Leading Meetings and Teams

2 Drawing Out and Consolidating

Facilitation is the skill of a facileader who is able to run their team well. If I had to sum it up in a single word, it would be to encourage. Just like you have seen in the facileader self‐assessment, the idea is to encourage your team members in a variety of ways and help them to produce results. Broadly speaking, there are two skills required to achieve this.

The first one is the act of drawing out. You need to draw out both the positive and negative sides of any given opinion, positives such as motivation and ideas, and negatives such as complaints and criticism. Only drawing out positives, for example, would not result in a very lively discussion. A workplace in which any opinion can be freely voiced is the kind of environment that will produce a strong, flexible team.

After you draw out the opinions of your team, you need to consolidate. Consolidation is the act of gathering up something scattered, such as people's ideas in a meeting, and forming them into one single lump. By doing this, team members can align their wills, with the aim of creating a shared vision and objective for the team and making everyone's opinion clear.

A whiteboard, for example, is a useful and powerful tool for visualizing everyone's opinions.

The skill of drawing out and consolidating is indispensable for leaders managing diverse teams. In order to do so effectively, it's important to first listen to a variety of opinions while maintaining neutrality.

Of course, ...