123. Training versus Facilitation - What’s the Difference? With my mates Chris Fenning, Shani Wende, Bethan Winn, Julissa Shrewsbury, Fran McCormack, Yoke Van Dam, Aden Date and hosted by Prina Shah

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Hello and welcome to this episode of Ways to Change the Workplace with myself Prino Shah. I love what I do. I'm a global leadership coach, a consultant, a trainer, a keynote speaker, a podcaster. I help you to develop your leaders, your teams, and I help you to optimize your organizational cultures. I'm here to help you find ways to change your workplace. Why? Because we spend more time in our waking day at work than we do with our loved ones. It has to be a good place to be. So in this podcast, you can expect a mix of interviews with amazing thought leaders and then some solo episodes from myself as well. Now, right now you can probably hear banging behind me or around me, and that's because the groundworks for the granny flat that we are having built has started today. It's all happening. I am looking out of my office window, and I can see a little bulldozer, uh little digger as I call them in Australia here, and yeah, it's on. It is on like Donkey Kong. But you're gonna have some noise in the background. That's all good. I just want to tell you what that was about. Today I want to talk to you about the difference between facilitation and training, and I want to talk to you about this because it's a really, really important conversation to have or consideration for you to make. I'll give you some context. So recently I was called, it was an emergency, kind of like a Batman phone call, you know, like woo Prina, we need your help kind of phone call. I was like, Whoa, what has happened? So, this is an old client of mine, trusted, and we've got a really good relationship, as you'll soon see. So, the context is that they have a number of internal trainers within the workforce, and this organization are going through massive, massive change, really important stuff that they're doing in terms of changing the culture, changing the way that they're working, and therefore, there's new practices and new expectations of employees. Therefore, there's lots of internal training now which is being offered now as mandatory rather than voluntary, right? So, I therefore, if I'm an employee, have to go to said training and spend one hour or two hours there. And we know the people are time poor, and therefore your time has to be used effectively, let's just say. And what has happened is because of all of this training happening with the internal trainers and um lots of new participants going uh to attend this training, which is now mandatory as I explained to you, there's been lots of complaints. And there have been lots of complaints on two parts loads of complaints by the trainers, and loads of complaints by the participants. So something has really gone wrong. Now, I'm not gonna break confidence and tell you who this organization is, I think they've handled it beautifully. So if this is happening to you, I want to share the story with you. That's the purpose of this episode. So the complaints from the participants were that the training is boring, you're just telling me what to do and telling me what to think, I'm not feeling it, you're not answering my questions properly, and I just feel like it's a waste of time. That's what participants fed back in relation to the training that they had been given or made to attend. Now, when we as facilitators or trainers receive bad feedback, it hurts, it hurts our soul a little bit, but it is a learning opportunity, always is the way that I say it for my uh sessions, and you know, we always have to learn. That's a good thing about learning. Now, the kind of complaints that the trainers made is that people were very rude, they were very argumentative, they didn't want to listen, they come with their cultural backgrounds and just were not willing to have an open mind. So, as a trainer, it's really difficult to work with such participants. I've had them in the past and I have ways of dealing with it, which I'll share with you in a bit, but it's really difficult. So, what happened then with this organization? They're huge, they uh they gosh, they have a workforce around of around four or five thousand employees. So, what happened is that the people and culture team and the learning and development team specifically decided to stop all internal training. That's a big call to make, and that's a serious call to make. They did a risk analysis, a gap analysis of what was happening, and they shared that report with me. With that information that I had gleaned from their wonderful work in finding out what exactly was happening, I got to learn a lot. And I got to learn that the participants were being spoken to, spoken at, rather than having a conversation. So I want to begin by explaining to you the differences between what is training and what is facilitating. So training is a structured approach to learning that focuses on specific skills or knowledge, okay? And it's typically led by an instructor who has expertise in the subject matter area and follows a predetermined curriculum. So in a training session, the instructor is the expert and the participants are the learners. The instructor's role or the trainer's role is to impart knowledge and skills to the participants who are expected to absorb and apply