Why Facilitation Skills are Not Optional For You as a Coach with Mehdi El-Naizi

And this is exactly the kind of skill that I'm going to discuss with today's guest. Mehdi En-Naizi is a workshop facilitator from Brussels and a former stand-up comedian, which apparently can be quite useful. He's not a one-on-one coach, but that is exactly the kind of parallel we want to draw today: what can coaches learn from a facilitator like Mehdi, and maybe also vice versa?

We cover how you can warm up a group without that kind of cringe, how to manage your own state before the session and also during the session when things don't go according to plan, and we will unpack a model that sits underneath both these kinds of group processes and, I believe, also underneath great coaching. So if you ever work with more than one person in a room, this conversation is for you. Let's go.

It's great to have you here, Mehdi. Today you guide group processes and facilitate workshops at companies like Volvo and Audi, but you also have a history as a stand-up comedian, I learned. So I was wondering, how did this history shape your facilitation practice?

But I hit the stage enough to see a lot of things that I can actually use in my own facilitation. I would say the most important skill I've learned from there is the capacity of reading the room. When you go to stand-up, your way to the scene, going on stage, the first joke is going to be critical, because this is the moment where people are going to judge you: is this guy funny or not? If your first joke bombs, it's going to be difficult. Not impossible, but you're already starting on the wrong foot, because people are going to say, "Okay, this guy is not funny." It's the same in facilitation. When you kick off your workshop, people may have feelings or thoughts about workshops: we tried this in the past, it didn't work. Oh, it's going to be cringe again. He's going to use an icebreaker, I don't know what.

So this is the moment where you need to show people if they can trust you, if you're going to guide them towards the outcome they want to achieve. And most of those people don't want to be in the room, contrary to a stand-up, where they decided to go and have a good time. Maybe the boss hired you, maybe two or three people are convinced about this way of working. So the first interaction, I would say your first five minutes, but really your first 30 seconds and then the first five minutes, will have a big impact on your session and on whether people are going to contribute or not.

And you also said the most important skill you took from there is reading the room. What does it mean to read the room?

This is why, among the many reasons I want to start with a warm-up activity, aka the icebreaker, though I hate this word, is because it helps me read the room. It helps me see: okay, this group is going to be more fun. This group is going to be more strict. This group is reserved, it's not going to speak a lot, so I will have to fight to get the insights I'm looking for. And then it's adapting your skills, your style of facilitation, based on what is in the room. Of course, each one of us has a certain style, but you can stretch it. I believe you have two opposites: I can be way more fun, and I can be a bit more serious and to the plan. Based on what I have, I will assess where I need to push more. Also, the first time you do something with a group, you're taking a risk, so you don't want to take a big risk right from the start. If you have a political joke, you don't want to throw it right away. You first want to create the trust, do the warm-up, make sure people are ready, and when they are, you hit them with a bigger risk.

It's the same in facilitation and in stand-up. You want to find where your group is, and then assess if it makes more sense to take a bigger risk later in the gig.

So you saw more and more coaches on the market. And like everything in the market, what happens when you have more offer than demand? The skill becomes a commodity. So you need to find a way to differentiate yourself. The people engaging in my course see it like: okay, I can be a stronger coach if I can also offer facilitation, the coaching of the group. Because yes, you can do a lot of things with your clients. Imagine you're coaching the boss of a team. You can do a lot, but there are also things you're limited with, because they will depend on the group, on the people executing what is right for the team or how to solve the problem they are facing. And this is where I think facilitation can help. When you're coaching, it's one person, one mindset, one perspective, one background. And you have enough time to get to know the person and to understand what could be improved, changed or optimized.

But when you have a group of people, it's different people, different mindsets, different backgrounds, different perspectives. It's not one human being. So you need the skills to deal with all of that in a very short amount of time, because you won't have a lot of time to work with the group, except if your client has a very big budget, which I totally wish you. Then it's going to be tricky. And this is where I think facilitation can help coaches: okay, now I can deal with a group. I can deal with the complexity of having different voices, of aligning on where the group should go, on how to solve a problem, on how to define a strategy, et cetera.

