Facilitation: The Skill We All Need to Master with Angela Agresto

Unlock the secrets of powerful team synergy as we sit down with Angela Agresto, a facilitation maestro from the picturesque city of Duluth. Angela lets us in on the transformative influence of expert facilitation, a craft that stretches far beyond the confines of a simple meeting. It's the cornerstone of every successful team, creating a space where each individual feels valued, heard, and confident enough to inject their unique perspectives into the collaborative mix. Experience the stories that paint a picture of how diverse voices, when woven together by skilled facilitation, can lead to breakthrough ideas and bolster the psychological safety needed for innovation to thrive.

In a realm where introverts may tread softly, Angela sheds light on empowering the quieter forces within our teams. Discover how the right encouragement and tailored coaching can nudge these silent thought leaders towards significant contributions and sometimes, career-defining moments. As we venture further, we dissect the delicate art of conflict management through the lens of facilitation—learning how to differentiate between the sparks of healthy debate and the fires of destructive disputes. Join us for an episode brimming with practical wisdom, as we explore strategies to navigate the choppy waters of team disagreements and emerge with a strengthened vessel, ready to sail towards success.

Connect with Angie on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/angelaagresto/

Check out Training from the Back of the Room and  all of Angie's training offerings:
https://angelaagresto.com/

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Transcript

Mark Metze: 0:06

Welcome to the Agile Within. I am your host, mark Metz. My mission for this podcast is to provide Agile insights into human values and behaviors through genuine connections. My guests and I will share real-life stories from our Agile journeys, triumphs, blunders and everything in between, as well as the lessons that we have learned. So get pumped, get rocking. The Agile Within starts now. Welcome back everybody to the Agile Within podcast. This is your host, as always, mark Metz. I want to welcome our guest for today's episode, angela Agresto from Duluth, minnesota. Welcome, angela.

Angie Agresto: 0:52

Thank you, Mark. It's a pleasure to be here.

Mark Metze: 0:55

Oh, pleasure to have you. So Angela is an author, she's also a facilitation master and she's a certified training from the back of the room trainer, both in person and remotely. I may or may not have taken one of her classes. No, I'm not going to be that silly about it. I've taken one of Angie's classes and she is absolutely fabulous and she did not pay me to say that. I'm saying that of my own accord. So her company is Agresto Training and Coaching. So we'll add some details to the show notes later if you're interested in in her offerings, because I fully fully endorse her. But Angie, back to you. So I want to find out a little bit about Duluth Minnesota. Not Duluth Georgia, which in my parts of the country that's close to Atlanta, but in Duluth Minnesota. If I were planning a trip and I only had a day to spend, what would be one thing that you would say I absolutely had to do?

Angie Agresto: 1:57

I would say that there are some absolutely amazing parks in town, like right in the center of town, that have, like these trails that are either dirt or paved and they follow the river. So you've got a lot of ups and downs and a lot of nature and then they lead out to Lake Superior. So there's these amazing views and it's just so peaceful and quiet, and then you get to hear the water of the river and these little cascading waterfalls, maybe even some larger waterfalls, depending on where you are, and I think it's just an absolutely amazing way to spend an afternoon is to just go walking or hiking in one of those parts.

Mark Metze: 2:45

Sounds wonderful. I'm going to have to make it up that way one of these days, because my wife and I love love hiking in nature. That sounds wonderful.

Angie Agresto: 2:54

Well, give me a call ahead of time and I'll tell you where to go.

Mark Metze: 2:58

I'm going to take you up on that, okay, all right. So, angie, we're going to talk about facilitation here in our. Our title for today's episode is facilitation, the skill we all need to master. So, angie, why is facilitation a skill that we all need to master? And maybe, first off, let's define what is facilitation. Maybe, first off, let's define what is facilitation.

