What's facilitation and a facilitator?

What's facilitation? By definition, it's the act of making easy or easier.

It's a skill, knowledge and mindset for:

• Guiding groups towards their objectives.


• Assiting people in building understanding and agreement.


• Bringing out the best in all group members.
  

A facilitator is a person who makes it easier for people to understand each other, build agreement and take concerted action.

Essential facilitation Competencies:

1. Guide the Process

• Build effective desired outcome statements for meetings or parts of meetings.


• Design an agenda that can guide a group towards its desired outcomes.


• Draw out participation, energy and creativity.


• Behave neutrally and contribute to content only when appropriate.


•  Facilitate discussions in a way that encourages an open exchange of ideas, generates useful information and keeps a group focused and on track.

2. Broker Communication

• Listen in a way that validates the speaker and confirms your reception of the speaker's words.


• Uncover the reasoning or feelings that lie beneath a speaker's assertions or concerns.


• Assess the meaning of body language and other non-verbal communication.


• Assist others in understanding a speaker's meaning, reasoning, feeling or intentions.


• Record speaker's ideas legibly on the group memory.

3. Build Agreement

• Build an atmosphere of openness, informality and collaboration.


• Identify and highlight areas of agreement.


• Navigate the group through a variety of strategic moments.


• Help the group build the appropriate sequence of agreements (e.g., agreement on the problem before agreement on the solution).


• Apply several tools for reaching consensus.

4. Resolve Conflict

• Protect individuals and their ideas from attack


• Handle difficult or argumentative behavior with directness and respect.


• Enroll disputing parties in a process for reconciling differences.


• Distinguish between issues, interests and positions.


• Tailor confidence-building measures and negotiate small agreements.

5. Transfer Capability

• Enroll the group in taking responsibility for the success of the meeting.


• Explain The Interaction Method in a way that builds confidence in collaborative approaches to decision making.


• use process commercials as a way of building awareness, understanding and skill.


• Model behaviors that inspire emulation.


• Provide positive and constructive feedback in a way that stimulates self-awareness, experimentation and risk taking.


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Posted at 02:11PM Jan 14, 2009 by byuan in Leadership  |  Comments[0]

What's Leadership

Here is a list I got from a leadership 360 degree survey, anyone who wants to be a successful leader can benefit from a self evaluation:

Management: 

1. Building a successful team.

2. Building strategic working relationships

3. Developing others

4. Empowerment/Delegation

5. Facilitating Change 

Leadership

1. Business Acumen

2. Customer Focus 

3. Decision Making

4. Entrepreneurship

5. Leading through vision and values

Technology

1. Continuous learning

2. Innovation

3. Technical/Professional Knowledge and skills

Posted at 09:32AM Oct 30, 2008 by byuan in Leadership  |  Comments[0]

Motivation issue in G11n group - Job design

Last time I mentioned that some young people don't like to work on
localization and/or  testing, then how to design the job in globalization group to motivate those people?

The following are the five core job characteristics that are
particularly important to job designs. The higher a job scores on each
characteristic, the more it is considered to be enriched, and the more the people can be motivated:

• Skill variety - The
  degree to which a job includes a variety of different activities and
  involves the use of a number of different skills and talents.
  
• Task identity - The
  degree to which the job requires completion of a “whole” and
  identifiable piece of work, one that involves doing a job from
  beginning to end with a visible outcome.
  
• Task
  significance - The degree to which the job is important and involves a
  meaningful contribution to the organization or society in general.
• Autonomy - The degree to
  which the job gives the employee substantial freedom, independence, and
  discretion in scheduling the work and determining the procedures used
  in carrying it out.
  
• Job feedback - The degree
  to which carrying out the work activities provides direct and clear
  information to the employee regarding how well the job has been done
  

Posted at 08:22PM Nov 01, 2006 by byuan in Leadership  |  Comments[0]

Motivation issue in G11n group (2) - Achievement motivation

After reading the following article, I decided to not write anything
but its URL, great introduction about Achievement Motivation.

Posted at 03:50PM Oct 31, 2006 by byuan in Leadership  |  Comments[1]

Motivation issue in G11n group

Many young people don't want to do testing because they think coding is
more challenging or interesting, and many people don't want to do
localization because they think localization is mainly about
translation, is very repetitive and also not technical, unfortunately,
both of these happen in Globalization group, most of our day to day
work is about localization testing, so, how to motivate people in such
a group?



According to Herzgerg's two factor theory, Hygiene factors are sources
of job dissatisfaction while Motivator factors are sources of job
satisfaction, the Hygiene factors or dissatisfaction factors are
associated with the job context or work setting; they relate more to
the environment in which people work than to the nature of the work
itself.  While the Motivator factors are associated with the job
content or work itself - if you want people to do a good job, you
should give people a good job to do.

Improving a hygiene factor, such as working conditions, will not make
people satisfied with their work; it will only prevent them from being
dissatisfied, a low salary makes people dissatisfied but that
paying them more does not necessarily satisfy or motivate them.



So let's take a look at the Motivator factors: Achievement,
recognition, work itself, responsibility, advancement, growth, as what
I said at the beginning, work itself in G11n group is not very
interesting to many people, so we have to think more about how to
improve the other factors ... (To be continued)

Posted at 08:59AM Oct 29, 2006 by byuan in Leadership  |  Comments[0]

How to achieve efficiency?

One of my goals is to improve the globalization effectiveness and
efficiency, today I have learned more about the efficiency from text
book Economics - Principles, Problems, and Policies (Campbell R.
McConnell, Stanley L. Brue, 2005):



To achieve efficiency, we must realize full production, which mean that
all resources must be used so that they can provide the maximum
possible results, full production implies two kinds of efficiency -
productive and allocative efficiency:

1. Productive efficiency is the production of a product or service in the least costly way.

2. In contrast, allocative efficiency is the least-cost production of
that particular mix of products or services most wanted by our
customers.



To improve productive efficiency, we can outsource or offshore some of
non technical tasks, or use some automation tools, or to leverage the
best practices that have been proven in another project or team.



To improve the allocative efficiency, we will need to prioritize our
projects or initiatives according to the requirements of our customers
or business, and allocate our limited resources to the most critical
activities.

Posted at 11:06PM Oct 28, 2006 by byuan in Leadership  |  Comments[0]