The Best Facilitators Talk the Least

Early in my career I watched Lorne Michaels run a room at Saturday Night Live, where the standard was perfection, every week, live. What struck me wasn't how much he said. It was how little. He'd let a table of brilliant, loud, competitive people talk, and he'd wait, and the room would sort itself toward the best idea while he barely moved. The authority was in the restraint.

I've spent the years since at the front of rooms in more than thirty countries. Keynotes, workshops, executive peer groups. And the lesson keeps proving itself. The person running the room should usually be the one talking the least.

That's a hard sell, because most of us were trained to believe the opposite. We think facilitating means having the answers ready, filling every silence, being the smartest voice in the room. So we over-prepare, over-talk, and turn a room full of experienced people into an audience.

When that happens, you've lost the whole reason for getting everyone together. You can read a memo alone. People come into a room for the thing that only happens between people: the challenge, and the idea nobody walked in with.

Silence is a tool, not a problem

The hardest skill I've had to learn is to ask a real question and then stop talking.

Ask a group something that matters and the room goes quiet, and three or four seconds feel like a minute. The instinct is to rescue everyone. Rephrase, answer it yourself, move on. Don't. That silence is people thinking. The moment you fill it, you've taught the room that if they wait long enough, you'll do the work for them.

So I wait. I've gotten comfortable being the only person in the room who isn't bothered by the pause. The best answer of the session usually comes from the person who needed those extra seconds.

Protect the room from the loudest voice

Every group has someone quick and confident who'll fill every gap. They're often sharp. They're also, without meaning to be, a lid on everyone else.

Part of running a room is making the space that confident person won't give up on their own. "That's one view. I'd like to hear from someone who sees it differently." Said warmly, that doesn't shut anyone down. It tells the rest of the room their thinking is wanted here.

The leaders I work with feel this in their own meetings. The same three people talk. The other eight have decided it isn't worth it. And the organization slowly stops hearing from the people closest to the work.

The shift

A presenter's job is to be impressive. A facilitator's job is to make the room think. Those are different jobs, and senior leaders are usually promoted on the first one, then quietly judged on the second.

And you don't get better at this by knowing more. You get better by talking less and asking sharper questions, then trusting the room to do what you brought it together for.

The best thing people remember after a session you ran usually isn't a line you said. It's something they worked out themselves, because you made room for it.

If meetings, decisions, and ideas all still run through you, you may be the bottleneck. Find out with the free Founder Bottleneck Checklist at jamiemasoncohen.com.