Being in a leadership position requires a range of skills. In addition to technical competencies, which are essential for guiding your team, you need soft skills. These will help you in every stage of the management process, whether coordinating work execution or leading your team. Facilitation skills are a good example.
They play a crucial role in the daily professional lives of leaders. Therefore, it’s worth learning more about them, discovering what they are, and including them in your development plan. This way, you’ll actively work to become an increasingly better manager, positively impacting results and the employee experience.
To do this, we’ll help you with all the necessary information! Continue reading to learn what facilitation skills are and see examples of this group of emotional competencies.
What are facilitation skills?
When we talk about soft skills, we’re referring to a large group of behavioral skills, right? They’re competencies that define how you conduct your daily work and deal with the challenges and issues of the professional world.
However, within the soft skills group, we can also identify other competency categories. These include skills that complement each other, share the same objective, or represent specific capabilities. In this context, we have the facilitation competency group.
In short, a facilitation skill is one that can literally make both the work and the lives of a leader’s team members easier. Thus, we’re talking about skills that make daily professional life simpler, more agile, smoother, and more fluid.
We can name a number of skills that fit this definition, and you’ve probably already considered some when evaluating your work situation. However, there are specific skills that make all the difference for professionals in leadership positions. Below, we’ve listed six that are worth developing for career advancement.
6 Facilitation Skills You Need to Have
1 – Conflict management
Conflicts are inevitable in the workplace. When dealing with people, whether they’re employees, clients, suppliers, consumers, or many other potential audiences, they will inevitably arise. What determines the outcome of the situation is the management skills of the leaders involved.
Thus, conflicts of all kinds can be handled in many different ways. Knowing how to do this in the best possible way is essential for a more peaceful professional life.
2 – Active listening
To communicate effectively, organize and guide your team, develop the best solutions, and build bonds with employees, you need to be an active listener. That is, you must be able to listen intentionally and attentively to everything that happens around you.
This especially includes the people on your team. By genuinely listening to them, you’ll be able to understand them, get to know them more deeply, strengthen relationships, reinforce mutual trust, and make all interactions simpler.
3 – Planning and organization
Leaders who lack planning and organization can cause headaches for any company. These two aspects are crucial to ensuring effective work, optimizing time and resources, and ensuring focus and peace of mind for all employees.
After all, confused and disorganized leaders don’t inspire confidence and leave their employees feeling distressed, lost, and stressed. None of this sounds like a “facilitator,” does it?
4 – Empathy
Few things can make life easier than the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. In other words, the ability to be empathetic. This is a fundamental virtue for all aspects of life, including, and with considerable impact, the professional side.
When leaders can genuinely understand the people around them, everything can change. They can make more humane and sensitive decisions, think of comprehensive solutions, anticipate issues, and resolve everything more smoothly.
5 – Emotional intelligence
Having emotional intelligence will revolutionize your career, regardless of your position. However, managers and leaders can benefit even more from this skill.
With emotional intelligence, you’ll have the clarity to understand and manage your own emotions, as well as gain new insights into other people’s actions and reactions.
All of this makes it much easier to read scenarios and people, dealing with all the complexity of the corporate world with much more ease.
6 – Team engagement
Finally, knowing how to engage teams is also a fundamental skill. With employees who get along well, can work together, and see a common purpose, it’s much easier to keep work flowing. This means greater engagement, productivity, and results.