Angie Agresto: 3:26

Okay. So facilitation is a process or skill that enables groups of people to work together effectively by creating an environment or space where everyone can feel like they're heard, understood and able to contribute their unique perspectives. You and I both work in the agile space, and typically this seems to fall on the responsibility of the scrum master, but it's actually something that is amazing for any skill. Whether you're in the agile industry or you're not in the agile industry makes no difference. Time and time again, I'll say that I get asked questions about facilitation and why it provides so much value, and I really think that when we understand what facilitation is supposed to be and how to create the space and get out of the way for those who are in the space with us, we help them tap into their own intelligence, creativity and resourcefulness, rather than pushing or forcing information on to them.

Mark Metze: 4:36

Can anyone be a master of facilitation?

Angie Agresto: 4:39

I think that everybody has the capability to master the skill of facilitation.

Mark Metze: 4:45

And let me ask you a follow-up question, angie. When we say master, help me and help our audience understand, what do we mean by mastering the art of facilitation, and why is it not just enough to be serviceable?

Angie Agresto: 4:58

I think it's important to master the skill because we have to understand how to get out of the way when we're facilitating a session with people.

Angie Agresto: 5:08

I'm going to take a step back here for a second, because you'll hear a lot of people talk about the fact that facilitators are supposed to be neutral.

Angie Agresto: 5:15

Right, facilitators are not supposed to have a leg in the game or invested in the product that we're talking about or the service that we're working on when we're having these workshops or these facilitation sessions, or even if we're just facilitating our team ceremonies and events.

Angie Agresto: 5:32

But the truth is that we do actually have an investment in the process. The investment is the people. The investment is creating the space that is required for everybody in the space to feel like they can actually contribute and bring their experiences to the table and their knowledge and share that with each other. And it's not something that we can just dip our toe in and practice sometimes, because when you're trying to create psychological safety for groups or teams or organizations, whatever it may be, the second you take your toe out and pretend like psychological safety doesn't matter. Then you lose all of the trust that you previously established. So it's really an art form and it's something that I think from a mastery perspective, that once you understand how it works, you really live it and breathe it. It's not a temporary thing that you just turn off and on.

Mark Metze: 6:41

You've worked with lots of different clients.

Angie Agresto: 6:44

Yes.

Mark Metze: 6:44

All these clients may have different roles, so talk to us about, let's say, executives. These are C-level people. What challenges do they have and why is it important for them to be able to master the art of facilitation?

Angie Agresto: 7:16

From a leadership or an executive perspective.

Angie Agresto: 7:18

It's important because this also helps allow for us to navigate effective communication and their ideas versus the traditional leadership style, and I'm not saying anything bad or negative about it.

Angie Agresto: 7:33

But there is a typical management style of telling people what they need to do when it needs to be done, and sometimes even to the point where, as leaders or managers, we think the easiest way to manage people or lead people is to just tell them how to do it. But when we actually facilitate a conversation with people, even in a one-on-one situation, where we invite them to bring their selves and their ideas to the table, as leaders, we can learn so much from the people that we're having conversations and by inviting that to happen on a regular and consistent basis, all of a sudden people will start to bring more ideas, innovation and think about I'm just going to, I'm going to jump forward. Think about the ideas, the thoughts, the experiments, the products, the services that could come from you If you come to you, if you had an entire organization of people that all knew that they could freely come to you and share, because you invited that process and that was the type of culture that you facilitated and nurtured and grew at your organization.

Mark Metze: 8:46

So how do you create that type of environment, especially when maybe you're stepping into a position where the people before you didn't have that mindset and you're trying to turn the ship, so to speak?

Angie Agresto: 9:00

Yeah, turn the ship around right.

Mark Metze: 9:02

Yeah, yeah, yeah turn the ship around right.

Angie Agresto: 9:03

Yeah, yeah Well. So one of the things that I like to do, especially if I'm in the leadership role, is I want to have some one-on-one conversations with the people that I work with. So again, it doesn't matter if this is someone I report to, this is a peer on my team or somebody that reports to me. I want to have a basic understanding of how do they learn, what's their preferred communication style. Not only do I want to ask the kinds of questions about how they learn best or how they want to be communicated to or with, but I want to share with them what my preferences are as well, so that we can come to a common understanding as to what that could look and feel like together.

