Like a good consultant answering any either/or question, I say, “Yes!”
Facilitation skills can be taught
When I was at a DC-area think-tank more than a decade ago, a graphic facilitator visited and taught the staff how to write on flip-charts. It seems like a simple skill, but the basic skills she taught us have, over the subsequent years, improved my flip-charting and enhanced the professionalism of my workshops. She didn’t teach us how to draw. She gave us simple rules like “use cool colors (e.g., black, blue, brown, and green) for text,” “use “warm colors to underline and accentuate,” and “bend your knees as you move down the flip-chart so you don’t stick your butt out at the participants.”
I use this example to show that facilitation skills can be taught. There is a lot of technical knowledge that a great facilitator knows, and much of this can be learned. How to design an agenda, how to handle aggressively opinionated participants, how to manage the time – these are all things you can learn in classes, from books, etc.
Some things come naturally for great facilitators
At the same time, some aspects of facilitation rely on a natural aptitude that comes more easily to some than to others. When reading Extreme Facilitation by my colleague Suzanne Ghais, I was struck by the fact that her list of attributes of what she calls “extreme facilitators” – that is, facilitators who can go beyond the basics and handle the most challenging individual and group situations – read much like my Strengths Finder profile. She emphasizes things like empathy for reading the participants, flexibility for adapting to a group’s needs, and authenticity for just saying out loud what you’re observing in the room.
They key is to find the style and format that works for you
But not everyone has to be an “extreme facilitator.” This is not just one way to facilitate, or just one kind of gathering that needs facilitation. The most important thing is to find the kind of gathering (e.g., workshop, board meeting, panel discussion) that you were made to facilitate, and the hone your skills in this context.
For me, I know that I’m at my best when facilitating challenging conversations in teams and groups where no one knows the answer, and where big, new thinking is required. This draws on my natural aptitude for “extreme facilitation,” my general tendency to think in big concepts and across long periods of time, and my professional training as a futurist.
I love a good workshop or retreat where we get into tough problems, experience all the appropriate confusion and grief, change the agenda and move the furniture around to set up new conversations, and then discover those key insights that will help carry us forward on a path we had never seen before. You might be like me, in which case you might thrive in sessions like that.
Or maybe not. Maybe you thrive by managing packed agendas, overseeing technical processes, or supporting incremental progress toward a known goal. Those are different kinds of facilitation, but in their own contexts they are just as valuable as the kind of facilitation that I was put here to do.
Learn the skills, find the contexts where you perform at your best, and you will discover your greatness as a facilitator.