Influence vs Facilitation

Abstract

Dianna and Fred discuss influence vs. facilitation and the difficulty of trying to do both at once.

Key Points

Join Dianna and Fred as they discuss influence vs. facilitation, comparing the roles of when you are a contributor vs. facilitating with peers.

Topics include:

• The need to be a facilitator when in quality engineering or reliability engineering
• The challenges of stepping out of the facilitator role to join the discussion as an expert
• Tricks to facilitating, including planning ahead and making ideas visible
• Home/school club, chalkboards, project management

Enjoy an episode of Speaking of Reliability. Where you can join friends as they discuss reliability topics. Join us as we discuss topics ranging from design for reliability techniques to field data analysis approaches.

SOR 1021 Influence vs FacilitationDianna Deeney

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Show Notes

Reliability engineers and quality engineers often find themselves needing to facilitate a meeting. Root cause analysis, continuous improvement, and other scenarios require teamwork. A challenge can be playing the facilitator role while you also want to be a contributor. These roles can be at odds with one another. Facilitators guard the process and ensure everyone is heard. Contributors have ideas and opinions to share with the team that help define the solution.

When you must facilitate, there are ways to shift from one role to another. Fred and Dianna talk about several ways to make the shift.

Facilitating itself is difficult and requires skill. Some suggestions they have:

• Plan ahead
• Define the scope well
• Know how decisions will be made
• Follow up with actions

One of the biggest takeaways: make it visible to everyone. Quality tools are examples of models and templates that that work.

Whether you facilitate in-person or are using remote tools, be sure you understand how to use the tools. Don’t let your misunderstanding about how to use tools create disruptive pauses in the process.

In conclusion, be cautious about the roles you play, and make it clear to the team which role you’re playing when. And you can enhance your career if you practice your facilitator skills.

Do you have any success stories to share?