But in the end, what I learned is that he always talks to the leader of the group first and starts with changing their mindset, or rather helping them reflect on what he or she actually wants to change. Only then does he face the whole group. But of course, you're totally right that eventually your client, if he or she is a leader, will face the whole group. So there's a lot of value in also facilitating that process if you actually want to help make an impact in the organization. And that's where group facilitation comes in.

So I think Niels is totally right. I would also start with the leader. Actually, every good workshop starts with a good discussion with the leader, because this person will drive the ship. So first you need to know where the ship is going to go. Is the ship capable of going there? What are the problems you have?

It's also having the manpower, the budget, all the things you need to work with the group. So you want to start from that. When you have clarity on what needs to happen, what the problems are, what the goals are, what the ambition is, and you help him also as a human to get there, then you can work on the group. And something I didn't say is that I've worked 10 years in consulting. My consultancy was expensive; we were paid a lot to define strategy for our clients. And I was frustrated a lot by doing awesome work, at least I believe it was awesome work, giving it to the client, seeing happy clients, but then nothing was done with it. This created frustration, and the moment we tried facilitation, this is where I saw the shift. Because when you build a strategy with the group, with the team, the magic happens: people feel ownership over it, and they're willing to implement, to change, to do the actions that are required.

So this is why I believe in bringing this facilitation. Of course, the leader will take the final shots. Of course, the leader will have a big impact on part of the strategy, the plan, the solution. But everyone will contribute, and this is a very important ingredient if you want real change to happen.

Questions that are outcome-oriented, purpose-oriented and goal-oriented. What I mean by goal-oriented is: what do you want to get out of this session? What is the most important problem you want to solve? When it comes to purpose, it's: why do you want to solve this? Especially if you want change to happen, you want to understand the why. You ask questions as simple as: why are we doing this? Why now? The momentum is usually important to understand in terms of context. And the final one is the results. What does the result look like? If I tell you, "I want to improve the collaboration in my team," wow, this is huge. What does it really mean for this person? So you ask: "Imagine this workshop is a success and we improve collaboration. How do you see that?" I'm talking about success metrics, final outcome, final deliverable.

How can we assess if we actually achieved the ambition? This will help you make the result you want to achieve more tangible. And the secret is asking those questions multiple times in different ways, so that you're sure you fully understand this person.

Because it's a conversation: what would you add to my answer? What is important when you're having a conversation with this leader?

So you tell me you want to get to ABC. Do you already have small, subtle signs that you are going towards ABC? Is there a behavior that is already useful? On the one hand, I think that helps the client to see what's already there, so it's just as important for the client to become aware. And then you can possibly work with that in the further group process.

The way I see it, leaders' time is very expensive, really precious. So I'd rather focus on the information I really need, and this one can wait, because it's going to be more powerful linked to other voices. Something I could ask is, "What did you try in the past to achieve this outcome?" That is also more interesting in the conversation with the client to assess the situation, because it shows you things they've done. Maybe they had a good idea, but why didn't it work? Then you have a lot of context on what could be the best thing for this team. They had a good solution, but what didn't work? Oh, they had a problem with execution. They had a problem with clarity on roles and responsibilities, because it was not clear who should do what.

We also said maybe some of this contracting exploration is worth redoing together with the team during the workshop. But let's say it is now before the workshop, or the morning before going into the workshop. What are you doing to prepare yourself? I don't mean your schedule or your draft, but how do you prepare your own state going into the workshop?