Angie Agresto: 9:48

And then, as a leader, my expectation isn't that everybody has to conform to my style because I'm the boss and I'm the one in the seniority position, but that I actually want to step into the position that is best for the both of us together, and having that conversation and creating alignment and transparency is key. So, from facilitating amazing conversations all the way to facilitating workshops and trainings, in workshops, we get together and we have these conversations about what we want our working agreements to look like together as a team? How do we want to work? How do we expect each other to show up If we're in a training? How does our group or our cohort want to show up for our classes? How we want to help, educate and inspire each other?

Mark Metze: 10:37

I can't help but reflect on my own experiences. And so I hear exactly what you're saying. And so I have a situation from my past where I came to a new company. One of the senior level executives said I want you to have the freedom to come to my office at any time to talk to me about anything. I have an open door policy. I had some questions about the company and what my role was and just some concerns, and so I said you know what? I'm going to take this lady up on her offer. I'm going to go and and meet with her during her office hours.

Mark Metze: 11:10

So I walked from the, from the carpeted side of the building over to the marble floor side of the building where the executive sat, and I walked down and I looked across and there was her office and she had this huge credenza and this oak desk and leather chair and I just stopped and I was like what am I doing? No, I just don't feel comfortable. This feels like a whole different world to me that I'm stepping into. I'm kind of ashamed to say I wasn't brave enough to step in and I wish I had. I think about that so often. But as I reflect, so our words can say one thing how can you set the environment so that people do feel psychologically safe? Even though you're trying to explain to them this is a safe space, but they might not feel that or experience it?

Angie Agresto: 12:03

Yeah, I think that's very common and I'll even share with you that in my own household I live with an engineer right that works at a major organization. Okay yeah, he does not feel the same way I do about the comfort level of being able to engage with leaders. So you're sharing is that you were given this invitation once, but you were never re-invited again. You didn't actually get the invitation repeatedly as a reminder. So when we're in a leadership role, we have to not just extend the invitation once, but multiple times, and then we have to model the behavior that we actually are trying to enforce and inspire inside of our organizations. So the one one thing in your particular situation the leader that you were referring to it probably would have been nice for them to come around and actually talk to you or to the other members on your team on occasion and then re-remind you right, re-extend the invitation.

Mark Metze: 13:27

Come into our environment instead of us coming to their environment.

Angie Agresto: 13:31

Exactly Because when they come into your space and invite a conversation and a dialogue with you, it becomes more normalized that, hey, this person is no different than me, right? Like, in my mind, every person is the same. We all get up every day, and I know you've heard this, it's very cliche, right? We all get up, we all put our pants on one leg at a time, just like each other. We're no different. But the reality of what you said is very true. There are many people like you and like my spouse, who don't feel comfortable engaging with somebody who's at a leadership, an executive or leadership level, if it's too far above and they're not reinforcing or re-inviting the invitation, and so that would be one thing that I think an organization could do better at if they're struggling from that type of scenario.

Mark Metze: 14:25

We talked from the leadership perspective and we talked about the advantages of mastering facilitation skills. What about that developer, or, let's say, a tester, maybe a UI, ux designer that they're just kind of happy doing their own thing, not really talking to very many people? Just, you just kind of give me work and I'll deliver it, but don't make me talk to people. What would you say to that group of people and how facilitation can help them?

Angie Agresto: 14:57

Yeah, so I do work in the software development industry and so I know exactly what you're talking about. There are a lot of people who work in software development or in creative roles that are more introverted and maybe aren't necessarily comfortable having conversations or being brave and sharing information and just learning how to be vocal and to share. And the way that I've reinforced that with teams that I've worked with is to celebrate the knowledge that they do share and then in conversations with them one-on-one, when they share something with me that is really pivotal, it's like, oh my gosh, you should really share that with the rest of the team. Have you considered the fact that this would be really beneficial for the others to hear? And usually the response is well, no, I had no idea. Or they'll be like well, I thought, if I just waited long enough, that somebody else would have the same idea and they would share it.

Angie Agresto: 15:56

So they're waiting for somebody else to put the foot forward first. Then what happens is, by the time they realize nobody else is going to put the foot forward first because it's their experience or their knowledge, then we've moved on to another topic and then they feel like it's too late. So, coaching them one-on-one on how to kind of step up and different areas of expertise and knowledge they have to share, and then celebrating when they do is really pivotal at helping to help shape and change how they feel about that and encourages them to keep continuing to collaborate and share with the rest of the team and other people in the organization.

