Hey everyone, it’s yours truly, Sloan Leo, the founder, CEO, and lead facilitator over at FLOX Studio. I’m excited to start doing these weekly tips to help you become a stronger facilitator. Whether you’re a CEO running an all staff meeting, the head of HR running a training, or an everyday person at your job trying to make sure that your team meetings and your one on ones are going better and even having even greater impact, this week I think I can help you.
This week I found myself in Los Angeles. I was there for the Unity Philanthropy Summit. It’s a big conference with 1,200 people who are there to talk about innovations in philanthropy. In the spring of 2020, I was contacted by the New York Women’s Foundation based in New York City. They do work that impacts women and girls to get them out of economic vulnerability to a place of economic resilience.
For three years we’ve been facilitating this group called the Brooklyn Economic Justice Project. It’s an initiative to create more economic resilience in a very specific pocket of central Brooklyn, for women and for gender non conforming people. It’s been an amazing project, and we’ve had over 14 different organizations participate to date.
Now, As a person running a panel, do you see yourself as a facilitator? Because the fact is, if you’re interviewing folks and engaging with an audience, surprise, surprise, you’re facilitating. When it came time for me to get ready for this event, I did a couple of things. I took the time to read everyone’s bio.
And as I was reading the bios, I was taking notes and thinking, huh, what am I naturally curious about? This is where authenticity comes in. So I went through all the bios. And then I went through some preparatory questions that I designed in collaboration with the team over at the New York Women’s Foundation.
We were asking questions to set up the context of the work they had been doing, a little bit about the work each person in the panel had accomplished, and have some space to talk about the lessons that they had learned. After doing that prep, we met in person a few weeks later. This week at the top of the conference, our session was at 1030.
So at 10 o’clock, we gathered in the room and we sat down and we made sure we made personal contact. So it’s, hey, how are you doing today? Tell me your pronouns. What’s your title? How are you showing up? With that warm energy established, I felt more confident that I could lead and facilitate a really engaging dialogue.
Slowly, as people came in, I put some music on my computer. Personally, right now, I’m the most fond of a Fela Kuti playlist. Really awesome world music from the 70s. And it made sure that people walking in started to feel a little bit of warmth, a little bit of that Brooklyn vibe. Once we had critical mass, which was about 25 people, it was time for the show to begin.
And every time you ask a question like that, the audience goes, I don’t know if I have a question. I feel kind of nervous. What should I say? So you have to take an extra long beat, something like this. So I’m wondering for you out there in the audience, what questions are you coming to today with?
I paused for a bit – maybe 20 seconds. and then, people started raising their hands. Folks raised their hands and brought some really great questions about how to do place based cohort funding to the table. And then I had everyone in the room, and there were about eight people who had questions, say their question out loud, and I wrote it down in my notebook.
I then took some time as people were finishing their questions to think about, was there a connection or a theme that I could use in summation to ask the folks on the panel? I did that. After we got through another 20 minutes of conversation, I paused and I turned to the panelists and said, what questions do you have for the audience?
Again, slipping it, reversing it, and inverting it. Finding ways to create more dialogue in both directions. So the expertise lives in the audience and on the panel. So as you look at your week ahead, maybe you’re not facilitating a panel, but at some point you’re going to be in the front of the room with people who are experts and folks in the audience who are not.
So I’m going to challenge you. Next week, do your best to find a way to create that sense of expertise exchange between the folks who know and the folks who also know, but are sitting on the other side of the table. Thanks so much. See you next week.
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