This is why in the beginning I was talking about stand-up: when you hit the stage, you have to have this energy: "I'm going to kill them. They're going to laugh so much. I know my gig is really strong. I've done it before." You need to go in with this winning mindset, and I believe preparation gives you that. And when I say preparation, it's going to sound a bit scholarly, but it's really repeating what you're going to say. Imagine this is the first time you put a workshop together; then it's being able to explain the activity. So rehearse the way you're going to explain a certain activity. I'm not going to lie, I'm not rehearsing explaining activities anymore, because I know my stuff. But what I'm always rehearsing is my first five, ten minutes. Basically, it's the way I set up the scene: "Hey guys, welcome. My name is Mehdi," and so on. I believe this powerful start can only happen if you're mentally prepared for it. So it's about rehearsing those five, ten minutes.

Usually I'm doing that sitting in my car, then I put on my favorite song, and then I just go.

What do you do?

But for me, the confidence comes from the preparation, from rehearsing. If I start my session by saying, "The goal of the workshop is..." and then, what is the goal again? It's to remove... no, it's to... Even if people don't care, because most of the time nothing is prepared, I myself am like, "Oh shit, I'm not doing the right job and I'm losing them." So this is why I was talking more about my mental routine. I don't have anything physical.

When I had a team, we were doing high fives, small physical contact so that we have more energy. But that's it. I'm not doing high fives myself anymore. Well, except if I have a really cool connection with the client, we've been working together for a while and he's like, "Let's go." Because I'm giving a lot of room to the decider; that's what I call the manager.

He's going to help me set the stage, because he's the person behind why this is happening. And hearing the boss explain what the goal is and why we are here helps a lot with engagement.

So those are great things. It's like when you ask a professional athlete, "What do you do?" Each one of them has their own thing. What is important is to experiment and see what works best for you, and then you do that again, so that you enter the room with confidence, ready mentally but also physically.

In my very early days of workshop participation, I always found it a bit cringe and difficult, and it rather tensed me up if I had to come up with, I don't know, the most embarrassing moment of my life. I get the intention: revealing something about ourselves helps to create vulnerability, to create trust. But I often found it difficult and rather achieving the opposite. So what's your take and your experience?

Between the participants themselves, and bonus points if you can create a connection with the topic of the session. So how can you design an activity that is going to do that? Usually I like to have an activity that does both: create a connection between people, but also a connection to the topic. Let me give you an example. If I do a creative or innovation type of workshop, where people will need to come up with ideas and draw stuff, an activity that I love is called the sunset activity, where you ask people to draw a sunset. You tell them, "Hey guys, you have 30 seconds to draw a sunset on this blank page. Don't overthink it. You only have 30 seconds."

What's going to happen is that most people are going to draw the classic horizontal line, some birds, and palm trees, like this.

"Ah, you know, I was in Bali with my wife. It was before the kids. We were sleeping. We were free."

So basically, you're just going to bring those good vibes, and people are going to learn about each other: ah, you've been to Bali, where did you go? It's going to create all those context situations that people can refer to during the break, during lunch. And after this activity, I'm just going to tell them: Look, you don't need to be creative. Creativity is in you, because we all are creative, but it depends on the way I'm going to guide you. You see, with a bad explanation, everyone had the same sunset. But when you give a specific prompt, this is where creativity comes. So in this session, you won't need to be creative, because you already are, and I'm going to guide you to your best creative space. And here I've created connection between people, because they know each other better thanks to this nice moment.

I teach them something about creativity, and I give them the confidence that today is going to be okay, because I'm going to make sure they will be able to come up with those ideas.

So a good connection activity will do that. But people think about, as you said, icebreakers, embarrassing moments, the shaking stuff like dancing. No. And even if you want to do that, which is not my style, think about this risk-taking perspective: you're asking people to take a risk. You want to start with a small risk. So I invite you to check out the work of Jan Keck. He's German, and he wrote a book about the campfire method, which is all about that. He calls this ice melters. It's not about breaking the ice, it's about melting the ice with the fire. He's gone very deep into this risk-taking metaphor that I took from him, to give him credit, of course.

