Good Facilitation Equals Stakeholder Trust

Hearing the honest and real concerns and needs of everyone involved in your organization is the key to making effective decisions, and successful implementation. Buy-in by your stakeholders (board, staff, clients, etc.) is essential for any planning success. Without buy-in, you are just spinning your wheels. Participants need to feel heard and remain confident your interests align with theirs. That's where a structured planning approach fits in.

The key to planning success, however, is not necessarily knowing the process, but having an experienced facilitator lead the engagement. By using an outside facilitator to lead your stakeholder session, you’ll be able to get their real perspectives and focus on hearing them, instead of simultaneously leading multiple conversations.

An experienced Facilitator provides a partner that can help everyone stay focused and engaged. Your stakeholders don’t have unlim

ited time to provide you with their insights. Working with your team, and managing the group discussion, the facilitators job is to provide specific deliverables relevant to your people and objectives. An effective gathering the first time will make stakeholders look forward to partnering with you for the long term.

As planning is a process, not an event, effective stakeholder engagement is rarely a one-time activity. A good facilitator will recommend strategies to keep your stakeholders engaged, happy, and participatory now and in the future. That, in turn, helps you stay on track with your projects and accomplish your goals the first time around.

Can you facilitate it yourself? Sure you can, but stakeholders see you a certain way. It’s not good or bad, but to them, you come with baggage. On top of that, you have your job to do, and now you are trying to lead a conversation and stay unbiased about the outcome (which is impossible). By working with a truly unbiased facilitator, you get to hear what stakeholders say objectively and gather data, without inadvertently relaying the information through your own lens. That means you’ll get as close to hearing their real concerns as possible, which will help you better understand and act on their needs.

Whether in person or virtually, M&A facilitation can create an atmosphere promoting trust and engagement, making your stakeholders excited to share and participate in the process. Let us facilitate your next stakeholder engagement session and recommend different approaches to get buy-in, solicit feedback, and achieve project success.