Facilitation in the Wild: What Happens When Training Meets Real People

“Cristina Amigoni: Well, and you touched on the exact piece that it’s important to understand, especially when you do build the training and you try to figure out what the outcome is going to be, is that every change is a behavioral change. It doesn’t matter what it is, it’s still a behavioral change.”

[INTRO]

Alex Cullimore: Welcome to Uncover the Human where every conversation revolves around enhancing all the connections in our lives.

Cristina Amigoni: Whether that's with our families, coworkers, or even ourselves.

Alex Cullimore: When we can be our authentic selves, magic happens.

Cristina Amigoni: This is Cristina Amigoni.

Alex Cullimore: And this is Alex Cullimore. 

Both: Let's dive in.

"Authenticity means freedom."

"Authenticity means going with your gut."

"Authenticity is bringing a hundred percent of yourself not just the parts you think people want to see, but all of you."

"Being authentic means that you have integrity to yourself."

"It's the way our intuition is whispering something deep-rooted and true."

"Authenticity is when you truly know yourself. You remember and connect to who you were before others told you who you should be."

"It's transparency, relatability. No frills. No makeup. Just being."

[EPISODE]

Alex Cullimore: Welcome back to this episode of Uncover the Human, it’s a host episode, Cristina and I are here today to talk about facilitation and training and some of the importance that we’ve noticed in training and how it’s either missed, sometimes before we do it, or the enjoyment people seem to get after it. There’s so much that happens with training and there’s so much that’s been a joy to you experiencing both, bringing facilitation and training facilitators, particularly during changes. So, it’s a very broad topic.

Cristina Amigoni: Because we usually go narrow.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah, we do. We only – that’s like, one narrow thing, and then we never discuss anything else, there’s no tangents.

Cristina Amigoni: And there’s never tangents, we stay on point.

Alex Cullimore: Well, let’s talk a little bit, I guess, about why this is coming up currently. We have a leadership program, which we did, which was really, really fun to do, got a lot of great feedback out of it, aerated and built that for over a year, started to transition that internally, and now pieces of it are being used in different ways within a few organizations. And so, we have pieces that’s growing and we were training people to deliver some of it, and one thing that’s been really fun is seeing the journey of people learning to facilitate trainings.

Watching people get into, like, thinking that it’s mostly about knowing what side is next and exactly what you're going to say, and then finding out that when you’re in front of the live audience it’s just almost a free-for-all because that audience is going to react entirely different than you expect. You could do the same training each time and have a totally different reaction to different portions, and the room will feel different. 

And watching people both navigate that, get nervous coming up to it, and then we’ve had a lot of people, thankfully, I think there’s been good selection of committees on who is going to try these things. The people will get a lot of joy out of doing it, and one of the notes we noticed a lot is people saying, “I really learned the material so much better for having taught it.” You just know it at a different level when you have to convey it.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah, and I mean, we’ve gotten so many great comments from this facilitator point of view, and for people that this was very much outside of their role or outside of their normal job and they stepped in in a very short time and made the material personal for them, and just took the leap and figured out like, “Can I do this as a facilitator? Am I going to be able to create the experience that I want people to have in the room?” 

And anything from realizing that the facilitation piece and what makes the experiences really bringing the information to life, and as you said, it’s not about memorizing the script, or what’s on the slide. It’s about truly living where the information is, and then having faith, having trust, trusting the process that if we understand it enough, we can bring it to life in our own way, which is going to be completely different than somebody else’s way. 

And it’s completely different even from our own way the day before or in a different setting because of that live audience of that understanding what’s happening with the audience with that piece of information.

Alex Cullimore: And I think that does increase your understanding. Not only do you have to like, know it pretty well so that you can have an idea of what to respond to when people have curve balls but the second people have curve balls, it then develops your own understanding of it. They interpret it this way, you’re like, “Oh, I’ve never thought of it that way. Here’s a response to that.” And you can open up to the group. 

