Facilitative Leadership
Facilitative Leadership is all about involving the employees in the decision-making process at all levels enhancing their sense of ownership, responsibility, and motivation. Facilitative leadership style uses a number of indirect communication patterns to help the group reach consensus and build commitment for the decision taken. To be effective in modern organizations, managers need to become facilitative leaders, learn what it means to be a one.
What is Facilitative Leadership?
To facilitate means to “make it easier” and a leader is a person who can get others to achieve assigned tasks. Hence a facilitative leader is a “person with authority or influence who encourages others to get up and do things”.
In business today, there is an increasing emphasis on facilitative leadership as a way forward. Facilitative leadership is about using the group’s collective expertise to accept responsibility and solve business problems collectively. Traditionally, managers used their authority to make decisions, which employees followed. Rather than being directive, the facilitative leader involves employees in the decision-making process and ensures their commitment to the final course of action. This approach removes the "them versus us" mentality and ensures buy-in from every individual who has been involved in the decision-making process.
Characteristics of Facilitative Leadership:
1. Facilitative leaders value creativity, reflection, and brainstorming over planning, commanding, and directing. They assume that most people are self-motivated and appreciate challenges and the team members are more innovative collectively than what they are individual.
2. Facilitative leaders have a strong interest in individuals and encourage ideas from all the team members. Decisions are reached by consensus and are supported by all team members. They trust their peers and employees to be able to create new solutions and ideas in creative ways.
3. Facilitative leaders are inquisitive about their underlying values and the reasons for their opinions and behavior.
4. Facilitative leaders are reflective in nature, ask structured, probing questions, and encourage interaction and debate, helping individuals to see alternative points of view. They encourage the team to think outside the box and actively work to instill confidence within the group.
5. Facilitative leaders have a high degree of patience as facilitation takes time and they are very flexible and readily change plans, ideas, and strategies based on the group’s suggestions.
6. They encourage healthy conflict and opposing views. They see this as an opportunity to get issues out in the open and have them resolved. An environment is created whereby individuals respect the wisdom and contributions of others on the team. They believe that every team member has an equal right to express their opinion and disregard traditional chain-of-command discipline.
7. Facilitative leaders focus on what the group is learning from the process as well as the outcome of the task.
8. Facilitative leaders provide coaching, support, encouragement, and appreciation. Tasks are divided up depending on the skills of each individual member and each individual is accountable for their agreed actions.
9. Facilitative leaders share the credit and praise with the team and/or individuals and in case of failures are ready to own the responsibility.
Conclusions:
This is a special leadership style that can be used by anyone who runs meetings. Facilitative Leadership can also be practiced by creating self-managed teams, which make decisions without the need for an authoritative figure giving instructions. The Team Leader role can further be rotated amongst the team members for a set period of time.
Although this particular style has many advantages but this might not be the appropriate style for all situations or all organizations. While it might produce results for one set of people it might create apathy and inefficient work habits within another. This approach requires careful planning. The business culture and the timing need to be supportive and leaders must assess and appraise the situation and circumstances before deciding on the degree of employee involvement.
Related Links
You May Also Like
-
Authoritarian Leadership Style
Although generally considered as a traditional, outdated, and non-preferred style of leadership, the autocratic style still can be used effectively in certain situations. It is a leadership style characterized by individual absolute control over a group. If you work for an autocratic leader, your job is usually to do what you're told. Learn more about this style and situations where this could be an effective style to use and when to avoid this type of approach. Analyze the characteristics of this style to evaluate if your followers consider you an authoritarian leader!
-
Power is the ability to exercise influence or control over others. Leadership involves authority and it is very important for leaders to understand what type of power they're using. The 5 Types of Power in Leadership are Coercive power, expert power, legitimate power, referent power, and reward power. Authority is the right to command and extract obedience from others. It comes from the organization and it allows the leader to use power.
-
The ten most important qualities that define a good leader are self-awareness, interpersonal and communication skills, ethical values, organizational consciousness, self-confidence, adaptability and flexibility, imagination and creativity, focus & result-orientation, continuous self-development and accountability and ownership for his actions. These ten qualities of leadership every good leader should possess to a certain extent and must continually strive to develop them.
-
Leadership has been defined in different ways by different sets of scholars. In very simple terms leadership can be defined as the skill of a person to influence an individual or a group for achievement of a goal in a given situation. One can use different dimensions and perspectives to define leadership. Through the evolution of leadership thought, leadership has been defined in various ways discussed here.
-
“Level 5 Leadership”, this term was coined by Jim Collins in his book “Good to Great” and it is all about achieving "Greatness" as a leader. This article will explain what we mean by Level 5 Leadership and what the characteristics of a Level 5 leader are. What it takes to achieve greatness as a leader, and what are the steps and strategies that one can use to move up to this top level of leadership.
-
Charles Darwin had once commented that “It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.” Agility means the capability of rapidly and efficiently adapting to changes and recently, agility has been applied in the context of software development, agile enterprise, and agile leadership. Agile leaders play an important, even essential, role in scaling agility in an organization. Understand how being an agile leader helps in effectively catalyzing organizational change.
-
Authentic leadership is an approach to leadership that emphasizes building the leader's legitimacy through honest relationships with followers which value their input and are built on an ethical foundation. The authentic leader acts upon his or her values and beliefs, and inspires others to do the same, is committed to know and develop oneself. Are you committed to developing yourself; know your motivations and the purpose of your leadership? Read this article to know more about authentic leadership style and discovering your authentic self.
-
Frederick Winslow Taylor started the “Scientific Management Movement”, and attempted to study the work process scientifically. Scientific management, also called Taylorism, was a theory of management that analyzed and synthesized workflows. It is a system for increasing the efficiency of manpower to its maximum potential and streamlining production to improve efficiency. This article explores this theory in more detail.
-
A good leadership style is something that every effective leader must have in order to succeed, but identifying what that entails or does not entails might be difficult to understand. Most of the research on leadership focuses on the exemplary, best practices, and positive attributes of effective and successful leaders. This article talks about a new approach to learn leadership using lessons from bad leadership. That is the lessons to be learned by examining leaders who have not effectively exercised their power, authority, or influence.
-
Appreciative leaders encourage contributions from those around them and facilitate the discussion to mutually solve problems. Understand the concept of Appreciative Leadership and learn about tools to create and ask powerful questions - that lead to new discoveries and possibilities. Instead of focusing on what’s wrong in the workplace, learn about, and build upon what works. Learn in this article the art to apply appreciative inquiry to specific situations and challenges at your workplace.
