Case study: Facilitation skills
Vessel
A utility company
The Charter
The HR Director
Departing From
Sticky Change was approached by the HR Director of a utility company to develop internal facilitation skills. The client has an innovative business model, which has led to there being a core team of 130 – 140 employees, with the rest being outsourced to across its partners.
Destination
This structure had led to the requirement for significant levels of facilitation skills, and these were provided by an external company. The utility company was keen to reduce its dependency on external facilitators, and to develop sufficient in-house skills for most of the facilitation work to be done by its employees. We were approached to design and deliver a 4 day facilitation skills course.
The programme was designed to be highly interactive, giving people as much opportunity as possible to facilitate sessions with their colleagues on the programme, and obtain feedback. There were 12 participants on the programme with 2 facilitators, to maximise the learning and enable us to work in small groups when appropriate.
The programme was structured as 3 modules, with a 6 week break between each module, during which time the participants worked in pairs to put their learning into practice and facilitate workshops with their colleagues. At the final module, we had an invited audience for the participants – working in pairs - to facilitate a 40 minute session with. It is our experience that this structure accelerates learning, as participants are quickly having to put their skills into practice and can discuss their experiences at the next module.
Skippers Comments
This programme has benefited the organisation and the participants. Our confidence in facilitating workshops has increased significantly. Our facilitators are benefiting from developing their own skills and in working with different functions and increasing their understanding of the whole organisation. With the internal facilitators now starting to be used, the monthly cost of using external facilitators is already at around half the previous amount, 2 months after the end of the programme.
Guest Comments
The words used by the participants to describe the workshop included ‘valuable, practical, interactive and challenging’ and the trainers were given an average rating of 4.91, on a 1 – 6 scale. The following are some of the comments:
- Very well facilitated – empathy created early on.
- Very good and pacey, positive, fun.
- Excellent rapport and well organised.
The average rating by the participants in their confidence in facilitating increased as follows (using a 1 – 6 scale):
- At the start of the programme - 2.73
- During the intermodular facilitation – 3.38
- At the end of the programme - 4.7