Maybe you realize the thing I thought was the problem we should be working on is not actually the problem. There's something else. How do you spot that kind of scenario?

Most of the time, coming from design thinking, you always have this space where you first want to take a step back. I don't know if you're familiar with the double diamond. The first part is to diverge on the problem space. When it comes to this topic, what is not working? Why is it a problem? This is where you want to take your step back in your workshop and spend a bit of time on it, so that you're sure you're going to work on the right challenge and that the team's time is well spent. Then, of course, because your time in a session is limited, you want to define which ones are worth spending more time on.

Taking my example of improving the recruitment process: there are so many things you could do. Maybe it's your conversion, the way you present the package. Maybe it's the package itself. Maybe it's how many people are involved in the process. So instead of throwing out this big question and already trying to brainstorm on "we need to improve the package because the package is not converting," take a step back. What is going wrong in the recruitment process? Then you're going to have: there are too many interviews. We are not paying enough. The recruiters are not able to explain the jobs properly. Doing that first does a lot of things. It's more like coaching: people love to complain, to empty themselves, if you can say this in English. They want to brain-dump everything they have.

That will feel good, and then you can choose. And it's easier to choose when everything is in front of you than when you assume that everyone knows what the biggest part of the challenge is. Now imagine a scenario where you don't have this luxury, you have less time, and you're going more into decision-making. There are two things you can do. First, you can have small interviews with the people before your workshop and ask them, "According to you, what is wrong with this? What is the problem? What are the three main reasons behind this issue?" Then you'll see if the group is aligned, if they really think like the boss. An activity I didn't mention for connection is called hopes and fears. It's asking people, "What do you want to get out of the session? Imagine it's a success. What do we have at the end?" Those are the hopes. And imagine it doesn't work and you're scared that... scared is a big word, so you don't use scared.

But: "What would make you not happy at the end of the session? What are the topics we didn't solve or the results we didn't achieve?" By doing that, you get a feeling of what the group thinks. Then what you could do is have a discussion with the boss: "Listen, your team thinks this should be the priority. Do you agree?" And you do that during a small break: "Hey guys, let's have a coffee break." If you see that people are really pushing back, not contributing, ask them the question, take breaks. If it's one or two people specifically, have a conversation with them during the break: "Can I talk with you for five minutes? Why are you not participating? Why are you challenging this?" And then you get the behind-the-scenes.

Because what you said basically is: in the first part of the session, you want to explore the problem. You first want to go broad. You want to explore all the different problems we're having. And at the point where the first diamond is big, that's when you decide. You said maybe it's nice to take a coffee break at that point, pull in the boss, who is kind of the co-facilitator in some way, or at least the person you should be aligned with, and then decide: let's say this is the problem we are going to work on, and then we narrow in. And at some point we come to the solution space, where we again go broad first, collect ideas, and then we narrow.

And this is exactly how you can define both group and individual processes. I asked a very experienced coach, Kirsten Dierolf.

In one of our very early episodes of this podcast: "After all these years of coaching, do you still follow any method, process or model?" And she also said, "Well, no, not really, but if anything, then the double diamond." That's her mental model for structuring the conversation.

But first, creativity will also depend on having people spend time on the problem. The more time they spend on the problem, the better they will understand it, and this will start connecting the dots to stimulate creativity. I believe one of the strengths of a workshop is that everyone will share their opinion, which never happens in a group conversation. I don't know what Tobi, what Matthias, what all the guys think. Maybe I have two voices that said it to the group, but most others didn't. So you want to give everyone the possibility to share their opinion, and there are techniques to do that in a psychologically safe way, because sometimes it can be overwhelming and scary to share your opinion on stuff like that. And then you want to invite the decider, the client, to take the final shots. The power of that is that when he makes the decision, he will know what his entire team thinks.

That helps him make a better decision and also manage the explanation of why he took a certain direction instead of what the group advised.

