Since 2016, I have been developing facilitative leaders including advice (coaching, mentoring), consulting, and training (workshops).
I’m CEO of a Psychology AI startup and have the usual tasks of bringing a viable product to market and sourcing funding. Typically, at the outset, resources are light and so you rely heavily on collaboration. My approach to orienting key people without using hierarchy or finance is through facilitative leadership.
Facilitative leaders successfully lose the ego of the leadership role. They leverage a collective willingness to work towards common goals. The facilitative leader ‘makes it easier’ for everyone involved to think, consider, explore, suggest, solve, agree and action.
Leader Language: LLQI
At a macro level, large organisations crave authoritarian and directive-driven leadership. Enterprises with a disruptor mindset seek out facilitative leaders that build empowering environments. Everyone can have direct, honest and adult-adult discussions without fear of judgement.
Psychological Safety
Psychological Safety is an important contribution to facilitating insights, problem solving, decision making, and the myriad of activities within a collaborative enterprise.
Research shows causal links between the strength of psychological safety and such aspects as productivity and innovation. The lower the sense of safety, the lower the productivity.
Add to this such issues as compliance and business ethics; weak psychological safety leads to cutting corners and fewer whistleblowers.
A key aspect of facilitative leadership is to recognise different points of view without having to necessarily condone / agree with them. This gives people the thought-space required for them to speak honestly without fear of condemnation or criticism.
Facilitative leadership is balanced, equitable, and encourages diversity. However, recognising ‘different points of view’ doesn’t mean that we condone what is fundamentally wrong (e.g. racism).
Build Your Facilitative Leaders
As facilitative leadership is a reflection of attitude, I have been codifying it within Leader Language and running various workshops to bring it to a wider audience.
There is increasing talk about recession and this will lead to ‘doing more for less’. Yes, recession is cyclic as are the internal discussions – and the facilitative leadership paradigm engages all stakeholders to gets things done.
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