Most of us spend a big part of our working lives in groups: team meetings, board meetings, planning days and workshops. Some sessions leave everyone clear on what happens next. Others go round in circles, or end with an agreement that quietly falls apart a month later.
This guide draws on what I've learned from many years of facilitating, working with groups and leading teams, including running sessions with boards, leadership teams and staff. More recently, I did five days of facilitation professional development this year: a two-day course with Groupwork Centre and three days at the International Association of Facilitators' Oceania conference. Many of the principles in this guide are shaped by Groupwork Centre's approach and by facilitators I learnt from or observed at the conference.
It's for anyone who runs group sessions themselves, and for anyone wondering whether their next one needs someone from outside to run it.
What does a facilitator do?
A facilitator designs and runs a group session so the group can do its best thinking and reach decisions together. The facilitator is responsible for the process. The group is responsible for the content: the ideas, the decisions and the plan.
The word comes from the Latin facilis, meaning easy. In practice, a facilitator:
works out with you what the session is for and what the group needs to walk away with
designs the activities and the run sheet
makes sure everyone contributes, not just the most senior or most confident people
keeps the group on track and deals with tension when it comes up
helps the group reach decisions and agree who does what next
It's tempting for a facilitator to take responsibility for the result. When that happens, the group tends to hand it over and step back. People commit to what they've worked out themselves, so the job is to set up the conditions for the group to get there.
Facilitator or consultant?
A consultant is usually brought in for their answer. A facilitator helps a group find its own. In my work I often do a bit of both. In a market positioning workshop, for example, I might bring in research on the market and competitors, but the decision about where the organisation goes stays with the people who will have to deliver it.
When do you need a facilitator?
It's worth bringing in an external facilitator when the stakes are high, when people with different levels of power are in the room, or when the person who would normally run the session needs to take part in it.
Sessions that benefit from an external facilitator usually have at least one of these:
The stakes are high, such as a strategy day, a decision about where to grow or a choice that will shape the next few years.
People with different levels of power are in the same room, like a board and staff.
The team is overwhelmed. Everything feels urgent, nothing is sequenced and people are working in silos.
The group is choosing between directions, such as how to position the organisation for a new market, and the trade-offs are real.
There's tension or history in the group that nobody has said out loud.
The team has been stuck on the same issue for months.
The leader needs to take part in the thinking, not run the session.
The last one comes up more than people expect. The CEO of a small not-for-profit told me this year that she knew she could run her team's prioritisation session herself, but then she wouldn't be able to take part in it.
There's another reason too. When a CEO or chair runs their own session, everyone watches them for cues. That includes the people who were meant to challenge their thinking. An independent facilitator works for the whole group, not the most senior person or the loudest one.
If you're running the session yourself:
Notice who speaks first and whose view everyone else responds to. If it's always the most senior person, you're not getting everyone's thinking.
If you're the leader, say which hat you're wearing when you give your view, and give it last.
What happens before a facilitated session?
Most of the work happens before anyone walks into the room. A strategy day isn't a regular meeting. Neither is the session a team needs when it's so deep in the weeds it can't see what matters most. Both are designed around a specific outcome, and the design starts with getting clear on purpose.
When I design a session with a client, we start with three questions.
Why are we here? What has led to this session, and has something triggered it?
What do we want to walk away with? "A strategy" isn't specific enough. "Three priorities for the next two years that both the board and staff support" is.
How do we want people to feel at the end? This one often surfaces what the other two miss. "I want the new board members to feel part of this." "I want people to leave hopeful, not overwhelmed."
Every activity then gets checked against the purpose. If it doesn't serve it, it goes, even if it's a favourite.
Pre-work helps too. A few short questions sent to each person beforehand means people arrive having already thought about the issue, and I can see where views line up and where they don't before the session starts. For a strategy, the design can also include interviews or workshops with staff, clients, partners or funders, so the views of the people affected are on the table before any decisions are made.
Something to try: write the purpose of your next session in one sentence at the top of the agenda, plus one line on how you want people to feel at the end. Then check every item on the agenda against it.
How do you get everyone's voice heard in a meeting?
Give people time to think on their own before the group discusses anything, and connect the group before you get into the content. Open discussion favours the most senior, the most confident and the fastest thinkers, and the group loses the thinking of people who often know things the leaders don't.
Facilitator Sam Bowtell said it plainly at a workshop I attended this year: "Open discussion is the enemy of inclusion." It sounds counterintuitive, so here's what it looks like in practice.
A board and leadership team meet for a strategy day. They rarely work together in the same room. The facilitator asks, "What are the biggest risks to our services in the next two years?"
The chair answers first and talks about funding. Two board members agree. The leadership team adds a few points about funding too. The program manager, who knows the waitlist has doubled and staff are close to burnout, decides it's not the moment.