this knowledge. I say you do is the mentality essentially of a trainer. Training is often used for technical or job-specific skills. Now, things such as ideally software training, compliance training, that kind of stuff. It's stuff that we need to learn how to do to make us more effective in our jobs, let's say. Usually it's not for theoretical courses or culture change courses. Okay, that was the first mistake that happened. Training is also commonly used for onboarding new employees or teaching new processes and procedures. So you can see that it's very process and procedure heavy in terms of uh mode of learning delivery. So that's training. Facilitating. Let me define facilitation for you. Facilitating, on the other hand, is a more interactive and collaborative approach to learning. It involves guiding and supporting participants in discovering and applying knowledge and skills. In a facilitated session, the facilitator acts as a guide or a coach rather than the subject matter expert. Hello, and this is exactly what I do. So I can facilitate a conversation, a session, a workshop, a keynote, or I can MC or Freestyle on a podcast on generally any topic that I do have knowledge of or that I have generally researched a little bit on, but the trick is there's uh lots of other tricks with facilitation. So let me go back to what facilitation is as a definition, then I'll share the gold with you. I'm keen to share the gold as you can see. So, in terms of facilitation, like I said, the facilitator acts as a guide or coach rather than the expert. The participants are encouraged to actively engage in the learning process to share their experiences and insights and to learn from each other. Hello, that is the golden point there. Please remember that. As a facilitator, my role is always to try my best to bring out your best so that we can have the best conversation on said topic, and we can learn from that and from each other. So, facilitation is often used for soft skills training, such as leadership development, communication skills, and team building. It's also effective for promoting critical thinking and problem solving skills because you put the onus back on the participants, you have less of a responsibility compared to when you have the trainer hat on, let's say. Okay? Now both approaches are very important for learning for a learning culture. Training and facilitation are very important to create a learning culture. So, training strengths. Training is effective for teaching specific skills and knowledge in a structured and efficient manner. It is super efficient. It's also useful for ensuring consistency and standardization in processes and procedures. So in a learning culture, training can be used to introduce new concepts and skills, provide a foundation of knowledge, and establish a common understanding among employees. So there's not much debate there, there's not much conversation, and there's not much going back and forth and learning from each other. As I said earlier, I say you do generally is the gist of training. Facilitating, on the other hand, is effective for promoting critical thinking, collaboration, and creativity. It encourages participants to actively engage in the learning process and apply their knowledge in real-world situations rather than conceptual situations. So in a learning culture, facilitating can be used to foster a sense of community and teamwork to promote continuous learning and growth and to encourage employees to take ownership of their own development and their own conceptual thinking skills. Now I want to bring a bit of sociology to you and I want to give you two concepts for you to really consider. Concept number one is the concept of the social learning theory. So the social learning theory, which was developed by a psychologist called Albert Bandura, suggests that people learn by observing others and imitating their behavior. This theory highlights the importance of social interactions and role modeling in the learning process. So in a learning culture, social learning can be encouraged through things such as peer-to-peer learning or I call it peer-assisted learning. Mentoring programs are brilliant for this. And collaborative learning experiences where you really break up teams and silos for other people to intermingle and learn from a social learning theory perspective. But I want to throw a curl curveball in here for you now. And that is a second theory. That is the theory of cultural dimensions. Now, the cultural dimensions theory was developed by Gert Hofsted, and you have to check it out. I've been talking about it for so long to so many people. So the cultural dimensions theory has it identifies six dimensions that can help us to understand how culture affects our behavior and communication. And by culture, I'm not talking about organizational culture, I'm talking about my culture. I was born in Kenya, brought up in the UK, my formative years were in the UK, studied in the UK, I then moved to Australia in my twenties, and blah blah blah blah blah. So all of your conditioning really is what the cultural dimensions theory talks to. Now, let me tell you this again. So it identifies six dimensions that can help us to understand how culture, as I just described, affects behavior and communication. These dimensions include power distance, so the distance of power that I perceive between me and my manager. It also includes