Like a runner trying to complete a marathon without training, many of us are trying (and failing) to navigate workplace relationships without practice or preparation.
We are out of practice, out of shape, and out of patience. We struggle to get along with our colleagues, let alone connect or collaborate with them.
The timing couldn’t be worse.
Several factors, from political transitions and cultural changes to heavy workloads and even technology integration (AI!), can create divisions and segmentation at work that threaten to push us apart even further.
This division presents complex challenges requiring all our collaborative resources and creative thinking.
In other words, whether you're a top executive or a team lead, you must develop facilitative behaviors that improve communication, increase engagement, elevate decision-making, and make difficult situations more manageable.
Here are four steps any leader can take to promote better understanding and more collaborative relationships at work this year.
#1 The Foundation = Self-Awareness + Observation
Effective facilitation starts with you. A leader must first cultivate self-awareness and understand your biases, assumptions, and reactions.
You will never lead people if you haven’t first done the work to understand the drivers within yourself.
Only then can you set them aside and move forward to understand the perspectives of others.
This can be uncomfortable for leaders who achieved their level of success, in part by being decisive and assertive or by relying on their expertise and judgment.
Many such leaders default to defending their position.
Remembering that we don’t lose anything by gaining a deeper understanding of another can be helpful. We don’t have to agree with someone to understand them better.
Self-awareness unlocks the ability to step back, explore with openness the perspectives of others, objectively observe the root causes of conflict, and bring to the surface the needs, concerns, and interests of all parties involved.
Take your organization’s pulse and identify the problems that must be addressed. Try not to dismiss things that may not seem like a big deal to you; people respond differently to issues.
#2 Hone Your Power of Listening
Effective facilitation also hinges on the ability to truly listen.
This starts with bracketing, which involves setting aside your own opinions, judgments, or arguments to fully understand the speaker’s point of view. This helps you stay open and curious about what the other person is saying.
It’s a critical first step that demands self-awareness and an understanding that others may react to ideas differently, requiring an emphasis on understanding before responding.
Fundamentally, listening is about uncovering what's below the surface, rather than responding to the positions people take and the reactions they have to them.
This relies on leveraging evergreen tactics, like reflecting, paraphrasing, and checking for perceptions to get to people's underlying interests, concerns, fears, and needs.
This is easier said than done.
Leaders face the dual challenge of truly listening while also combating perceptions that they don't care or won't act on what they hear.
You can do this though, and the reward is worth it, as it will allow you to uncover the deeper meaning behind people's words and build trust and rapport.
#3 Implement Facilitation Skills and Techniques
With a clear understanding of the communication, connection, and collaboration challenges your team is experiencing, leverage facilitation skills and techniques to promote inclusivity, clear communication, and collaborative decision-making.
Facilitation skills and techniques include:
Ask/Say What’s Going On
Much of what we do as facilitators is to try to bring what’s invisible or happening under the surface up to the visible surface, where everyone can be on the same page.
For example, a team of directors was meeting to discuss their quarterly strategic plan, but the mood in the room was sour and the conversation was contentious.
The facilitator said, “I’m sensing some frustration in the room, what’s going on?”
From there, a director was able to share that a memo from the CEO had changed the course of their plan that morning, negating several hours of work. Once that was out in the open, the team was able to reorient with new goals and get back on track.
Acknowledge, Legitimize, and Decide
Acknowledge an idea or concern without agreeing or disagreeing, legitimizing it by restating or recording it, and then deciding whether to address it immediately or defer it to a later time.
This can create inclusion and encourage engagement, acknowledging the value of each person’s contribution, while also allowing progress to continue without letting one person derail collaborative work.
For instance, a head of people in a fast-scaling startup needed their lean team to refresh the onboarding process.
However, the brand and culture manager insisted that company values should be revised first, while the recruiting manager argued they didn’t have time for such an overhaul.
Rather than dismissing either concern and making a directive call without input, the leader accepted and legitimized both positions, acknowledging the value of each of their interests; the brand and culture manager’s desire to ensure values aligned with growth was valid, and the recruiting manager’s urgency to improve hiring efficiency was also critical.
Once they surfaced these interests they decided to deal with the situation as a team and looked for proposals that might include the interests of both. They settled on a phased approach, updating the onboarding framework immediately while gathering feedback on whether value alignment issues were surfacing. If they were, a company values refresh would follow in the next quarter.
Build Small Agreements
Agreements are the building blocks of collaboration, but they are most durable when they are made in increments that are small enough for everyone to truly understand.
Unfortunately, much of the time in meetings we try to agree on broad statements that people don’t fully understand, we assume everyone is on-board, and then implementation falls down. The antidote to this is breaking down our solutions into bite-sized chunks and building up momentum with lots of very small, clear, and actionable agreements.
All of these techniques can help make the invisible visible, highlighting some of what people don’t see or understand about workplace relationships. They also help you effectively separate the urgent from the important, ensuring that conversations stay focused and productive.
#4 Put Theory Into Practice
Developing facilitation skills takes practice and courage. Start by facilitating conversations around less contentious topics, gradually building your confidence and expertise.
Be transparent with your team, letting them know that you are practicing and learning, and encourage them to do the same.
These tools come up all the time, in big complex challenges, and also in small quick misunderstandings or disagreements.
Take this complex case, where a chief medical officer at a large hospital system wanted to implement an AI-powered decision-support tool to help doctors diagnose. However, the director of IT was concerned about data security, while a senior physician argued that AI could undermine doctors’ expertise and erode patient trust.
The CMO initially assumed the resistance stemmed from a lack of understanding of AI’s benefits, or simply resistance to progress, but she set this aside and asked questions to get a better understanding of each position. She discovered the IT director was concerned about HIPAA regulations and the physician feared AI recommendations might be prioritized over clinical judgment.
By surfacing these important concerns the team came to a more prudent implementation plan. Through a series of small agreements, they decided that AI would be introduced first in non-critical decision areas, like admin workflows and patient triage, and physicians would retain full discretion over-diagnoses. Additionally, an oversight committee including doctors and IT reps, would monitor outcomes and adjust the implementation as needed.
This built trust across the team while allowing AI integration to move forward responsibly.
Together Is a Winning Formula
Leaders need to champion open communication and understanding. We can do this by becoming more self-aware, actively observing our teams, and learning to facilitate well.
Facilitation means stepping back to see the bigger picture, ensuring everyone feels heard and valued, and guiding our teams toward collaborative solutions. Focusing on these things creates a better workplace that improves outcomes for our companies, customers, and employees.
It’s a win-win-win worth prioritizing within your organization this year.
Rachael Grail, a senior collaboration consultant at Interaction Associates, aims to enable peak performance in teams through effective communication, strengths-based collaboration, and sustained well-being. As an experienced facilitator and coach, she skillfully weaves new concepts and awareness into practical actions. She leverages a breadth of experience and numerous evidence-based frameworks to be highly responsive to the unique needs of each group she supports. Rachael supports leaders and teams in global companies, high growth startups, and NGO’s. Her experience includes engagement with clients at: Amazon, Adobe, DocuSign, Meta, Outside PR, PG&E, Service Now, and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Interaction Associates is best known for introducing the concept and practice of group facilitation to the business world in the early 1970’s. For over 50 years, IA has provided thousands of leaders and teams with practical, simple, and effective programs, tools, and techniques for leading, meeting, and working better across functions, viewpoints, and geographies. Learn more by visiting https://www.interactionassociates.com/ and connect with Rachael on LinkedIn.
