The Skilled Facilitator: A Comprehensive Resource for Consultants, Facilitators, Coaches, and Trainers

"The Skilled Facilitator is a book that I have picked because my current job requires management. I am currently a research director at ETS, and that means I have a team of colleagues who work with me on different projects. Even if I was not in that position, a lot of work at this company is interdisciplinary, and so you work with people with all different kinds of backgrounds and training. You have to bring them together and share information, get reasonable buy-in for ideas, for processes, for practices, and that is a hard thing to do. “I really believe that even if you just have a small unit, you need to live by a set of values that are really constructive, that also reflect you, and that you want others to live by when you are not with them. ” The current director of the division that I am in at one point referenced the ‘mutual learning’ framework by Roger Schwartz. This particular book is one of the first books in which Roger talks about that framework in detail. It is essentially a very accessible and elegant way of communicating that in order to work together, you have to have a psychological mindset that is formed on ideas like transparency, curiosity, compassion, and that you should ground communication and negotiation on those kinds of values and their surrounding culture. Put simply, rather than being top-down, punitive, secretive, and unnecessarily directive, this kind of mindset really helps teams work together better. It helps you connect with individuals better. It helps you make smarter, more efficient, more effective managerial choices, which, if you think about that whole test development process that we talked about earlier in our third book, is really what you need. I have found this framework to be really, really helpful. I actually have a poster on my door from a workshop that Roger Schwartz and colleagues did to remind people that when we have conversations about ideas, those are the principles, the assumptions, and also the behaviours that we should be guided by. I have seen it work really well. Incidentally, I always believed in those kinds of values anyway, so for me it was just fine-tuning that, reminding myself to continue to improve myself as a manager, as a director, as a colleague. I really believe that even if you just have a small unit, you need to live by a set of values that are really constructive, that also reflect you, and that you want others to live by when you are not with them. And let’s face it, as a director or manager or coach that is 99% of the time. I personally believe that this is a critical part of how we do our job and are successful, and how we help others be successful."