“Yeah. I think the facilitative approach to leadership it's all the good things about leadership like bringing active listening skills to a group, being able to encourage and generate participative discussion and groups. Help stimulate creative thinking through different brainstorming and idea generation processes. Help people work through different problem spaces. Being able to draw out the opinions of people in objective and non-judgmental ways, be able to create that psychological safety. Help shape more powerful and strategic questions that teams can explore, but being a manager for so long, I've intuitively developed these skills, like really worked on building better empathy and better listening skills, but I haven't found a structured approach to really developing myself in that. It's more like gut intuition and just practice and finding this more structured, tangible skillset of facilitation has been really empowering for me here. I was like, there are actual tools and different techniques that you can learn and frameworks that you can develop yourself and to become better at all these things as the leader.” -Nicole Richard

 

In this episode of Control the Room, I had the pleasure of speaking with Nicole Richard about her ample experience leading product teams, developing STEAM programs for children around the world, and studying the nuances of facilitation.  She shares how to get colleagues to try new collaborative approaches to work and potential pitfalls.  We then discuss her facilitation training and the importance of developing the language and narrative to share your professional aspirations.  Listen in for more reasons to give yourself more grace at work.