Now run it again with five minutes of silent writing first. The program manager's sticky note about the waitlist goes on the wall next to the chair's. When the group clusters the notes, three of the leadership team have written something similar. It becomes one of the day's priorities.
Two things I build into every session:
Individual thinking before group discussion. Everyone writes their ideas down before anyone speaks, so the first person to talk doesn't set the frame for everyone else. It also gives reflective thinkers the time they need. Some people do their best thinking in silence, and a fast discussion has moved on before they've worked out what they think.
Connection before content. Time spent connecting a group at the start isn't time lost. People speak up more when they know each other a bit and have agreed how they'll work together. It matters most when there's a power difference in the room. Task-focused people can find it frustrating, so I tell them why we're doing it.
Two things to try:
A few days before your next session, send people two or three questions to think about. Make it optional. Some people love time to think ahead and others prefer to think on the day.
After you ask a big question, give everyone time to write before anyone speaks.
What do you do when a group gets stuck?
Name it, then hand the problem back to the group with a question. Confusion and frustration partway through a session are normal. It usually means the group is wrestling with something real.
A leadership team is spending a day working out how to reposition their organisation. By early afternoon they've mapped four options, with the pros, cons and risks of each, and there are forty sticky notes on the wall. Energy is low after lunch. Someone says, "We're going round in circles." Someone else says, "I thought we'd have a decision by now." The CEO looks at the facilitator with an expression that says "do something".
This is the messy middle.
The instinct, for facilitators and leaders alike, is to rescue the group: tidy the clusters, recommend an option and move on. It feels helpful, but it takes the ownership away. A group will be less committed to a direction someone else picked for them.
What I do instead:
Pause and name it. "This is the messy middle. It's meant to feel like this."
Hand it back with a question. "What's making this hard?" or "What do you need to be able to move forward?"
Wait for someone to answer.
In this case, someone says, "We don't agree on what we're trying to achieve. Half of us are judging these options on impact and half on revenue." That's the real issue. Once it's out, the group can agree its criteria first and then test each option against them.
Sometimes a group is still in the middle at the end of the day. That's OK, as long as you name where they are and agree what happens next. For example, a small working group takes the two strongest options and brings back a recommendation in a fortnight. The real risk is people leaving thinking they've agreed on something they haven't.
Something to try: next time a session gets stuck and you feel the urge to propose the answer, ask "What's making this hard?" and wait for someone to answer.
How do you get a group to agree on priorities?
Find out how strongly people support each option, rather than asking for a yes or no. That surfaces doubts while there’s still time to deal with them.
Most groups make decisions in a way that reads silence as agreement. They discuss until nobody objects, or they take a show of hands. People who have doubts but don’t want to hold things up stay quiet, and the doubts come back later as slow progress or quiet resistance. Dot voting has a similar problem, because people can see where others have put their dots and tend to follow the senior people or the crowd.
Measure support, not just agreement
A widely used scale is the five Ls: love it, like it, live with it, lament it, loathe it.
Put up one clear, specific proposal.
Agree the bar before anyone shows their position, for example 80% at "live with it" or above.
Everyone shows their position at the same time. Cards or fingers work, but I also like a sociometric line-up, where people stand along a line from "love it" to "loathe it". It gets people up and moving, and seeing where you stand compared with everyone else often tells a different story from a show of hands. If there's a big power difference in the room, do a quick private round with cards first, because people tend to stand near the boss.
If the bar isn't met, ask the people at the lower end, "What would need to change for you to move up one step?" Their answer usually improves the proposal. You can also ask the whole group, "What would you be prepared to let go of?", which helps people see that some compromise may be needed.
Match the bar to the stakes. "Live with it" is fine for a small, short-term decision. For something big or expensive, you want more people at "like it" or above.
Take a social enterprise that runs a café training young people for jobs in hospitality. The board is considering a second site: "We'll open a second café in 2027." Most people show "like it" or "live with it". The operations manager and one board member show "lament it".
Asked what would need to change, the operations manager says the training supervisor is already stretched across one site, and a second would put the quality of the training at risk. The board member is worried about cash flow. The proposal becomes: "We'll open a second café in 2027, once we've recruited a second training supervisor and the first site has broken even for six months." Everyone moves to "live with it" or above.
With a show of hands, the original proposal probably passes with a few nods, and the concern about the young people's training stays in one person's head.
Turn priorities into a plan
Agreeing priorities is only half the job. This year I worked with a small team going through a governance restructure and a change of legal structure, with several positions unfilled. Everything felt urgent, nothing was sequenced and people were working in silos. They didn't need more ideas. They needed to know what to do first.
Once the group has agreed its priorities, three more questions turn them into a plan:
What has to happen first, because other things depend on it?
Who owns each priority? One name, not a team.
What are we going to stop, pause or do later to make room?