individualism versus collective cultures. Now, generally speaking, individualistic cultures are generally in the West, and collective cultures, generally speaking, are in the East. Hofstead's cultural dimensions theory also covers masculinity and femininity within a culture and how to address that. It also talks about uncertainty and avoidance, talks about long-term orientation, and the best one, indulgence restraint. It's a really interesting one because Western cultures, generally speaking, have that high dopamine effect. So you can imagine what the indulgence restraint there is. So I won't I won't go off on a tangent too much with this one, but if you are a learning and development professional, you need to check out Giert Hofstedt's Cultural Dimensions Theory. If you want to geek out on it, and if you're not in LD, please go out, do it. I highly recommend you do because anything that you learn from that is going to give you a whole new lens of looking at the way that you operate with others as well. So going back to training and facilitation, you need to consider how you train or facilitate using the cultural dimensions theory as well as the social learning theory that I just described to you. Okay, I think you get it now. The difference between what training is and what facilitation is. I've given you context about the client incident that happened and that emergency phone call that I had. Now I've got my training slides here in front of me, and what I did is I called this a facilitation booster session. I called it a collaborative learning session, in fact. And I asked my participants to wear two hats today. They're all trainers, internal trainers, right? So I asked them to wear two hats today. Hat number one as a participant, and then hat number two as a facilitator or a trainer, whatever you want to label yourself as, and observe me in that light. So I did an intro, I did all of my stuff, and um I introduced and I set the scene. I asked the group then, how do you set the scene? And we had a really good conversation. So I shared how I use humor, how I set up my introductions at the beginning, how I get to my sessions really early beforehand to ensure that I'm set up even before the session starts, you know, even 10 like probably half an hour before the session starts, because I know that there'll be early comers and I want to welcome them like a host at a party. So I want to be the hostess with the most test, so to speak. I also shared some images that I share with um participants in my sessions to get the conversations flowing. Uh I also talked about organizational culture and meeting people where they're at. Why on earth would you deliver something sexy and you know, really out there when your organizational culture isn't at a mature level to even comprehend the concepts that you're sharing? So we talked a lot about that. We we had a really good conversation, and we really talked about connecting with our participants from the get-go. So, as a facilitator, I showed them how I did that in the morning, and then we shared how they do it as well, and you know, we learned from each other, so we had so many great ideas. I then also asked them to consider breaking their thinking, so they've all been labeled as experts, so I asked them to consider while you are the expert, you are also not the expert. And I asked them to deal with that by being curious, and that is one of the best skills of facilitation: curiosity, ask the why, ask the how, you know, uh summarize, paraphrase, check for understanding, all of that kind of stuff. And then I shared with the group how to be what my friend Lianne, who is the queen of facilitation, calls, how to be a lazy facilitator. Now, I'm not doing myself a disservice there whatsoever by calling myself a lazy facilitator. I think it's really important to use the audience. No way am I gonna have all of the answers, and no way should I have all of the answers. That's the other thing. So I shared a load of uh interactive activities that the group could do. So I'm happy to share a few with you, right? Um, three questions you could ask. You can begin with, what is the worst mentoring experience that I've had? Then you know you set ground rules and whatnot for that. What is the best mentoring experience that you've had? Blah blah blah. And then question number three What's missing? What would an 11 out of 10 mentoring experience look like if you had a magic wand? Now, this is just one that I pulled for the group because the week prior I had opened and facilitated a mentoring program for some beautiful clients of mine. So I just shared some fresh stuff that I was doing with them. I shared some other interactive tools as well with them. Now, if your trainers need help in this manner, then get in touch with me, you'll have my details, go stalk me, and I'm really happy to train your trainers to actually facilitate conversations. I then shared tools, the kind of tools that I use. So in my little bag of tricks or facilitation, I have a tiny little ceramic elephant that I always carry with me. And if you're a longtime listener, you know that I deal with teams at both ends. I deal with teams who are toxic and need to do better, and they always do better when they work with me, and then I deal with teams at the apex of their careers as well. You know, they're at the height, they're at the helm of um their achievement. But when you're at the highest peak, the