Facilitative Leadership Training: Day 3

I'm learning about Facilitative Leadership, a program put together by the good people at Interaction Institute for Social Change (@IISCblog).

The top 3 things I learned on the final day of training:

It's all about the meeting.

1. How to plan a meeting.  I thought I knew how to do that.  The corners I cut in creating agendas the day before and getting people the info within 24 hours was all well and good, but I learned that every bit of planning that I can do ahead of time for the meeting pays off.  

2. "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of intervention." They say it pays off, and in the greatest currency I could wish for: Meetings that go smoothly.  Members that don't mutiny.  Most importantly, the meeting is more efficient in accomplishing goals and moving the team forward.  

 

3. This last one has taken awhile to sink in (with this late blog post, I've certainly given myself plenty of time to think).  It's that soapbox moment, when I get passionately argumentative about a controversial topic.  I used to think that every time I did this, I was being heroic.  I learned that leaders just don't do this every chance they get.  Who would follow that person?  In Facilitative Leadership they don't call it a soapbox, they call it a ladder:

Every once in awhile there's that particular piece of data that triggers someone.  When I'm "up my ladder," you'll probably find me spewing my beliefs forth from my lofty height, and maybe the conclusions I've drawn and the assumptions I've made.  Am I interested in a conversation?  Perhaps I'm more interested in grabbing my pitchfork and marching.

It's usually later when I look back on that moment sheepishly.

Between Wednesday, when I learned this, and Monday, as I write this, I caught myself up my ladder at least a half dozen times.  I'm proud to say I apologized a couple times, and I even stopped myself once before I even began.  

Baby steps!

-B

 

Facilitative Leadership Training: Day 2

I'm learning about Facilitative Leadership, a program put together by the good people at Interaction Institute for Social Change (@IISCblog).

The top 3 things I learned today:

1. The Iceberg! How to go from micro to macro with a problem you're solving:

The iceberg exercise asks the participants to keep an eye out for "levers" in any of the different depths that can be pulled to make a change.


2. Consensus!  And what happens when you can't get it.  Turns out I found myself as one of the people creating an obstacle to consensus with an issue I felt strongly about but not many others did.  I felt a lot of involvement, a lot of ownership (see the graphic below)

3. This wonderful quotation from the Facilitative Leadership text made a big splash in our group:

Facilitative Leadership Training: Day 1

I'm learning about Facilitative Leadership, a program put together by the good people at Interaction Institute for Social Change (@IISCblog).

Here are my top 3 highlights from today's training:

1. In the triangle below, I learned that Process and Relationships are equally important to success as Results.  "You must unlearn what you have learned." -Yoda

2. There are three parts to a discussion: open, narrow, and close.  What I didn't know was that I, like most people, am most comfortable in one of these parts over the other two.  This means that if I'm discussing something with a person whose preference is to open the discussion while I'm a closer, we could have some trouble communicating together if we're not aware of it :)

3. This wasn't from the curriculum, but I talked to a colleague in the training who taught me to find out "where everybody gets their cookies." This is a way of saying that each person identifies a different source of reward from his or her job, and we're always trying to get to that place.  For the people we're working with, learn their source in order to create win/win scenarios!