Co-facilitation requires facilitation competencies. First and foremost, the job of co-facilitators is to facilitate a group process and that requires managing oneself as a facilitator, the event, the process, individuals and the group as a whole. Like facilitators, co-facilitators enhance the interpersonal relationships of people in a group, sharing power, respecting the individuality of group members, and understanding that in order for learning to occur, valid information needs to be shared, people need to have choices and everyone needs to accept responsibility for decisions.
As a means of enhancing the professionalism of facilitation, the International Association of Facilitators has developed Facilitator Competencies and a process for accrediting facilitators who demonstrate them.
Another way of enhancing professionalism, is through co-facilitation.
Co-facilitators represent not only themselves, but also the wider principles that they espouse. They are accountable to the group, community or organisation, society or culture and the wider world. In co-facilitation, co-facilitators make a conscious commitment to work to agreed standards, codes of conduct and accountability.
Co-facilitators develop their ‘learning edges’: areas of confidence and lack of confidence, strengths and weaknesses through collective reflection about aspects they can improve as a team and individually and personal areas for development. There are opportunities to model from a colleague, for being surprised, for refreshing knowledge, for learning about themselves and for learning different ways of doing things.
Co-facilitation offers a way of supporting an assessment of facilitator competencies and of improving competency as a facilitator. Co-facilitators seek and act on feedback including written evaluations, verbal reflections or conversations about a facilitation event. Feedback from a skilled peer, aware of the dimensions of facilitation and able to give specific examples of competencies that are observed, with or without using a competency framework, can support facilitators in improving their facilitation.
For co-facilitators to work effectively together they need to make attitudes and values explicit and, where necessary, bring differences together and weave them into a consistent whole. They need to blend their individual theories concerning how people behave, groups form and operate, courses are designed, and facilitators use power. They need to bring together the ways they prefer to work with a group and the strategies for they know and use for particular purposes. Complementarity of knowledge and skills is more important than commonality. Complementarity enables co-facilitators to use their different knowledge, experience, and skills to provide a holistic process for each other and the group. It is these differences that enhance the possibilities of learning.
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