only way is down, so you need to maintain your brilliance as a team. Now, both teams that I work with, I have utilized my little ceramic elephant so many times. So you'll see if you've been in any of my sessions, if there's anything awkward happening, if there's anything weird that I can sense in the room, I will happily and safely, so psychological safety I'm talking about here when I talk about safely, pull out the little ceramic elephant and ask for the group to talk to the elephant in the room. And whoever has the elephant in their hand is the person who's speaking, so no interruptions, the rest of us listen. I also use tools such as timers in my sessions. So if it's a presentation, you know, on the big screen with a projector, then timers with sound are really good to people to get people going. I use my eyes and my ears, I walk around, I listen when people are doing activities. Because often, as a facilitator, when you bring people back to you know after the activity, so how did we go? What do we want to share? There's usually silence. So if I listen, then I can pull out bits and I never name people. I say, Oh, well, when I was walking around, I heard this statement. Does anyone care to elaborate? And you know, that kind of stuff, and people always elaborate. When I'm stuck, when I'm really stuck and I don't have the answers, which you know often happens, I will use a little tool called in the hot seat. So that is essentially pull up a chair in the middle of the room or the front of the room or wherever, and we throw questions at each other in terms of that those curly questions, and we as a collective group respond to the questions and therefore learn from each other. Another tool that I use is flip charts. For me, writing is really important and paraphrasing and summarizing is really important, so I get to understand my clients and their needs. And you, as a facilitator or a trainer, your ears and eyes have to be on absolutely with the active listening and paraphrasing and summarizing. But writing is a really, really important skill as well. Because when I write something on the flip chart at the beginning of the session, guaranteed I can go back to it and say, Hey John, remember when you mentioned blah blah? Well, that's I think what you were talking to there. The other thing I really am focused on is emotional contagion. Now, emotional contagion from my sense, because that's the only thing that I can manage and have control over. So I need to ensure that I am fresh, I am bright, even if I've had a crappy night's sleep. If I'm facilitating, I'm facilitating and I'm on delivery mode. So I cannot be cranky or hangry or any of the you know negative states that one can be in. No way, I need to be on. And then I use a very important question that I don't know if many trainers use, and that question is a very, very famous song. Well, lyrics in a song, I will say, and the lyrics are tell me why, tell me why. You know, it's a really expansive question. So when someone makes a statement that you are unsure of, or even if you disagree with, rather than disagreeing as a trainer and saying, No, you shouldn't do this or shouldn't do that because of blah blah, it's really important to understand the perspective of the individual who's just thrown that curveball at you and asking the question of tell me why, please explain, please expand on your statement is enriching because it enables that other person to speak and explain their perspective, and then we can have a richer conversation as a result. At the end, I always do some kind of a reflective kind of questioning, whether it is one word, what did you think of the session, how did we go, one word to describe the session, or I've got more reflective questions depending on the kind of sessions that I run that I utilize. The other thing we talked about in the session that I ran was how to deal with difficult participants. Now, I'm not going to go into the details there because that's a whole different podcast altogether. But have you considered whether you are a trainer or whether you are a facilitator? And if you're in the learning and development team and if you've got internal trainers who are specialists, you know, subject matter expert specialists, have you actually upskilled them on all things facilitation? If you haven't, I highly recommend that you do because guaranteed those sessions are going to be something different altogether. If you need any help, as always, please do reach out to me. And I wish you a frigging amazing experience when you next go to facilitate. Go forth and prosper and be brilliant with facilitation. Training is also needed within the workplace, so we need to counteract both of them. I hope you understand the difference between training now, more so where it's more instructive and more for procedures and policies and the mandatory kind of stuff, versus facilitating where you can have open and honest and enriching conversations and change your organizational culture. You can probably hear the groundwork happening, all of the granny flat work is starting now. Anyhow, ignore the noise. So, what I want to tell you is that you know I have a number of Brainiac friends who are also facilitators. What I've done for the purpose of this episode is I want to bring you their voice as well. So let's hear from them and see what they have to say about what facilitation is in their perspective. Check it out.

