Facilitating

How to manage change, and how to ensure continuous improvement: these are perhaps the two most important challenges confronting businesses today. And increasingly facilitating is being seen as the best way to deal with both. Facilitators - and managers operating in a facilitative style - work on helping individuals, groups and organizations to enhance their performance. This book shows how that can be done. The first part deals with the nature of facilitation and why those involved need to understand the basis of human behaviour. The second covers the management of change at different levels. The third provides practical guidelines on the relevant skills. The fourth looks at the kinds of situation where facilitators can be effective and includes case studies from a wide variety of settings. The final part deals with facilitative styles of management. For any manager or trainer determined to release the unfulfilled potential of their organization and the people in it, this book is the ideal starting point.

Contents: Introduction. Part I The Facilitator Role: The origins of the facilitator role; Understanding the facilitator role; Understanding groups; Understanding individuals. Part II Managing Change: Understanding and developing organizations; Changing and developing groups; Changing and developing individuals. Part III Facilitator Skills: The start point; Facilitative behaviours; Developing empathy; Listening; Eliciting; Positive confrontation; The Emperor's new clothes; ’Facipulation’. Part IV The Facilitator Role in Practice: Issues for the facilitator; Situations where the role is useful; Case histories of facilitation; The correct approach. Part V The Issue of Management Style: Theories of management style; Facilitation as the style of the future; Further reading; Index.

Mike Robson is Managing Director of MRA International, a leading consultancy and training organization specialising in the development of organizations and their people. Ciaran Beary is a consultant.