So this is what you want to do first: have this warm-up, not the cringey one, the one we explained how to do, so that it helps people connect with the topic, but also with each other. Then we want to explore the problem space. I call this the collection phase: you're going to collect information. The third C: you want to choose what to focus on. I only have two hours in this workshop; I'm not going to try to do everything.

If I try to do everything, what's going to happen is that you're going to have surface-level thinking, very small ideas that are not going to help anyone. So you want to spend enough time on the problem you decided to prioritize. Because one of the biggest problems in collaboration is that people are not on the same page. How can they contribute to coming up with ideas if they don't understand the situation well? If I invited them to my workshop, I want them to contribute. I want their smart ideas. So I want to give them the space to be able to come up with those right ideas, which is having this moment. I'm sure most people, when they have a brainstorm, skip this. "Hey guys, we have this problem. We're going to spend one hour finding ideas." And right away you've lost half of the group. Okay, now we have done that. You're going to go to creation. This is the fun part.

This is the part people enjoy. This is where we come up with solutions. And then, as the double diamond suggests, you want to choose again, but this time you want to commit to what you're going to do. This is another step that is often skipped. We have cool ideas, the meeting can be done, the workshop can end. No. If you do that, what's going to happen is that you're going to be this facilitator: it was fun, it was nice, but then nothing happened. And this is not what you want to give to your clients. You want to create real change. So the real change is: "Okay guys, we have all those ideas. Let's see which ones are the best. Let's commit to a certain number of them. We're going to do these three." And then you want to create a commitment plan. It can be a roadmap: okay, this idea will be delivered by Tobi in two weeks. But the last part, which people never forget, is the celebration phase.

So the celebration phase. First, it brings a smile to your face. But it's this moment: how can I close my session the right way, so that people have clarity on what needs to happen, but also remember that it was a very fun, engaging experience? People remember the beginning and the end of an experience. This is why you want to design the connection, the kickoff, the setup well, but also the ending. And then it's summarizing everything that happened, because you, Tobi, just remember, "Oh, this brainstorm activity was really difficult. I cannot remember what happened before." So you want to tell the story: "Hey guys, three hours ago we had no clue how to improve the recruitment process. Now we have a full diagnosis of the situation. We've mapped the five top issues. We decided to focus on the first two."

"We came up with a bunch of ideas that we smartly prioritized." Because when you have creativity, you have a lot of biases. What sounds cool, what sounds innovative, tends to win.

Together with two or three people from the community, we improved it with the connection and the celebration. But this framework has been used by hundreds, I would say thousands, of facilitators, and I know it works.

It's a framework, so it should help you, not the other way around. Don't try to push it for the sake of pushing it. In the end, all of those frameworks are based on common sense and logic.

And then you would tell me a good coach doesn't give advice.

And trust that the client has the competency. I think this is very much true in coaching and also in facilitation. In the end, it's their problem, they are capable of solving it; you are just making the process smoother.

But I think if you have a bit of knowledge about the topic, this is where you can have an even bigger impact, because you will know which options make sense for the group, which conversations should be stopped, which ones should be carried on. Even if you don't have that, what I do now is, in the car, I'm talking with Claude: "I have a workshop on this topic. Can you tell me the most common problems when it comes to that?" I'm just building context information that I may be missing, so when I hear it the first time, I'm not surprised. It helps me better visualize all the different ways it can go in the room. Then it's easier for my brain to say, "Okay, we're going to go this way," instead of, "Fuck this. I have this plan. I'm just going to execute my plan."

You can also try working with these kinds of cards digitally on metaFox Online, or you can get a physical card set on metafox.eu. If this was useful, share the episode with a person who runs workshops or meetings, and feel free to subscribe to this podcast wherever you are listening. I'm Tobi, co-founder of metaFox, and I wish you all the best on your journey towards becoming an impactful coach. See you back here in two weeks. All the best, and bye-bye.