5 Superpowers Every Facilitator Needs

Being a facilitator isn’t about having all the answers or being the smartest person in the room; it’s about decentering yourself to help teams unlock clarity, alignment, and their best ideas.

To do that, you need to dial up your EQ and other intangibles (like helping people feel more comfortable), as well as your familiarity with methods and techniques that diffuse drama, neutralize politics, and tap into each person’s creativity.

Whether you’ve been facilitating for a while, or are just dipping your toe in, these 5 superpowers will help elevate your ability to successfully guide people through the winding road of decision making, ideation, and problem solving, all in the spirit of helping them do their best work.

5 Superpowers Every Facilitator Needs

1. The Keys to Unlock Team Creativity

Most people have been socialized to think that creativity is something you either have or you don’t. This line of thinking isn’t conducive to doing great work because your participants can’t tap into genuine exploration if they feel judged, stifled, or unqualified to share their ideas.

As a facilitator, it’s your job to diffuse this thinking by using methods that demystify creativity. Activities like rapid-idea generation, sketching exercises, lighting demos, and more can make a huge difference in your team’s ability to explore solutions and killer ideas unencumbered.

This article outlines my 5 favorite methods for doing just that, with step-by-step directions for recreating them during your own meeting or workshop — feel free to copy and paste them into the plans for your next session!

2. Engagement Maximizer, Disruption Diffuser

Let’s be honest, there’s only so much you can control when you’re leading a group of people, and that includes whether someone shows up to your session with a bad attitude. However, as the facilitator, it is your job to create an environment where people who may have a history of friction can work together successfully.

To do this, make sure your sessions are designed with the following in mind:

• Clarify every attendee’s purpose so they know their role
• Include structured methods that help set the tone for the interaction, democratize feedback sharing and ideation, and diffuse derailing questions
• Remove distractions (like technology)
• Have a contingency plan for how you’ll handle an unruly participant if you need to call an audible and address distracting behavior on the spot

Check out this article for details that expand on each of these bullets.

By learning how to depersonalize conflict, avoid team drama, and rally everyone around shared purpose, you’ll be able to better navigate hard-to-handle participants and keep the group engaged.

3. The Ability to Help People Feel Comfortable

People who feel comfortable with one another and you, the facilitator, are more likely to collaborate with ease, work together seamlessly, and do their best work. That’s why this superpower is so important!

It can sometimes feel intangible, but I created a list of actions you can take and little things you should pay attention to so that this superpower comes more naturally, including:

• Warm Up: Participants often need a moment to transition into a session from another meeting, sending a screaming child to school, cleaning up spilled coffee, and so on. This is that moment! Never underestimate the power of icebreakers to kickstart the interaction. Here are some of my favorites — give one a try!
• Normalize Stupid Questions: As the facilitator, one of the most powerful things you can do for your group is normalize asking “stupid” questions by asking tons of questions yourself, especially when jargon is being thrown around. Interrupt the conversation with “What does that mean?” and “Can you say more about what you mean by ‘synergy’?” Your ability to make no assumptions means attendees will feel relief and gain more alignment when seemingly-obvious questions are asked.
• Manage the Politics: Funky group dynamics and politics come with the facilitation territory. That doesn’t mean you’re at their mercy. In fact, I leverage a handful of techniques to get ahead of possible problems, or stop them in their tracks, like anonymous voting, timed feedback, and so many more, which you can find listed here. Pull whatever you need from it and apply them to your own sessions!
• Take Breaks: If you’re leading an hours-long or a days-long session, you absolutely need breaks in your agenda. I never keep people in their seats for more than 90 minutes at a time because they naturally become antsy and unfocused. Schedule breaks for people to stretch their legs, grab a glass of water, make some lunch, or all of the above. Let them know there are going to be scheduled breaks, but that they should also take care of themselves if they need to grab water, use the restroom, or do anything else that will support their needs.
• Use Active Listening: Facilitators listen to people all day long, so it’s up to us to receive information, synthesize it, play it back, and paraphrase what we’ve heard. It builds trust, drives understanding and collaboration, and helps teams align and gain clarity (which is likely something they’ve struggled to achieve on their own, hence the importance of guidance from a facilitator). Here are my 5 tips for improving your active listening skills.

4. A Curiosity Mindset

At the beginning of my facilitation career, I thought I needed to know every answer and took it personally if a session detoured from the original plan. Now I know that these are classic characteristics of a Performance Mindset and they often stand in the way of effective leadership and team success. Being able to help unlock possibilities for your team requires a shift in your attitude across several dimensions so you can move away from being a performer and into the role of a curious guide, aka the Curiosity Mindset.

Check out this article for 3 simple things you can do to start cultivating a Curiosity Mindset today.

Depersonalizing the work and remaining unbiased is critical to helping teams reach the best outcomes. If you or an internal team member struggles with that aspect, don’t worry, it’s normal (team politics are real!). In this case, bringing in a neutral third-party might be the best way to push the work forward because it separates the work from that team member’s performance (which can be really distracting).

5. High EQ (and the Vulnerability to Pivot)

To build on the last superpower, part of making your workshop a success is having the EQ to know when you need to adjust in real time. It keeps your team at the center of the work and shows that you have their best interests and the session outcomes in mind.

Even the most intentional, expertly-crafted workshop designs can’t anticipate exactly how a session might need to deviate to better support the group’s needs. Getting to desired outcomes depends on receptivity and flexibility so you can pivot to support the emergent needs of your group.

To that end, being able to read the room is critical because it keeps you tapped into the people, personalities, and energy of the group. From those observations (both verbal and nonverbal), you learn essential inputs that help inform required pivots.

If something isn’t working out as you’d imagined, don’t be afraid to head into uncharted territory. It’s irresponsible to muscle ahead just for the sake of following the agenda exactly, so listen to your gut if it says the group needs something else (and honor the vulnerability required to own that!).

Activate These Superpowers to Elevate Your Facilitation Skills

With time, patience, and practice, you can get better at activating these 5 facilitation superpowers. Not sure where to start? It might be more approachable to pick one area to focus on first, then fold in others as you get more comfortable with the methods and mindsets listed.

If some aspects of the work feel more innate to you than others, don’t worry, that’s normal. But if you get stuck, feel free to reach out: I’m happy to answer questions, partner with you for 1:1 or group training, or chat about anything else that’s on your mind!

What else do you consider to be a facilitation superpower? Let me know in the comments. If you’re new here, think about hitting the “follow” button to join my community!