Then we build the plan on the wall, with pen, paper strips and blu-tack. Each task goes on its own strip with an owner's name on it, placed in the week or month it's due. The team can see the whole plan at once, including when one person's name is on too many strips or one month is overloaded, and they can move things around together until it works. For teams who spend most of their day working digitally, planning this way on paper is a noticeably different experience.
That team left with a workplan they could pick up and use straight away. One person said afterwards that they could now tackle things systematically as a team, rather than everyone working separately and getting overwhelmed.
Something to try: next time your group is about to agree to something important, use the five Ls and ask anyone at "lament it" or below what would need to change. Then, before you close, ask what the group will stop doing to make room for it.
What happens when the plan for a session falls over?
Sessions rarely go exactly to plan. Often someone raises an important issue that isn’t on the agenda. When that happens, acknowledge that it matters, show the group what it will cost in time and let them decide what changes. Changes to the agenda are the group’s decision, not the facilitator’s.
I learned this the hard way. Halfway through a strategy day I was facilitating, someone senior raised an issue that wasn't on the agenda. The agenda was already full.
It was a bit of an elephant in the room. I gave it space, because it needed to be talked about. It took up a large chunk of time, so we rushed the rest of the day and the decision-making at the end got squeezed.
Looking back, I made a call on the group's behalf. The conversation was important, but deciding what to drop to make room for it should have been the group's decision, not mine. It's been my biggest lesson of the year.
What I do now:
Say that the conversation is important.
Point to the agenda on the wall and ask, "If we have this conversation now, what comes off?"
Offer some options: drop an item, shorten a few, park the topic for a follow-up session or agree to finish later.
Let the group decide, then carry on.
Leave room for the unexpected
That day also changed how I plan, because something unplanned nearly always comes up. I'm a natural planner. My run sheets are detailed, sometimes timed to the minute, and my instinct is to fit in everything the client wants plus a few things I think they need. I've had to learn to leave about a fifth of the time empty, and I still find it hard. Now I:
fill no more than about 80% of the time, because the most important conversation is often one nobody scheduled
mark each activity as must-do or nice-to-have, so we know what gets cut before the day rather than in the middle of it
give an issue time on the agenda if it keeps coming up in conversations beforehand, or ask the decision-maker to make a call on it, because leaving it off doesn't stop it coming up
have a couple of alternatives ready for each activity, such as a shorter version, a way to go deeper or a way to do it in pairs, so I have something to change to if it isn't working
When I started out, I thought going off plan meant I hadn't prepared properly. Now I see changing course because the group needs something different as part of doing the job well. If your sessions often go off plan, though, check whether the plan was over-packed before deciding you did a bad job.
I judge a session by what the group achieved and how people felt at the end, not by how closely it followed the run sheet.
Two things to try:
Look at the agenda for your next session and take one item off. Coco Chanel's advice was to look in the mirror before you leave the house and remove one accessory. It works for agendas too.
Put the agenda somewhere everyone can see it, and agree at the start that changes to it are the group's decision.
Frequently asked questions
Can't our CEO or chair just facilitate?
They can, and for many meetings they should. The trade-off is that they can't fully take part while they're running the process, and people tend to follow their lead. For a strategy day, a big decision or a session with a power difference in the room, an independent facilitator lets the leader be a participant.
What kinds of sessions do you facilitate?
Strategy days, prioritisation workshops, team planning days, market positioning workshops, value proposition workshops and program reviews. I work with boards, leadership teams and staff teams, and often with all of them in the same room.
What's the difference between a strategy day and a prioritisation workshop?
A strategy day usually looks further ahead and asks where the organisation is going. A prioritisation workshop is for a team with too much on its plate that needs to agree what comes first, who owns it and what can wait. Many sessions do some of both.
How much preparation does a facilitated session need?
More than most people expect. Before a strategy day I'd usually have a planning conversation with the client to agree the purpose, design the run sheet, send any pre-work to participants and check in before the day. Sometimes there's also a wider stakeholder engagement process beforehand, such as interviews or workshops with staff, clients, partners or funders, so the views of all the people and organisations affected by the strategy are heard and fed into the day. Most of the work that makes a session go well happens in that stage.
Do you work with small organisations?
Yes. A lot of my work is with small not-for-profits and social enterprises. A session can be scoped to fit a small organisation's budget, for example a single workshop with some light pre-work rather than a longer engagement.
Do you facilitate in person or online?
Both. I'm based in the Dandenong Ranges and facilitate in person across most of Melbourne, and online for organisations across Australia.
Thinking about a facilitator for your next session?
If your team has a big challenge to work through, I'd be glad to talk about designing and running a session to help. That might be weighing up which opportunities to pursue, getting clearer on what your customers need or agreeing priorities when everything feels urgent. I work with social enterprises, not-for-profits, government teams and other purpose-led organisations.
Book a free call, or email me at olivia@impactpractice.au.