What is a facilitator?
We thought we’d share a little brainstorm from our thought wall, where we play with ideas and strategies.
The challenge…
We are fast-growing company that needs to protect and nurture its culture and clearly communicate its values. Getting the right people on board is essential. But how to do that? How to communicate our values? How to assess the values of new staff – especially if they’re part time. An interesting dilemma and one that we’ve been spending some time on.
To back up a bit and put this into context, we’re in recruitment mode right now. We’re looking for new staff – core team members that can help us move forward with integrity and passion and consistency. We’re trying to figure out who the best kind of people are to recruit and build relationships with – especially as we have an ongoing need for part timers. We’ve found that short term recruitment of powerful personalities is unsustainable and can undermine the development of the OI brand, so we decided to ask ourselves a simple question, “what is a facilitator?”
At Odyssey we don’t draw a line in the sand between our logistical support team and facilitation team. Some organizations do. We don’t. They are not separate species. We want everyone to have an appreciation of what other team members are responsible for and what their duties and roles feel like. In order to do that we deliberately blur the line. Not that we don’t delegate effectively, its more that when we do we know what it feels like to receive that responsibility and know who’s best to hand it to. This, we feel, is a good formula for building a community (as opposed to a collection of individuals).
The Facilometer
First of all my Operations Manager, Novi, and I took this one to lunch (a spinach pizza at Bali Buddha) and I ended up drawing out a diagram on a napkin. Next it went back to the office and turned into the OI Facilometer! Its basically a tool for diagnosing the potential of professional experiential facilitators to become full time core staff members at Odyssey. I guess you could also call it an HR strategy. Here’s what I came up with:
Defining OI Facilitators
Once in the field with a group, our facilitators have what we call “front end” and “back end” responsibilities. As experiential educators we need to get a whole bunch of ducks in a row in order to create powerful Learning Adventures. Really, the list is long – especially when you consider we are operating in remote wilderness settings in developing countries!
If you get how to organize and manage the “space” (work environment) and are great at managing logistics, etc, but don’t have much of a connection to the students, or much of a passion for education, you could be a solid logistician (what we might call a “stage hand”) but very weak as a front end facilitator.
Similarly, if you are highly skilled and passionate about engaging students and holding them in a powerful, energized, focused learning space, but have no idea how to set the show up, you’re what we’d call a “rock star”.
As you can see from our Facilometer, anyone scoring high on either the front or back end exclusively is going to be suitable to part time work only. That’s not to say that Odyssey doesn’t need rock stars and stage hands (we need a whole bunch of them!). We’re just not building our company around them. At least not at the core.
So… for Odyssey the quest continues. Core Odyssey team members (facilitators) have a working knowledge of the dynamic range of responsibilities necessary for the creation of our Learning Adventures (holistic experiential education opportunities). Our logisticians and sales staff have a love of experiential education and our facilitators deeply appreciate the technical aspects of getting those kids to camp. And the more anyone is able to embody this middle ground (circled on the chart), the more likely they are to be a long term, full time member of Odyssey’s growing family.
We are, after all, in the business of holistic education and we want balanced individuals with a strong sense of team work and an appreciation for the diversity of skills required to get the job done.