SPEAKER_03 25:59

Hi Prina, this is Chris Fanning. I'm a business communication skills author and instructor. And what do I do if you want to be clear and concise and communicate better at work? And if you're looking for practical ways to do that, I provide those frameworks and tools for clearer, pain-free communication at work. When it comes to the differences between facilitation and training, I believe that training is where I bring my expertise and knowledge and uh transfer that to a group of people so that by the end of the training they can go away and apply the methods, frameworks, knowledge and so on to produce their own outputs on their own. They have the skills and ability to do a new thing. Whereas when I'm facilitating, I'm using my knowledge of a process or method to enable other people to create a specific output using their knowledge and experience. An example would be I could train people on how to run effective meetings, and by the end of it, they could run effective meetings by themselves. Or I can come and facilitate meetings using the frameworks that I know, and they bring the content they know what they want to produce in the meeting, and by the end, they've produced the things that they need, and I've just helped them along the way. And that's what I think one of the core differences is between training and facilitation.

SPEAKER_01 27:23

Hi, my name is Shanille Wendy. I design and deliver learning at Australia's National Science Agency, the CSIRO. And here's my take on the question: training moves existing knowledge from one person to others, while facilitation births new knowledge from a group. And yes, I do say birth because I think discomfort and joy often exist in equal measure during powerful facilitation. And of course, uh, the act of facilitation can feel like you're naked in front of a room sometimes. It can be scary, it can be vulnerable. Training is about structured knowledge transfer. So a trainer has clearly defined content to deliver and they test a person's proficiency before and after the training, usually using something like an assessment matrix. The goal is to increase their skills and knowledge according to targeted levels. Facilitation, on the other hand, is quite different. It's about providing an environment and tools for co-discovery. It could be structured. There's some really structured facilitation going on that might look like training from the outside, but it leaves plenty of room for participants to find their own information and find their own insights. Facilitation can take place during a course, but it could also be during a team meeting, during conflict mediation, a brainstorming or you know, creative problem solving session, during a project check-in. And the mindsets are very different between training and facilitation. So a trainer might think something like, I have a plan for what and how the session will happen. And success looks like sticking to that plan and proving that we stuck to the plan. And a facilitator might think something like, I have a plan, but have no idea if we'll stick to it. And if we don't, that's okay because the spontaneous connections between people and ideas were more valuable than my initial plan. In my experience, when people say a training course they attended was really, really good, it's usually because there was a high level of facilitation. You can alternate between the two. You don't have to pick one, you don't have to be a trainer or a facilitator. I truly believe that you can switch between those roles and those contexts and those mindsets during the same event according to what the goals are and according to the uh posture that you have in front of the group.

SPEAKER_07 29:46

Hi, Prina, this is Beth Ann Wynn. I facilitate on critical thinking, decision making, problem solving, and human skills, and often do a bit of facilitation in strategic planning, things like that as well. Um, great question about the difference between facilitation and training. I would say that in training, you're supposed to be the expert, the holder of knowledge. Um, you're the expert in the room, and facilitation is more about drawing out of people and being the coach. So there's a lot of analogies with coaching there rather than mentoring, I suppose. Uh so in training, maybe you're the rock star and facilitation, you're holding the mic for other people. Um another thing that's useful no matter what you're doing is to ask what's it for. But often facilitation, it's about helping the people in the room uncover a particular outcome. And I think you can blend the two so it's not a hard and fast rule or it's this or it's that. That's a false dichotomy. It's always gray area, and you're always using multiple skills. So there's my two cents.

