Great facilitation is hard and intimidating

Full transcript

Intro

Sarah: Hanging around master facilitators, seeing them get a whole group of people to just sing together. It's just really hard to accept your own juniorness in this area.

Jay: We all hate crappy meetings, ones where we feel like we show up and we waste our time, where you could cut the tension with a knife, where it feels totally disorganized, and we're not sure where we're headed or what the outcomes are gonna be. Well meetings and workshops and gatherings like that happen because no one decided to design that conversation. That's what facilitators do. They bring groups together. They talk through and make decisions about really complex topics. They get folks to trust one another so they can come up with really good ideas. Facilitators aren't magicians, it takes a lot of work. And facilitating groups of people is really, really hard.

And if you followed along other episodes in this series you'll see experts coming and talking about all the challenges that they work through and how they've mastered certain techniques. And like what Sarah was talking about in the opening, watching these people can be really intimidating. You think to yourself, "I could never do that."

Sarah Mills is the Director of Product Design at DocuSign. And today she's joining Facilitator's Q&A to get really humble and vulnerable about how difficult facilitation has been for her. If you're facing imposter syndrome or feeling intimidated altogether about stepping into the role of a facilitator, you're gonna enjoy Sarah's stories and what she has to share with us today.

Today’s episode

Jay: Hey, Sarah.

Sarah: Hi.

Jay: So this series is dedicated to empowering facilitators and I've had all of these inspiring people on that I've learned from, or just admired from afar. And they've come to talk about all of these superpowers that they have as facilitators. And when you and I were talking about facilitation I appreciated so much how open you are about how hard facilitation is. It's the most recent skill that I've picked up especially as a leader and also the hardest. So I love hearing that it's hard for you and for other people too. And so today you and I we're gonna talk a little bit about what it's been like for you to step into facilitation, what the hard things were. But maybe you could just start by telling a little bit about your story with facilitation.

Sarah: Sure. I think when I joined IBM and they had such a great program for teaching design thinking. So I got really into it 'cause it was new to me and it just kinda blew my mind. It was one of those things like the first time you do research and you're just like, "Oh my God, what have I been doing?" And it was such, it changed how I designed. And now I've come to DocuSign and facilitate every now and then but also very much would like for my teammates to learn and become more comfortable with it so they can do it, and I don't have to. Even though I think it's probably a core part of my job.

Jay: Well, what is it? What happens for you as you're thinking about stepping into that role of facilitator, where you might outsource it or just otherwise not wanna show up and do that job?

Sarah: So you know, the higher you move up in leadership the stronger your need for therapy becomes. You're just dealing with a lot more people. I saw you had an episode with imposter syndrome, like it just increases. And so my issues, I would say, I can trace them right back to something in therapy.

One is confidence. I heard many facilitators say, when you go into the room a bunch of people are putting their trust in you that you're gonna meet an outcome. And so the advice was, "You gotta go in there and be confident." "You've got to make people feel safe." But I cannot fake it.

Another one, I think the best facilitators are able to read the room, they can pick up on energy. And a lot of them can even do that remotely now, like I don't even know how that happens. I get really self-conscious and inside my own head. And so I can't read the room, 'cause I'm like stuck in my own head. But at the same time I also have a bad habit of trying to manage other people's emotions and try to like make sure that people are happy. And that's something I've been working on for years. That it's okay if there's conflict. It's okay if people aren't happy about something, like I just have to let go and let people feel their feelings like adults.

Let's see. Perfectionism. I think the best facilitators are able to improv and just go with things. I for a long time feel that things have to go in a certain order, that's a mistake. Like design thinking activities do not go in order. But part of what made me a good designer was like a high level of detail and organization, putting everything in its box and it has to go a certain way and not settling for things being messy. But that doesn't serve me very well with facilitation. Those are my blockers. All my dirty laundry.

Jay: One thing I heard you say was I saw this spectrum of you on this line of control. And on one hand, as a designer when you're doing things on your own, you have high control, high visibility because it's your own work. And then when you get in front of the group I think what I'm hearing you say is, you know you need to let go of that control but because it's important conversations and your boss and your boss's boss might be in the room and this fear of perfectionism, you have a hard time of letting go of that. Did I hear that right?

Sarah: Yeah. I'm getting better. And I think a lot of it honestly comes with experience just doing it over and over. If you are a professional facilitator you're gonna, happens right. You just do it all the time. And for somebody that doesn't practice that often and is actively avoiding the opportunities, the benefits of that repeated practice and, God the knowledge that you gain from like observing people in groups.

Jay: What do you try then? How have you made it better for yourself?