Mark Metze: 16:44

So I'm going to put you on the spot. Okay, Do you have an example, either in your own dealings as an Agile coach or maybe through your training offerings that you've done and having somebody speak up? Do you have an example where somebody did receive that coaching and it transformed them?

Angie Agresto: 17:02

Yeah, a couple actually. So there was a team that I worked with a few years ago development team and I would say half of the team was fairly or very introverted and was uncomfortable with sharing information and just piping up because they always felt, you know, like I had explained in the previous example, you know that somebody else would have the idea, or maybe their idea wasn't as important as you know. We all realized it was once. We learned it by doing that and encouraging and coaching and mentoring them to speak up and to share that information. The next thing, you know, they're actually speaking at community of practices and the developers are coming together and sharing information and knowledge with each other and standing in front of a room and actually doing trainings and little showcases and demos and stuff like that.

Angie Agresto: 18:01

And then having you know, somebody in the leadership team going, oh my gosh, like I've never seen you actually step up and do this and share information like this. You know what has changed, you know. And then they literally said it's the coaching that I received from Angie. And the leader was like no, no, no, I'm talking about you speaking. And this person said no, really, it's from the coaching that I received from Angie. That helped me understand how know that information. But if we don't have the experience ourselves, we don't have that information, and so it's really coaching and educating and getting them to understand that. Another example I had an educator who took one one of my TBRVE classes and after he left our class he actually received a promotion to run an entire department at a new educational institution in California because he was facilitating and teaching students differently than they had ever seen done before teaching students differently than they had ever seen done before.

Mark Metze: 19:25

Wow, that's incredible. Yeah, Incredible story. That's awesome. I'll have a similar situation where I was working with somebody who was a really strong developer, but I don't think he would. This was from a previous company, previous position that I had and I don't think he would. He definitely would agree with me on this was a little bit on the gruff side, sometimes didn't use the best language, let's just be honest and but very talented, very, very did very good work, and some of the work that he did we knew would show a lot of people how valuable this work that he was doing for this segment of users. So we wanted to demo it to them to get some feedback.

Mark Metze: 20:08

And everybody's like, oh, you can't let this person do it because you know how they are. It was just like, well, you know, have we given them a shot? It's like, oh no, we've never done that before. That just would be a disaster. I was like, well, how do we know? Let me just talk to them and just see, and you know what I mean very professional sounding, had a great voice, great presentation, great skills as far as presenting something remotely, being able to show the feature, doing it succinctly, and did a great job. So I say I share that story and say all that. All that to say is that sometimes people just need a chance to shine.

Angie Agresto: 20:49

Yeah, yeah, absolutely, and I'll take it a step further. Sometimes they even just need a little bit of guidance, like maybe there was an assumption that this person wouldn't be good at doing this thing because of a previous experience, that they had little guidance on having an understanding of what are the key points or the benefits that you actually want to highlight when you're sharing information with a group of people doing a training or presenting, whatever the case may be. So I can tie that back to an organization that I had worked at once many years ago and we were trying to improve our sprint reviews, or sprint demos. Right, I'll also share. At that organization, we ended up splitting them up so that we could make sure that the key stakeholders that needed to be present for each of the intended purposes of those sessions were actually present.

Angie Agresto: 21:53

But what we discovered was that one of the biggest struggles that the team members were having with actually putting together the demo portion to share with stakeholders you know what they had actually accomplished and show them these things, was that they didn't really have a clear understanding of what leadership thought was important, of what leadership thought was important.