You get a full discussion going in. It’s incredible how much greater the understanding is, not just for the people learning the information but for yourself as a facilitator. If you’re doing a kind of the way that we would prescribe and we try and help people bring to life, which is creating a lot of space, putting the information out there, giving people chances to interact with it because the whole point is to have them interact and feel that. 

And that’s something that we’ve noticed has become increasingly important in changes. When organizations make changes, when people assume new roles, we need to create a new role out of nowhere where people are stepping into that, or where other departments have to now work with that, or it’s just rather than just being an idea, and then people are trying to implement that idea, it is a huge portion of that activation phase is getting people to understand what are you really training. 

And as we do that more when people really start to say, “Here’s what we’re trying to convey, here’s the behaviors we want people to have.” It is in sometimes formal, and sometimes informal ways different levels of training. You’re trying to reinforce and get buy-in, and get people to understand a set of behaviors that they will hopefully care for.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah. Well, and you touched on the exact piece that it’s important to understand, especially when you do build the training and you try to figure out what the outcome is going to be is that every change is a behavioral change. It doesn’t matter what it is, it’s still a behavioral change, and so one of the things that we bring when we help organizations and teams think through we have this new framework or we have this new way of doing things, and we need people to understand and also adopt it, it’s not the actual content. 

It’s not the skills, especially today, with between Google and ChatGPT and everything else, the skills themselves don’t need facilitations to actually be learned. It’s really what’s the behavior that you’re trying to change, what is the behavior that you want to see after this? And so, it’s really switching that point around, and I was working on Monday with one of the teams that we are helping out on their training plan. 

And seeing that that way, he was sharing how it completely shifted how they were going to deliver the training because they’re now minimizing the actual templates and the skills and the information and they’re maximizing that personalization, that understanding. If this is the framework in the training in-person in the room, we’re going to work on what house your behavior today aligned with that, how it’s not aligned with that, and what do you need to switch that.

How does it make sense for you? What’s the behavioral journey for you to be able to take this framework and make the most out of it so that your day and your job and your role, and what you’re trying to do as a team has better outcomes?

Alex Cullimore: That’s a great way of categorizing it because it does come back to behaviors and it has helped people change that entirely and when you think about changing people’s behaviors, it then helps us get that framework that you need to have to help people understand what they would want to do and in a behavioral change. So, you have to have a really strong compelling “Why” of why they would all change their behaviors. 

Why would they do something different? Why would they, when it’s actually brain tax and you’re in the middle of already being busy with five other things, why would you take this on? Why would you do these things? And it helps them create the framing of like, “Here’s why, here’s what we’re aiming for as an outcome, here’s the behaviors we expected to help that.” Rather than, “Here’s a template so make sure you fill out that template.” 

I mean, maybe that template helps create the structure of the behavior, but if you haven’t listed the why, if you haven’t understood the end goal, then people aren’t going to see the template as much more than another piece of bureaucracy, something that fell out, something that has to be done if you’re just – maybe for your performance stream, maybe just because people might get angry if you don’t do it. 

But they don’t necessarily see the point, and they haven’t changed necessarily behaviors, they’re just obeying some choice, some templates, some process, more than understanding like, behaviorally, “How can I best adapt just to get to the outcomes based on the stated goal and why?”

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah, exactly. 

Alex Cullimore: I never thought about this before. I haven’t thought about this for a long time because in college I did a lot of tutoring in math because math is just what I ended up studying, and I always enjoyed tutoring, and now that I think about it in this light, it was always – the fun part was that you were training ways of thinking. You’re training behaviors of how to approach a problem, not like, yes, they were discreet patterns. 

You had to recognize the types of problems, there’s discreet steps to take, and knowing just different algebraic steps, different calculus, different – whatever pieces. There are formulas you do have to kind of know to use, but it was more about you’d see the lightbulbs go off when people started to understand the concepts of like, “Oh, this is how these all relate.” And then they can apply it in different ways. 

