How to Facilitate a Workshop — Part 1

The Jobs To Be Done for the Facilitator

First, what is a workshop? I think of it as an environment where people with a common interest or challenge either learn new skills, techniques, or mindsets to address a challenge OR apply their preexisting skills, techniques, or mindsets to a new kind of challenge. Workshops are collaborative where the participants interact amongst one another rather than sit and listen to lecture.

Often “seminar” and “workshop” is used interchangeably. They are different. A seminar resembles more of a traditional environment where attendees are not so much interacting with one another but rather are listening and perhaps interacting with a speaker or facilitator.

A workshop is not a meeting. A meeting is more of an interaction that facilitates the exchange of information and ideas. It provides a forum for the sharing and updating on work begun or issues spotted. It is where decisions can be made as to coordinating of resources, logistics, and responsibilities on a single topic or across a number of separate unrelated topics.

So, if you are running a workshop, here is an easy way to help you increase your likelihood of success. Success being that participants leave feeling fulfilled, motivated and equipped.

There are three jobs and three acts (as in a play or musical) to every successful workshop.

The Three Jobs of a Facilitator

Functional. A facilitator must make sure the participants leave EQUIPPED to do something. To do this, they must learn how to do something they previously did not know how to do or strengthen their ability in some material way. This requires subject matter expertise as well as the ability to make the topic accessible and easy to understand from the relative experience of the participants. For example, a workshop on fighting illiteracy in a community would be approached differently if most participants were teachers versus ordinary citizens. Different skills, experiences, and POVs require different approaches.

This is not about making participants experts, that is what formal education and real-world experience is for. This is about exposure, awareness, practice, and comfort. Design the approach in a non-complicated and straight forward manner. There is limited time to make an impact and too many facilitators either undershoot (leaving no impact) or overshoot (striving for fundamental change in the participants). Incremental advancement is an admirable goal.

Emotional. Participants in a workshop enter it from a state of ignorance (want to learn) and anticipation of interaction (it is a workshop after all). They may or may not know others in the session. Regardless of how many participants there are, the facilitator is presented with a room full of divergent, dissimilar, and different emotional states and personalities.

The job here is to create CLARITY and CONFIDENCE in as many of the participants as you can. You may be able to do this for all of them and that should be the goal, but it is not necessary nor easily obtained. You do need critical mass though as you will see why later.

CLARITY. Clarity eases the mind. Get to the ground rules, guidelines, expectations, and acceptable outcomes right away. This shares with the participants what your approach is going to be, what you expect from them, and what will be happening in the room. Most importantly, it begins to build a sense of shared behaviors and norms for the period of time people are together. This is important to do as it creates a temporal bond between everyone in the room. This tends to alleviate stress and provides a sense of direction.

CONFIDENCE. Confidence creates action. Two things here.

One, remember incremental advancement is the goal, not creating experts out of novices. By stating specifically what each participant should be able to do after the workshop and that it is relatively easy to do within the allotted time, participants will immediately have a sense of confidence that they can meet that threshold.

Two, use obstacles, barriers, and restrictions to level the playing field in the room. Time, tools, resources, and information are all elements you can use to create scarcity and urgency. This tends to drive people together as they share the scarcity burden and must problem solve while working on the workshop subject matter. For instance, use time to create urgency by giving them too little time to complete a task. Let them know ahead of time that this will be the case. This helps people understand that completion of a task is not essential to learning and it also ensures that quality of work (seldom of importance) inside a workshop, is not the sole focus of participants; using the tools, skills, or creating a new mindset is. Another example is removing workshop resources (such as markers, chairs, etc.) requiring participants to share. This is not about making their job more difficult, so make sure they can still get their job done (removing all writing tools would be a bad idea in most cases) so look for peripheries that are easily substituted for.

Social. This is about PERCEPTION. Workshops are temporary social ecosystems. Having people interact with one another (whether they know one another or not) on something new that requires skills they may not have creates plenty of interesting social chemistry. There are abundant moments of awkwardness and hesitation, as well as showmanship and swagger.

This social chemistry, however, is the lubricant that makes everything work and keeps the workshop interesting. Trust me, it is a good thing. So be courageous enough to play with it, even acknowledge it. But be mindful to ensure that each participant’s social status is not challenged nor negatively impacted. For instance, there is nothing worse than allowing a loud mouth to take complete control of a team, thereby minimizing, demoralizing, and diminishing the other teammates. These poor folks will begin to worry about how everyone else is perceiving them.

Most participants desire to leave a workshop feeling better about themselves, that they learned something new, and participated a smidge beyond their comfort level. This feeling translates into a notion of value. They will generally feel as though the workshop was a solid use of their time and that they are walking away with something new. By creating an environment that is challenging rather than intimidating, most participants will rise to the occasion.

Wrapping Up

There is a lot here to consider but just like a workshop, the point of this post is not to make you an expert. Rather it is to help you come up with a better game plan, introduce a new mindset, create some awareness in you as to what your jobs as a facilitator are. In my next post, I will share how every workshop has three acts.

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Josh Kubicki is an award-winning legal industry leader and intrapreneur. He has recently co-founded the first business design studio for #BigLaw with his co-founder and legal industry pioneer, Kim Craig. Learn more at BoldDuckStudio.com And yes we do workshops: amazing, engaging, and thrilling workshops for buttoned-up types and the unbuttonned-types ;)

You can connect with me on Twitter or LinkedIn.