Angie Agresto: 22:18

They didn't understand how to connect the dots to the product that they were building and the value, or the dollars or the data. That actually was very significant from a leadership planning perspective. So we started having conversations with the leaders to help us understand. Please explain to the team what it is about this project that actually or product enhancement that is so important to you. Why is this so valuable? And when the leaders were actually able to articulate it in a way that let them understand what was important, which many times is money right Increasing costs, increasing revenue, increasing ROA, customer satisfaction and then showing the team members how to correlate what they were doing to those business plan propositions, then they were able to come to the table and actually do something that leadership wanted. And then leadership was actually even more present and more engaged and the teams felt happier and more supported because they actually knew they were delivering what leadership was expecting. So sometimes there's just not enough information that's actually being transported from the leadership level to the team level.

Mark Metze: 23:41

It's amazing what alignment can do.

Angie Agresto: 23:45

It is right.

Mark Metze: 23:48

What about facilitation in conflict? Let's just say you have a team and there's some conflict and people are very, very hesitant because let's get most. There are some people that do like conflict. Some people like the war of having discussions with others and being able to engage, but most of us don't necessarily like conflict. So how can facilitation and improving our facilitation skills, what can that do for us as far as combating conflict and I know not all conflict is bad, but let's assume that it's negative induced conflict.

Angie Agresto: 24:31

Yeah, well, so one of the things from a facilitator perspective. So let's say, in this particular situation, this is a scrum master, because a scrum master would be someone that would see conflict on a team you know regularly, see where it's coming from, why is it happening, who's involved, involved? So having an understanding of where the conflict is arising is a really good place to start right. Then we want to have a conversation with the team to create some engagement norms, meeting norms, whether it's team norms, meeting norms, so wherever the conflict is happening, right, we want to have a conversation about how do we address conflict. I was literally just working with a brand new organization in a completely different industry than I've ever worked in a few weeks ago and I had set up meeting norms and team working agreements with them and we talked about conflict and how do we want to deal with conflict when, when it comes up. And they said, well, we don't really have a lot of conflict. And I said, well, I said that's amazing, and you know they're a small team, so it makes sense, it's. You know they haven't run into a lot of it. I said, but you guys are growing and you are going to at some point introduce somebody or something into your system that is going to create conflict. And they said, yeah, that's true, that is probably going to happen with maybe the next person or two that we hire. And I said so, how would you like to handle it when it happens? And so then they actually spent, you know, 10, 15 minutes just talking about what do we want to do, how do we want to handle it. And then they made an agreement together that, when conflict arises, what do we want to do, how do we want to handle it? And then they made an agreement together that, when conflict arises, what we want to do is one, be transparent about it, unauthentic, and then give each other grace and space to step away from the conversation if we need to, because some people don't handle conflict as well as others.

Angie Agresto: 26:34

Right, they might get emotionally charged and or maybe not be able to separate the issue at hand from who they are. Right, there's not a bad. You're not a bad person. There might just be a bad behavior. Or there might be an issue with something you created. You know a bug or something like that, and that doesn't mean that you're a bad developer. It just means there there a bug or something like that, and that doesn't mean that you're a bad developer. It just means there's a bug that we need to have a conversation about and figure out how we're going to fix it. But some people will take that personal.

Angie Agresto: 27:04

So setting up and having a conversation to align on how we want to handle it when it arises, before it happens, is key. And if you haven't when it does, then take the time, not in the moment, but afterwards. Take the time to set up those conversation alignments on how do we want to handle it. So then, the other thing that they did was they said so we have permission to say that we need some space and step away from this, but we commit to coming back together and addressing it within 24 to 48 hours. So we are not going to let it linger and not take care of it. We have to commit to handling it, but we're talking about how we want to handle it together. So that's, I think, a really important thing. And then, outside of that, to be completely honest, mark, you and I both know that there are some facilitation tips and tricks that you can use if you're facilitating sessions to navigate, mitigate and guide who speaks and in what order. Sometimes doing things like that is also really helpful.

Mark Metze: 28:15

you know in what order and sometimes doing things like that is also really helpful. How do you delineate between healthy conflict and unhealthy conflict? Because I'm just imagining so if you've got a team that says, oh, we don't have any conflict, then everybody's being very nice to one another, and I think of, when somebody makes a suggestion, then it's just immediately decided upon. Oh, that's great, let's do that. Should we always go with the first option that comes to our mind? Should we go through other options to see which one should be? So how do you help define that between healthy and unhealthy conflict?

