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
-
We define Lean as the systematic elimination of waste through a continual effort to decrease inefficiency; the lean leader strives to create a more efficient organization. Lean leadership is a philosophy. It is a consistent way of thinking and being in your role as a leader. The focus of this approach is on raising new leaders and help their team embrace a culture of continuous improvement. Learn what we mean by lean leadership style and its principles.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
This style is characterized by leaders making decisions for others and expecting followers to follow instructions. The directive leader is adept at giving instructions, setting expectations, and establishing timelines and performance standards. However, it is possible for the same leaders to display both directive and supportive behavior as per the demands of the situation.
-
Charisma is a certain quality of an individual personality, by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men. Charismatic Leader gathers followers, through dint of personality and charm. Understand the meaning and concept of Charismatic Leadership and the qualities of a charismatic leader. Gain an understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of using charismatic leadership. Finally, explore the difference between charismatic and transformational leadership.
-
Have you ever resonated that there seem to be as many different ways to lead people as there have been great leaders? When we recall the success of Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Abraham Lincoln, Napoleon Bonaparte to Steve Jobs and Jack Welch, we also notice that they all used different approaches that were suitable to their specific situations and circumstances. Over the last century, researchers and psychologists have developed simple ways to describe the “Styles of leadership” and in this section, we will explore these commonly known leadership styles.
-
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.
-
Adaptive leadership is a style of leadership that emphasizes the importance of each and every person and role within the company. Adaptive leadership views the organization as an ever-changing, living organization, where employees can learn, adapt, and grow. Adaptive leaders mobilize people towards a common goal and also have the courage to experiment with new ideas and approaches. Adaptive leadership is the practice of mobilizing groups of people to tackle tough challenges and thrive. Learn how to adopt this style and how to become an adaptive leader!
-
Understanding of how individuals of different cultures interact with each other is very important. Not all individuals can adapt to the leadership styles expected in a different culture whether that culture is organizational or national. In a fast-paced business environment, developing a richer understanding and sensitivity to other cultures is a skill that leaders must possess. Learn to be effective in a cross-cultural setting.
