Good facilitation is built on a foundation of acceptance. How do you have an attitude of acceptance toward those you wish to facilitate? Here are 5 suggestions:

1. Listen well. I have covered listening in many other articles so suffice it to say here that you need good listening skills to make facilitation work. When the other person feels heard, they are more likely to get energized to solve their own problems.

2. Seek understanding. As Stephen Covey wrote in his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Habit number 5 is: “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” You need to make this your intention, to seek understanding. If you don’t understand where the other person is coming from, you cannot facilitate their moving forward. Having the intention of seeking understanding puts you in the right frame of mind to facilitate rather than to direct.

3. Be mutual rather than one-up. Try to be on the same level as the other person for as long as you want to be in a facilitative posture. If you are their boss, this is hard to do. But you can say, “John, I don’t want to try to show you what to do in this situation. I want to facilitate your figuring that out for yourself.” John may still be deferential toward you. Just do your best to be more equal with John and seek mutuality.

4. Be non-judgmental. You will, of course, have judgments about what is the best thing to do, and you can offer them in a non-judgmental fashion. That means you do not make the other person wrong or less-than. You do not show any contempt, which destroys relationships. Some poor bosses sneer at their direct reports. Sneers just pop out. They don’t seem to care that sneers demotivate people. Other bosses sometimes use thinly veiled contempt with innuendos. Tearing people down in any fashion fails to motivate.

5. Affirm the other person. As with number 4 above, avoid using any disdain or stimulating fear in the other person. Do all you can to maintain their dignity and build on that as you facilitate. I was once a leadership trainer for Zenger-Miller, Inc. We constantly emphasized that leaders must build self-esteem even in hard situations such as when they discipline people. That is an art that I can help you learn via my executive coaching.

You can improve in all of these 5 approaches to being accepting through our individual or group executive coaching (http://www.EmotionallyIntelligentLeadership.com).