Hey, it's Rachel Cook, your modern mentor. I'm the founder of Lead Above Noise, a firm

specializing in helping teams and organizations create better working experiences that deliver

better results. So this kind of kooky meta thing happened to me recently. I facilitated this

session for a leadership team. And following that session, one of the participants reached out and asked if I could design

and run a session for his team to help them be better facilitators.

Now, I've taught facilitation many times, largely to other trainers or HR practitioners.

But what through me here is that this is a tech leader, not

typically a consumer of facilitation skills. But his reasoning really stayed with me. He sees his team

as a bunch of doers. They are highly skilled and talented doers, but still, they receive

requirements from the business and they're expected to build.

And he sees an opportunity for his team to be doing more, to be facilitating meaningful

conversations with the business in order to offer true strategic partnership.

And he's spot on.

I think his logic applies really to any specialist, be it marketing, finance, development, etc.

So let's talk about how you can up your facilitation game in order to work with, not for, your internal partners,

to deliver outcomes that are bigger, better, and more impactful.

Here are just a few of the ideas I'll be including in the program that I deliver.

First, understand your unique value. I don't mean this in a gosh, your special kind of way.

I mean that in every interaction, each party has or should have something unique to contribute.

Like, imagine a conversation between a store manager and their

retail associates. In one scenario, the manager tells the associates how they'd like the store laid out,

which products they'd like featured at the front, how they'd like the transactions at the register

...