Facilitation ≅ Coaching @ Scale
Everyone is doing it! Not very good at it though. If you ask them, every single one of them tells you they are great at it. I am talking about Facilitation!
Everyone is thinking they are doing it. Many of them have an idea about it, maybe through word of mouth. The funny thing is that everyone is claiming to be great at it. This time, I am talking about Coaching!
Facilitation is what we do on a daily basis, no matter what our roles are. If we are talking to more than one person, we are probably using some facilitation techniques. People that are working with teams use that more often. Facilitation is a human-centric activity. It gets more complicated and more complex by the number of people involved, and that's not the only factor. There are many factors involved in that.
Coaching is not something we necessarily do on a daily basis unless you are a coach; and a coach by heart. It is very easy to call yourself one and not be one. It is hard to be a coach. Coaching is a deliberate stance we take. In coaching, depending on your client's situation, you use different tools and techniques.
In their core, Coaching and Facilitation are not very different. One is mostly focused at a person's personal level, and one at a group's personal level. When you look at the group as one entity, you can apply techniques and tools for both. Similar to the scaling challenges you might have encountered, you can not necessarily apply the exact same techniques and tools to the bigger picture. However, you can rely back on the pillars of Coaching, Facilitation and vice versa.
