Facilitation is an essential leadership competency. Facilitative leaders take a step back and nurture collaboration, capacity, and commitment with employees, colleagues, and stakeholders. With effective facilitation, groups can work together to assess a situation, analyze information, create a plan, and make group decisions that stick. The results of facilitative leadership are engaged participants, stronger teams, and efficient collaboration.
In this workshop we explore the qualities, values, and benefits of facilitative leadership. Participants will learn techniques for facilitating meetings that are designed to activate the power of the group: including the focused conversation method of facilitating group discussion and decision-making and the carousel method of synthesizing ideas. Throughout, we will discuss common barriers to facilitative leadership and how to overcome them.
Participants will leave with instructions and further resources for each of the techniques presented.
Speaker Information
Sarah Cohn is a principal consultant at Aurora Consulting. She helps her clients discern their audience’s needs; think about their roles and opportunities as departments, organizations and within broader networks; and build their internal capacity to measure the impact of their organizations and programs. In her experience, complex collaborations with diverse partners succeed when they build in time for listening and honest reflection. She sees her clients as the content experts and herself as the facilitator of nuanced conversations.
Al Onkka is principal consultant at Aurora Consulting. Al is experienced in promoting data-based decision making and organizational learning having worked in the field of evaluation since 2009. Al uses, and builds the capacity of others to use, an evaluative lens to help organizations develop, understand, and improve at the programmatic and organizational level. Al has a master’s degree in evaluation studies from the University of Minnesota’s Department of Organizational Leadership, Policy and Development and is a member of the Minnesota Evaluation Association’s board of directors.