Sarah: So I think one thing that helps me is to do enough of the legwork upfront, right. So make sure that I'm not walking into a situation with surprises. And a lot of that is spending one-on-one time with them, talking about what's gonna happen, what we're gonna do.

Another big one is just having to, like talking through the workshop with a colleague and kind of brainstorming like, "Oh, okay. So if we do this next what kind of blockers do we think might happen?" And just the same as you would practice like a script for a speaking engagement.

Internalizing that everything's an experiment. This whole workshop is an experiment, right. We are all just collectively gonna just try this out. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work, right. And saying that out loud helps me relax. Practice makes it better. And that's the same as everything else, Public speaking or designing. When I have like periods of my life where I'm doing it a lot it gets way easier.

Taking the formality out of it. So if I am treating it like some big event... Oh, this one happens all the time, that this is Design Thinking, capital letters, and colleagues that haven't done this type of thing before are going to form opinions about it based on my performance. And if I just can reframe it in my head, is like, this as like any other kind of working session, that helps a lot.

I think the biggest one is just getting help, right. Like be friends with facilitators. Having backup, too. Like if it's not just one person facilitating. Like if you have a partner in there who is taking notes or in the breaks you can be like, "How do you think this is going?" Like especially for times when I'm not reading the room, having a second set of eyes, a person who's on my side already, accepting things are gonna be messy. Nope.

Jay: Well, Sarah, what would be the one thing then... You manage these junior designers. What's the one thing that you tell them though going into this, when they're just raw as facilitators?

Sarah: Don't look up a bunch of videos, don't look up a bunch of stuff. Just do it, try it your way first, right. Like don't worry about the right way to do it. If you can just approach it with the confidence of a five-year-old, you're gonna get it so much faster. Just do it, don't worry about it. Until you run into a problem, then start looking up and asking around.

Jay: Beginner's mind, right. Just raw.

Sarah: Yeah.

Jay: That is really important advice that you just gave. I got really good at running design sprints and feeling really confident about the framework and the structure and when things were gonna go sideways. And I think that's the practice that you're talking about, where people feel like they need to be an expert on the topic or the music to play at the right time or the perfect questions to ask, but it's more about the rhythm of facilitation, knowing how to begin, knowing the people that are gonna show up late and how to flex with that and have a flexible schedule. Know when someone's gonna push against you and... Like there's all these, there's difficult characters that come into it, that are just like unknowns.

A lot of the magic of facilitation too for me happens before the workshop ever begins. And that's where, it's just like, you talked about like prep and doing the one-on-ones with people so you know the questions and the challenges that they're gonna come into.

Sarah: Hanging around master facilitators, seeing them get a whole group of people, like you said, with difficult personalities to just sing together. When you know that's like what good looks like, it's just really hard to accept your own like juniorness in this area.

Jay: Well of all the ideas you shared today, the one that I felt was most interesting especially for folks that are just getting started with facilitation is having someone, a partner come and attend your workshops, because having that person go and like kinda audit and come back to you and say, "You did these five things really well, and these two things, I thought you did much better than we originally thought you were gonna do, but here's a little bit of feedback to it."

Sarah: You know something I'm curious about, getting my feelings hurt to put together like a workshop or anything like a sprint. And there will be people behaving in ways that I am reading as disrespectful, right. Like they show up late. And I was just curious like if you've ever dealt with that or?

Jay: Yeah. And far beyond just in workshops. I mean in conversations with friends and family members. I think a lot of comes from the meaning that we attach to it, so the story that we create. So when you ask that person, right, like the person drifts in 10 minutes later, the story that immediately goes through our head is they don't respect us, they didn't listen to our rules. And then you talk with them afterward and they're like, "Yeah, I had to run my kid to school. It was like a last minute emergency." And then you feel bad that you even judge them to begin with and then you kinda like beat yourself up over it. It's this like endless cycle and it's ridiculous. The best cure for it that I that I'm still working on, definitely, every day, is just to ask questions.

Sarah: That's another tattoo...

Jay: Ask more question.

Sarah: Ask questions. Stop telling yourself a story.

Jay: Stop telling stories, let it go. Yeah.

I really appreciate how open and vulnerable and transparent you've been today to share some of this stuff. I hope that it, I know that there's a whole trove of people out there that feel the same way as you do, as I have plenty of times and I still do. So I hope that they appreciate hearing all your stories.

Sarah: Yeah. I mean, it certainly helps to even just write it down. "Why don't I like this? Why am I so tired? Why is this the most exhausting thing? Or why do I avoid this?" So it's actually been really helpful to get to talk about it.

Jay: Thanks again, Sarah. It was so great having you on.

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