It wasn’t just, “Here’s the problem at hand.” It was, “Here’s how to think about the problem at hand, here’s how to think in the larger scale, how can you pull on the things you already know, how can you just notice these patterns.” If you know what this is doing, like at the base level, if you don't understand what is happening, what these formulas mean, something it’s a lot easier to apply. 

And it was really fun to see some of those lightbulb moments where people would connect with something that seems as – we sometimes categorize anyway, as so black and white and as just step-by-step procedural as math can be, and when you actually take it to the abstract level, something people could understand could catch up when they had felt like they had fallen behind on a year or years of math and could just relate to something. 

And see it in a different way, it was really fun to do, just spend the time just coming up with different ways of understanding concepts so that people would then relate to how to apply the concept, and it was still behaviorally changing because it was about, “How are you going to approach a problem,” not, “How you would do a calculus problem?” How do you approach the ideas behind this, how do you understand this? 

How do you think about it, what are different ways so that you can? The next time you’re thrown a problem and you don’t have your tutor with you, and you're in the middle of an exam, you can still apply these and you can do this well.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah, and also taking it even a bigger step as you were tutoring and teaching how to approach a problem, it doesn’t have to be a math problem.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah.

Cristina Amigoni: It could be any type of problem, you know? The application now becomes part of life. Like, this is how I look at any type of problem.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah, but I would suggest, so I have, “How well do I understand the concepts, what can I do with it?” And you know, we get to do really fun stuff now, just like human behavioral change, and with our leadership program is geared towards, “How do you need to show up as a human?” Which is always just fun abstract and connects to everybody’s experience all the time. They connect that to life usually without our prodding and helping, and so that’s helpful. 

So, we have those pieces, but it is always that like, you’re teaching some ideas on how to approach, essentially, life, and that’s why I bring up the math example because I think we can box math so easily and so like, that’s a very discreet subject. It’s a very like, black-and-white idea of like, you get a right answer, you get a wrong answer. It was like, “Yeah, theoretically.” And, it’s more about how you’re thinking. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, it’s absolutely how you’re thinking, and so when thinking about that journey toward change or because just there’s something new that people need to be learning or would benefit is really taking a step back from the content itself, what we’ve always said, especially when training new facilitators is that it’s really 90% facilitation and 10% of the content, whether this is going to be successful or not. The content itself, just put a prompt in ChatGPT, and you’ll get the content in five minutes. 

Alex Cullimore: Yes, it’s as easy as reading that than now being done in a second.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah, that’s not what the training should be about because the content is the content. It’s how can you create that experience for people to see themselves doing something differently in the future. 

Alex Cullimore: Yeah, so I think where it can be, this lot would be really helpful in any type of organizational change is when you’re thinking about just as something as seemingly. I don’t know, you might not thinking either training for or just now this department is doing something a slightly different way or now we have a new role. Yeah, you want to keep that up and train that role. 

But maybe it’s a role that was, “Oh, well, they were already basically doing that job. We’re just changing a little bit of their job description,” and you’ll hear that all over the place, but what does that mean for the people who are relating to. Is that meant for that? And it becomes a training because, and it should be, I think, maybe thought of that way, or maybe it would be helpful to think about it that way from the executive point of view. 

Because if you can actually think about how you would train somebody to do that, you’re going to have a much better idea of what you’re looking for, so now you’ve got way better chances of success already because you’re going to have so much more clarity as with who’s your ability to convey that to people and interact when you’re fatigue if you are able to convey that, even if you’re not the one giving the training to the people. 

If you are able to give that to the people that will be giving that or will be doing the more on-the-grounds interactions with the people, that’s when you have that deeper understanding, and now everybody can be better aligned, and it is not because it was as simply stated. It would not because you had a specific PowerPoint. It is not because everything was communicated exactly according to process of you know, the VP announces it, or the directors announces it to the people, or whatever else. 

It is not that there is an exact procedure for it is that everybody viscerally has to understand enough to have explained it to somebody else, and so if you have gotten to that point of explanation and training and knowing something so well that you are viscerally are just trying to help people interact with what has to happen, you’ve got clarity. You can get the buy-in, you can have the people understand exactly what they're meant to do, and get people excited about it. 