Angie Agresto: 28:52

Yeah, so healthy and unhealthy. Unhealthy conflict yeah, so healthy and unhealthy. Just very, very simply. In my opinion, unhealthy is the equivalent of throwing darts or throwing daggers right, it's saying something that is actually sharp or intended to hurt the person that is actually being thrown. The information at right. So we want to have a conversation about what that actually looks like.

Angie Agresto: 29:20

Healthy conflict is.

Angie Agresto: 29:22

You know, I may not agree with that idea, but I can appreciate the fact that you're bringing an idea to the table and that we need to change something because this isn't working.

Angie Agresto: 29:32

Can we talk about some different ideas as to what might actually be a better solution? So we can disagree with each other, and it's actually an amazing opportunity to be able to trust and dive in or lean into healthy conflict, because brainstorming is an amazing way for us to gather ideas, not just on what we're working on or what might not be working today from an efficiency or product or service perspective, but it might stimulate ideas that we never even considered before. And when people are throwing ideas out, typically the first I don't know 20% are going to be, and I know there are statistics on this. I am not a person who memorizes statistics, but I'll say the first 20% usually are going to end up in the garbage. It's us having the conversation and allowing for that brainstorming and idea development and collaboration to happen together that actually creates the amazing ideas, because we're taking all of our thoughts together to create something we could never have created on our own.

Mark Metze: 30:44

Gee, as we're coming to a close, what words would you leave to our listeners as far as why facilitation is a skill that we all need to master?

Angie Agresto: 30:53

I think facilitation is a skill that we all should master, because if we lean into facilitation, we can help others tap into their own intelligence, creativity, resourcefulness. We can encourage and inspire other people to bring ideas to the table that we wouldn't have heard had we not used the skills of facilitation to create the space and invite something meaningful to happen within the team and organization, or a product Like it. Just it works everywhere if we just take the time to invest in it as a skill and see the benefits that it brings to an individual, a team or an organization as a whole.

Mark Metze: 31:45

I guess the only thing I want to add is what do you have to lose? Nothing, nothing.

Angie Agresto: 31:51

You have nothing to lose. The benefit is creating the space and the vocabulary to be able to just keep getting better.

Mark Metze: 31:59

Low risk, high reward. That sounds like a pretty good investment to me. I agree with you with the training from the back of the room, the virtual edition class, if they maybe want to take that class, if they want to see some of your other offerings through Agresto training and coaching, why don't you tell our listeners how they can get in touch with you?

Angie Agresto: 32:25

Yes, so you can connect with me on LinkedIn with my name, obviously, Angela Agresto. Actually, on LinkedIn it's Angela Bella Agresto. My website is AngelaAgrestocom and I have my entire 2024 training schedule posted on the website now. If you're interested in taking one of the TBRVE classes to elevate your facilitation skills and I would love to have you so reach out to me, connect, join a class. Whatever you'd like to do, I'm here to help and you have a book as well, right.

Angie Agresto: 33:02

Oh, yeah, yeah. So I have a book and a deck of cards called Brain Building Blueprints and what that is is a facilitation tool that is a complement to the training from the back of the room course, and there's actually a brand new one being printed right now, which is the brain building blueprints for virtual instruction. So you can use the flipbook to just automatically design instructional maps for your workshops with your teams. You can also use the individual techniques within the book or the deck of cards to give you tips and tricks on how to actually do different facilitation techniques. You can use them for workshops, you can use them for team meetings, anything you like. So I've got some other stuff in the works, but that's what's available right now.

Mark Metze: 33:51

Awesome. So I have the flip book and have used it several times over and it's just very, very good way to be able to mix and match different techniques together and just very easily put together a facilitation session, so I highly recommend that. All right, well, as we come to a close here for this edition of the Agile Within, I want to thank Angie for coming on and her valuable time. Thank you, angie, for being our guest, and that's a wrap. We'll see you next time. Everybody, thanks for joining us for another episode of the Agile Within. If you haven't already, please join our LinkedIn page to stay in touch. Just search for the Agile Within and please spread the word with your friends and colleagues Until next time. This has been your host, mark Metz.