Why Focus on Personal Development?

Why is personal development essential to masterful facilitation, and how do we approached teaching about “mastery.” The Grove defines facilitation as “the art of leading group process toward agreed on outcomes with full participant, creativity, and ownership from all involved.” Facilitation is all about serving the group and its collective purpose as distinguished from one’s own. Leaders and team managers are ones who often set the purpose and goals for a group. Consultants may often be agents for leaders, but when a person says they are facilitating, most people would expect them to serve the group.

This intention plunges anyone who takes up facilitation into the position of needing to take everyone into account during a process. Given that orientation, one measure of mastery would be the extent to which a facilitator can relate to, understand, and help a wide range of people. That capability requires one come to accept, with humility, all the different aspects of oneself and aspects of other people that you might not be comfortable with personally.

It is possible to facilitate within an industry or a given functional area and develop a lot of proficiency without spreading out to the full spectrum of positions, thinking and learning styles, and areas of expertise represented in sizable organizations. It is also possible to be very facilitative without a lot of experience if one is firmly anchored in beginners mind and being able to learn VERY quickly from the group.

If you are graphically facilitating, however, and choosing to visually reflect the group’s process and thinking on large charts as a way of guiding the group, your listening and sensibility is completely exposed! This raises the bar on what constitutes mastery.

This becomes even more challenging if one works across sectors and boundaries, works with entire organization systems, or moves into the facilitation of community involvement and transformation processes. This work calls for deeper than ordinary command of ones own awareness and sensibility. Developing this depth and introducing practices for ongoing development is what the Facilitation Mastery workshop seeks to provide.