplines and stakeholders.
4. Perfect the pivot
   Facilitation skills can help leaders stay focused on project goals to build sustainable agreement, while adapting to change. They enable leaders to respond intelligently to innovative opportunities for team creativity.
   Facilitation skills can help leaders enhance their sense of timing, learning, and adapting to change, allowing them to pivot when necessary to sustain the goal of the project.
5. Develop relationships based on trust and respect
   Facilitation skills have the ability to solidify trustful ties and can help leaders make the most of members’ social competencies, flexibility, and reciprocal relationships. Facilitation and leadership both require integrity, credibility and alignment with core values and these skills mutually reinforce each other in achieving project outcomes.
6. Lead with emotional intelligence
   Facilitation skills can help leaders effectively manage group dynamics, while maintaining their own passion. Facilitation skills can help leaders foster collaboration with empathy.

Conclusion

As described here, leadership of cross-disciplinary teams and projects can be enhanced in various ways by facilitation skills, especially through improving team communication, encouraging creativity, and supporting collaboration. Are there other facilitation skills that you think would be useful for leaders of cross-disciplinary projects to master?

Reference:
Addington, C. (2020). Use Your Facilitation Skills to Become a Better Leader. Talent Development Magazine, 74, 9: 54-59. (Online): https://www.td.org/magazines/td-magazine/use-your-facilitation-skills-to-become-a-better-leader

Biography: Manal Affara PhD is professor of Egyptology in the Tourist-Guidance Department at Alexandria University in Egypt. Her research interests are to develop interdisciplinary research in tourism.