Customer Reviews

Facilitation Skills - Helping Groups Make Decisions

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I own a consulting firm and I needed a good book for my consultants to study to become good facilitators. I ordered and reviewed every facilitation book available on Amazon and sent them all back except this one. This book is well-written and organized, and hits all the important points needed to become a solid facilitator quickly.

I would recommend that this book be read by every project team leader as it does a good job clarifying roles of teams, its members and facilitation basics (right down to which color markers to use on a flipchart.)It's a good, nuts and bolts template for first-time facilitators. I'm an experienced technology trainer (6 years). This book was a quick-read and worked well for me when I needed to work with a task force troubleshooting interdepartmental communications. Book needs some proofreading - found lots of grammatical errors (distracting to me). Case study examples mainly focused on "what went wrong" but did drive some good points. Not an in-depth facilitation resource but worth it's price.

A very simple book, it does give some insight into facilitation, but I found it very irritating that there were typos on nearly every page! When words like 'expect' are used instead of 'except' the whole meaning has changed. And a whole page of this small guide devoted to how to turn and tear pages from a flipchart? This is a very low level primer on this subject. As a student of cooperative leadership, this book did little to enhance my knowledge of the process of facilitation.

Now in an updated and expanded second edition, Facilitation Skills: Helping Groups Make Decisions by training and development manager and facilitator Gregory B. Putz is a step-by-step guidebook for organizing and promoting cooperation. Facilitation Skills concentrates specifically on the role of the facilitator, whose duty it is to remain neutral and help the team arrive upon a decision, as opposed to the role of team leader. Each individual page offers different tips, tricks and techniques in easy-to-read format that lends itself to browsing or just opening to a page and random. Simple black-and-white sketches illustrate this superbly presented, highly recommended, "user friendly" guide for anyone assuming responsibility for team facilitation.