It’s been three years since OpenAI released ChatGPT, making generative AI mainstream and introducing a new era of innovation and organizational transformation.
While many have adopted the technology and experienced significant gains in productivity, emerging challenges are also affecting the people in our organizations.
Currently, we see companies, big and small, slashing office jobs and replacing them with machine-driven efficiency. This resulting job insecurity produces heightened anxiety and a sense of precariousness among the workforce. And the fear doesn’t stop with Gen AI.
Accompanying technological change is an era marked by deep political polarization and rising identity-based tensions. Everyday conversations feel riskier than ever, and concerns about being judged, misunderstood, or professionally penalized based on personal beliefs or affiliations are widespread.
In this precarious environment, self-protection often takes precedence over self-expression. People who might otherwise contribute bold ideas or take creative risks instead default to caution and self-censor to preserve safety, stability, and belonging.
Over time, a culture of withholding becomes prevalent, trust erodes, and collaboration stalls.
The consequences of this are significant.
We must find a way to tap into our unique human abilities to work together and be creative. First, we have to loosen the knot of fear that grips our teams.
The answer to this challenge is effective facilitation. When done well, facilitation builds trust, unlocks collaboration, and helps teams navigate uncertainty with confidence. It creates the conditions for people to speak openly, think creatively, and reimagine what’s possible, together.
What Is Effective Facilitation?
In practice, facilitation is often misunderstood. Many who seek to facilitate well believe that it means they lead or control a conversation, so there are no surprises.
In practice, well-meaning leaders often fall into the trap of thinking that a facilitation job well done is one that goes exactly according to their plan. This only reinforces the limiting factors of human collaboration.
The reality of effective facilitation is much more nuanced.
When a culture of withholding takes hold, an effective facilitator’s first task is to create an environment that fosters trust and psychological safety.
The next task is to create and guide a process that is agile enough to encourage discussion and productive disagreement but is organized enough to enable a group to still achieve what matters to them, emerging from the collaborative process with the results they need, and the relationship resilience that reinforces further work together.
Here’s how.
Creating Trust on Purpose
Everything starts with trust.
As David Maister and Charles Green helpfully identify, trust is the sum of your credibility, reliability, and intimacy, divided by self-orientation.
To understand this equation, let’s break down each of these crucial components:
- Credibility: This means that someone is competent and capable. A credible facilitator thinks through what the group needs to accomplish and makes well-considered decisions about a process supporting that.
- Reliability: This means people can count on them to follow through. A reliable facilitator demonstrates reliability in several ways, ideally before, during, and after a facilitative process.
- Intimacy: Intimacy means we feel safe sharing information with that person and are confident that they will handle the information we share respectfully and appropriately. This element of the trust equation acknowledges the risks people feel sharing openly and seeks to provide awareness and action that assuages their concern.
The peril of self-orientation undermines these qualities. When people feel you are more concerned with your own personal success and agenda than with the needs, thoughts, or feelings of others, trust erodes.
The Trust Equation in Practice
To see how these facilitative principles translate into action, let’s apply them to two common and challenging scenarios.
Strategic Decisions
Here’s a hypothetical scenario many leaders experience: a leadership team is meeting to discuss expense reductions to mitigate a budget shortfall.
In this scenario, the facilitator builds trust for the difficult budget conversation by establishing credibility upfront.
They provide the leadership team with the necessary P&L information and forecasted numbers with enough lead time for a proper review, demonstrating they have made well-considered decisions about the process.
The facilitator proves their reliability by sending these materials out on time and by following through with a recap of key decisions after the meeting.
To build intimacy and make it safe to discuss a sensitive topic, the facilitator chooses a process that depersonalizes ideas and finally, they demonstrate low self-orientation by acknowledging the discomfort of the conversation and asking the group for refinements to the process.
Interpersonal Conflict
Here’s a different, but still common challenge for organizational leaders.
A cross-functional project manager is pulling their team together to address personal tension that has resulted in a lack of cohesion, blame, and corrosive gossip. The facilitator establishes credibility by setting the stage with common goals compelling all parties involved. This shows they have a competent and thoughtful process for navigating the conflict.
To build intimacy and safety, the facilitator skillfully guides the group toward a process of inquiry rather than blame. They achieve this by modeling and enforcing active listening techniques and focusing on underlying interests instead of rigid positions, which helps the team find common ground and opportunities for resolution.
The Courage to Guide
Collaboration is often messy and unpredictable, yet it remains one of our greatest assets for navigating change. At a time when many employees are anxious about the impact of AI on their jobs or unsure whether they can bring their full selves to work, building openness and connection is essential.
Effective facilitation is the way forward. It is not about controlling the conversation but guiding it with intention, courage, and care. Skilled facilitators create the conditions for trust, candor, and creativity, especially when the path ahead is unclear.
Choosing to become a better facilitator is a powerful leadership move. It signals a shift from fear to possibility and from individual agendas to shared success. The best part is that facilitation is a skill. It can be learned, strengthened, and practiced over time.
Rachael Grail, a senior consultant at Interaction Associates, aims to enable peak performance in teams through effective communication, strengths-based collaboration, and sustained well-being. As an experienced facilitator and coach, she skillfully weaves new concepts and awareness into practical actions. She leverages a breadth of experience and numerous evidence-based frameworks to be highly responsive to the unique needs of each group she supports. Rachael supports leaders and teams in global companies, high growth startups, and NGO’s. Her experience includes engagement with clients at: Amazon, Adobe, DocuSign, Meta, Outside PR, PG&E, Service Now, and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Interaction Associates is best known for introducing the concept and practice of group facilitation to the business world in the early 1970’s. For over 50 years, IA has provided thousands of leaders and teams with practical, simple, and effective programs, tools, and techniques for leading, meeting, and working better across functions, viewpoints, and geographies. Learn more by visiting https://www.interactionassociates.com/ and connect with Rachael on LinkedIn.