Get people in the same room, get people ready to do this together, get people understanding it from everybody’s point of view, and have a much better flushed-out change. I think this is something that could be incredibly helpful to consider for any type of organizational change. Even if you don’t think you need a formal training, think of it as training, trained behavior. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, it’s trained behavior. It’s training new behavior. If you didn’t need new behavior, you wouldn’t need the change. It’s that simple, it’s a behavioral change, and it’s amazing even the ripple effects of something like that are felt in different ways, especially when you do start giving people the chance to step up into this new role as facilitators, whether it’s a one-hour thing or a three-day thing, or anything in between of facilitating an experience to help people change whatever behavior that is that is needed. 

But that also provides the example of, especially when it’s internal, and that is not a typical role for some of the people they are stepping into that facilitator role, they see, and now you could inspire others to step outside of their comfort zone because they see their peer, their manager, their friend in a completely different way and doing something completely different and then they’re like, “Oh wow, if he can do it, maybe I can too.” 

And that’s where innovation is born because now you’re think innovatively because you’re thinking like, “Wow.” And it doesn’t have to be training-related or change-related, this could be anything. Like, “Wait, like, if there’s success and this is making an impact by doing something completely differently, I have this idea. I wonder if I could actually step into that and try it out?”

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. I really like that. That’s a great point, the social portion of that can be understated. I think the noticing of how different your peer is or just hearing from peers who are going through the same hour-long training, two-day training, whatever, or just a seminar of lunch and learn, whatever you got going on. I think that’s – there’s a huge benefit to understanding and seeing people in a different light. 

And I think there’s something exciting and people can maybe, hopefully, get to enjoy some of the challenge when you see some of the benefits in having to understand a topic enough to be able to plan and flex with it. If you are just trying to help people understand what active listening is, and maybe encouraging them to try it out and use it, then you have to understand what you really mean by active listening. 

What does that look like, what are examples you can bring to it, or how? You have to listen really deeply too, that people – this is a double edge example, you’re always, as a facilitator, have to listen really deeply to what people are coming up with because then you can relate to what either their block is before they can understand it, or whether they feel like it’s possible, and when you know something that well, that’s the same idea behind any organizational change. 

How many times have you been part of something where they announce a process and you're like, “Yeah, but that doesn’t fit in this edge case. Yeah, but that doesn’t fit what I’m like – well, I’m trying to do this. I can’t decide whether that falls in the process or out of the process.” Like, always, you end up finding all these edge cases, which is why you should be doing a lot of interviews before announcing anything, for one. 

Cristina Amigoni: Yes.

Alex Cullimore: But also why –

Cristina Amigoni: That would help.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah, you’re never going to catch all the edge cases, even then. So, you’re going to get this either way.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah, if it’s 90% education and 10% standard, maybe that’s not the right way to go.

Alex Cullimore: It’s not a change and maybe that’s not an announcement, maybe that’s just – that’s 10%.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes.

Alex Cullimore: But if you can understand something well enough to understand the "Why", you should be able to address those edge cases and in collaboratively, like immediate. This is the fun part about facilitating is when somebody comes up with a challenge and you now have to phrase it in a new way that absorbs this challenge to it or understand it, or it expands what this thing that you’re trying to say could be or it narrows the focus to like, “Oh yeah, that would apply in that case. So, let’s think about this for other cases.” 

Whatever it is, but if you’re able to do that as a leadership team, how much easier would it be to do your change? Every time people are coming up with a challenge to it, it would be much easier for even totally different people on a leadership team to have an answer that will still bring about consistency towards the goals that you’re looking, the behavioral changes that you’re aiming to make.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah, and we’ve talked about this in the past. One of the biggest shifts that happens from change resistance and rigidity to change agility is when as a leader, you’re not even the one bringing the change anymore. It’s like, the people are so agile to change and they’re feeling so free to be able to improve the things that they’re experiencing are not going well that they will even bring out those issues. 

