Facilitative Leadership

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

Creation Date Monday, 18 March 2013 Hits 22717 Leadership Theories, theories of leadership, types of leadership

You May Also Like

  • Narcissistic Leadership

    Narcissistic Leadership

    Narcissistic leadership is a leadership style in which the leader is only interested in him. Narcissists are good for companies that need people with vision and the courage to take them in new directions. Such leaders sometime might be highly successful, but is it a style to be followed. Learn the various types of narcissistic leadership and the characteristics of such leaders.

  • Lean Leadership Approach

    Lean Leadership Approach

    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.

  • Agile Leadership Style

    Agile Leadership Style

    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.

  • Emergent Leadership

    Emergent Leadership

    Emergent leadership occurs when a group member is not appointed or elected as leader, but rather that person steps up as the leader over time within-group interactions. Have you ever faced challenges in getting accepted into your new role of position as a leader? Groups don't automatically accept a new "boss" as a leader. Emergent leadership is what you must do when taking over a new group. Learn more about emergent leadership.

  • Definition of Leadership

    Definition of Leadership

    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 Five Leadership

    Level Five Leadership

    “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.

  • Leadership Styles

    Leadership Styles

    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.

  • Bureaucratic Leadership Style

    Bureaucratic Leadership Style

    Bureaucratic leadership relies on a clear chain of command and strict regulations. Bureaucratic leadership style is a very decent style for work involving serious safety risks, such as handling toxic substances, moving large objects. The focus is on compliance with rules and laid down procedures to make sure that the group is doing their job correctly and safely. Learn some advantages and disadvantages of this style and situations in which this style could prove to be effective.

  • Factors of Leadership

    Factors of Leadership

    There are four major factors in leadership called Leader, Follower, Communication, and Situation. The success of the leader is dependent on how the leader is effectively able to communicate and motivate followers to perform desired tasks using the appropriate leadership style best suited for the given situation. Interdependencies and dynamics of these four factors of leadership must be considered by a leader to be effective.

  • Authoritarian Leadership Style

    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!

Explore Our Free Training Articles or
Sign Up to Start With Our eLearning Courses

Subscribe to Our Newsletter


© 2023 TechnoFunc, All Rights Reserved