SPEAKER_06 30:58

Keen to hear what everyone else says. I'm Jelissa Shrewsbury, Director of New Work Consulting, working with organizations on how their people connect to and communicate the company brand and how this helps build a great culture. What is the difference between training and facilitation? A training will repeatedly take people through set activities and content. A facilitation is a framework where the conversations and outcomes could go anywhere. A training might look traditional in format. Here's a piece of information for you to absorb. Now I'll ask you questions to test your understanding. A facilitation helps people grow through an experience. A training focuses on the students in the room. A facilitation can have an immediate ripple effect through a whole organization as those people who have grown through the experience go out and change things. A good trainer knows how to teach information and skills so that people will learn. This is important. A good facilitator does a different job that's also important. They create a container for people to get involved in meaningful ways.

SPEAKER_05 32:20

What's the difference between facilitation and training? Well, I agree with you. Very different. Training is kind of like the sage on the stage, a person imparting wisdom, imparting knowledge, people going away with a learning objective. Whereas facilitation is uh less involved in the details and just guiding teams and people through a process to the objective that the team themselves identify. So staying out of the content, staying as neutral as possible, as neutral as we can be as facilitators, and just guiding them through that uh facilitation process. So I agree with you. I see the two modalities as being very different. I'd love to hear what other people say. Thanks, bye.

SPEAKER_02 33:06

Hi, this is Jurke van der Dam. I help leaders and teams to step into the executive presence to create meaningful workspaces to really find a flow as a team. How is the training is where a trainer is guiding the delegates step by step through a specific skill or product, and the the most of the knowledge is assumed to be in the mind of the trainer. Where facilitation is where you are guiding the audience or the delegates and trying to find the answer in the room. Some techniques that I love is brainstorming, where um people write ideas on post-its and stick it on on a flip chart, and then you're actually going through the ideas, or another idea is something called nominal group technique, where everyone writes down their ideas and they go around the room for a certain period of time, giving everyone to share one idea at a time. And um, once that time limit is over, the ideas are categorized, prioritized, and um solutions are voted for.

SPEAKER_04 36:14

What happens if you go second? What happens if you give up control? So I think the excellent facilitator is someone who is attentive to what's happening in the room and is bringing forth what is already there, casting it into the light, rather than downloading what they know onto the audience.

SPEAKER_00 36:33

You heard it there from my mates, fellow facilitators, uh extraordinaire, they're amazing. If you don't know them, then their details are in the show notes. Now, many of my friends, my facilitator friends, raised the point about training and facilitation can be a two-in-one experience, and that's often what I do. So sometimes I will share a conceptual theory from a management perspective, let's say. We can talk about the theory, I'll teach about that, right? But then I want to have a conversation in relation to it, and that's where I start to facilitate. So I've got examples of theories that I use, and then I break down to okay, now how does this apply to you in your team? What are the areas that are working well in relation to said theory? What are the areas that are not working well, and what's the gap analysis there? So we can have so many conversations. I think one of the other things that's really important to note is if you are going to be going down the facilitation route, you heard from many of my facilitation friends that facilitation is very much uh aligned with coaching. So you have to have good questions, good open questions, expansive questions to get the group, the audiences, juices, and brains flowing so that they are interactive. Facilitated sessions are far more interactive than training sessions, huge differences there, and yeah, I hope you really benefited from this episode because I truly feel that I have over and out for now, and I will see you in the next episode. Until then. How good was that episode? If you liked it, be sure to share it with a couple of other people. Also, in the show notes are details about my newsletter. Keep in touch, I send a newsletter out around once a month. It won't be spammy, it will be very practical. And if we're not connected on LinkedIn yet, we must be connect with me on LinkedIn. And on Instagram, I am prina.shar. I will see you somewhere else or in the next episode. Until then, goodbye.