They’ll bring up something that needs to change because they’re experiencing it as a resistance of not being able to do their work well, and so that’s one of the best moments as a leader is when you have a team come to you and say like, “Hey, we’ve noticed that this is not working the way it should, and we’re not getting in the right outcome, or it’s not as efficient and we’re thinking of doing it this way, and we need this from you. Can we do it and can you provide this support?” So now, that’s change agility. Now you’re not even imposing change.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. You got change brought to you, you just have them trying to move roadblocks and everybody moves faster.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, and knowing that it’s feeling that on the receiving end, I remember when, and especially in our last company, I had a great manager and I was put in that position to say like, “Hey, I’m going to point the problem, you go figure out what needs to be done in that problem, and then you tell me what I need to move out of the way and what I need to support you on that.” 

But it wasn’t really about, “I want you to do it exactly this way.” It was really the opposite, and for a lot of things, it was like, “Oh, if I could do it there, and I have the freedom and the support to not be alone with knowing somebody has my back when I inevitably go down the wrong path, I can then notice the other problem.” I mean, like, “Hey, can we do something about this? Because that’s also not working.” And that change agility now expands, and that confidence expands.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah, that’s a great example of change agility because we don’t – I think any aware leadership team would happily tell you that getting buy-in is one of the hardest parts of change. If they’re bringing you the change, your buy-in is there.

Cristina Amigoni: Buy-in is there.

Alex Cullimore: They’re trying to get your buy-in now.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, yes. The buy-in is there.

Alex Cullimore: Instead of you trying to sell them on something that is difficult to sell. Like, they’ve already brought a potential solution because they're bought into just making something successful and that – there’s a high-performing team, there’s an agile team.

Cristina Amigoni: Yeah.

Alex Cullimore: I mean, this offer a sense. I mean, just change agile sense.

Cristina Amigoni: It’s change agile team. So yeah, so think about this through the next change.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah, think about behavioral change, think about training, think about the benefits of thinking of things as trainings, even if you’re not doing a formal training.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, and also as soon as the change is happening, so the timing is crucial. Giving somebody a whole new role and then a year later, realizing that maybe they should be taught how to do that role, it’s a little late. But giving somebody a new role and then, immediately, as soon as possible, giving them the tools and the support to succeed in that role will make the next change way better, and way easier.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah. That is actually – that’s a really good note to end this on. When you do this right when you really get to process of like developing a training and thinking about how people are going to, and maybe this is just a personal interest, but I think it is, it becomes much more fun. We’ve had teams come to life, we were already excited about what they were trying to push through, come to life on making the change like, happen. 

And it’s very exciting to see people actually engage on what needs to be engaged so that they can be successful in a change they were excited about, but would otherwise potentially lose their energy for because they’re not able to support it, not thinking about it in a way that will be supportive to them and others. It’s like, you kind of change this mindset, it’s really cool to see the engagement, a lot easier to be engaged.

Cristina Amigoni: Yes, yes, and it spreads like fire too. So, it’s very cool to see that and it all comes back to like, “Can I see myself in this future that I’m being told?” If you can’t, then it’s not going to happen.

Alex Cullimore: Yeah.

Cristina Amigoni: Thanks for listening.

Alex Cullimore: Thanks for listening.

[OUTRO]

Alex Cullimore: Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of Uncover the Human. Special thanks to Raechel Sherwood who helped produce our theme, and of course, our production assistance, Carlee and Niki, for whom we could not do this or could not publish this. We get to do, basically, the fun parts, and thank you to We Edit Podcasts for editing our podcasts.

Cristina Amigoni: You can find us at Podcast@WeAreSiamo.com. You can find us on LinkedIn, you can find us at Uncover the Human on social media, so follow us, and we are Siamo is W-E A-R-E S-I-A-M-O.com.

Alex Cullimore: Please feel free to reach out with questions, topics you’d like addressed. If you’d like to be on the show, reach out, we’re around. Thank you, everybody, for listening. 

[END]