Following on from my previous posting On Distinguishing for facilitators, two important distinctions we explore in the Stage 2: Essence of Facilitation training programme are safety and trust. Trust and Safety are necessary for a group to succeed. Both also need to be maintained throughout the stages of a group’s development (see Tuckman & Jensen’s Stages of Group Development, 1977). Safety and trust are subjective as concepts and are very dependent on individual points of view. For example, what might be safe to one participant can be very different for another. Safety is the focus of today’s discussion as creating a safe environment for people to work within is a core aim of any group facilitator.

Safety a Core Facilitator Competency

As skills of a facilitator these aspects are considered core. Pierce, Cheesebrow, and Braun (2000) published a comprehensive description of facilitator competencies based on competency identification work undertaken with group facilitators at conferences of the International Association of Facilitators (IAF) and the Institute of Cultural Affairs (ICA). In that work, Pierce et al., included the facilitator competency of “Create a climate of trust and safety” (p. 27) in Section C. on Create and Sustain a Participatory Environment. They go on to say,

of the process of creating a climate of safety and trust is encouraging unconditional positive regard for the experience and perceptions of all participants (see Rogers, 1957). Using the group’s diversity to positively affect the group solution is significant in the facilitation process. There is a great distinction between facilitation and a more directive style of meeting conduct. The facilitator is aware of and considers the organizational culture and its impact on group interaction (p. 29).

Section 5 of the IAF Statement of Values and Code of Ethics also includes:

5 Respect, Safety, Equity, and Trust

We strive to engender an environment of respect and safety where all participants trust that they can speak freely and where individual boundaries are honoured. We use our skills, knowledge, tools, and wisdom to elicit and honour the perspectives of all…We work in ways that honour the wholeness and self-expression of others, designing sessions that respect different styles of interaction (see Hunter & Thorpe, 2005, p. 557).

Safety is also an important aspect for facilitation in online settings. In my own work developing a set of competencies for online facilitators in relation to Section B on setting and maintaining a shared group culture, I comment that, “Both online and face-to-face facilitation work includes ensuring inclusiveness, assisting a group to create a shared climate of safety and trust, and evoking group creativity.” (Thorpe, 2016).

While we might understand that safety is important, some groups can be dynamic and unpredictable, and sometimes the organisations within which they operate are not always safe places for people to flourish and thrive. Many of us have lived through group experiences that have been difficult, conflicted, toxic and stressful. It can be natural for people to be wary and careful in terms of how much of themselves they are willing to expose to others in a team or group setting. 

Workplaces expect people to work together in teams, online and in-person, and to produce consistent outstanding results. Co-operation at other than a very superficial level requires trust and safety. For groups to be really successful the people within them need to be able to speak their truth and to be heard. Sometimes this can be unpleasant for both the speaker and the listeners. It may even lead to distress and feelings of being unsafe. However, without honesty a group will not move towards maturity and synergy (Hunter, 1999).

What is Safety?

Being safe, freedom from danger or risks (Concise Oxford Dictionary)

Safety is about minimising risk to ourselves and to others. It is not absolute, and our sense of safety can vary depending on a whole range of factors. Safety can be protected through procedures and practices. However, it cannot be guaranteed. In group settings there is no such thing as 100% safety – no matter what we might try to do or put in place. As a group facilitator, we may be able to work with the group to improve safety, to generate safety in a group, but not to ensure it will be there at all times.

For a facilitator, sometimes safety can be a tricky aspect to get right. What happens if you have a participant or a group that needs to step outside their safety zone in order to create a breakthrough or take new ground? Keeping the group environment too safe may be holding the group back and conditions might need to be more challenging or to shift to a deeper level in order to take the group forward. This can be why we describe facilitation as sometimes like dancing on the edge of a sword.

The group purpose will be a helpful place to stand as the facilitator and you can also look to what is in the group culture too for where an appropriate intervention might be available. I often like to think of the facilitator as being in a role that can always create options for people. So, as the facilitator you can encourage participants to step outside their normal comfort zone. To try new things out, or new ways of being. The facilitator can also encourage the participants to support each other in stepping outside their normal comfort zone.

It can be helpful to remember that groups can be surprisingly resilient – they have within themselves all that they need to succeed. Some of the process ideas mentioned below might be a helpful as a starting point or you can even source something from within the group that they know has helped either improve the safety or to assist one another in taking risks.

People have very different perceptions about what constitutes safety, whether it be physical, emotional, intellectual or spiritual.

As mentioned in The Essence of Facilitation (Hunter 1999), here are some of the safety aspects to consider in facilitating group work:

Physical

• That the venue conforms to legal safety standards and does not include hazards such as sharp objects or broken floors.
• That there is a non-violence rule
• That people have real choice around physical space and touching
• That the space will be protected from interruptions

Emotional

• That the facilitator and group participants will stay for the duration of the group session
• That expressions of emotions will be respected
• That each person will take responsibility for their own emotional reactions and refrain from projecting them on to others
• There will be no put-downs, blaming or scapegoating behaviours

Intellectual

• That the facilitator will provide a conceptual framework and outline of the processes being used and their intended outcomes
• That power differences will be acknowledged
• That choice will be encouraged
• That ethical standards will be maintained

Spiritual

• That the facilitator and participants undertake to respect differences of spiritual belief and culture, and the respective practices associated with these
• That spiritual experiences are respected

When Safety is Missing

A lack of safety may show up in several behaviours:

• anxiety and fear
• uneven contributions
• silence or an absence of inter-personal differences being expressed
• taking responsibility for others work and rescuing
• people naming or saying they feel unsafe, or a particular person is named as unsafe
• peer pressure to conform to majority views
• groupthink (see Janis, 1972)
• the group is projecting onto others outside the group

Generating Safety

As the facilitator, sometimes naming you notice that safety may be missing can assist a team to seeing what may be at the root-cause of their situation. For example, ‘I’m not seeing much challenge of the mainstream ideas here, is it perhaps unsafe in this group to challenge the status quo?’, or ’Is anyone feeling unsafe in this group right now?’, or ‘a comment was made in the break about the need for safety, how can we as a team generate enough safety to fully discuss what needs to be done here?’

Other times a process may help, or the facilitator might create something in the moment, or to arrange the group into smaller groups first – sometimes people feel safer to express more freely in a small group rather than in the large. The facilitator may also look to the group culture to see if a change might help generate a shift – perhaps something is missing that now needs to be there.

For a group that is struggling with groupthink (see Janis, 1972), consider adopting processes such as Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats (1985) where different styles of thinking are taken into account with the whole group.  de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats encourages individuals to approach problems from six distinct perspectives, each represented by a different colored hat. The six hats—white (facts), red (emotions), black (critical judgment), yellow (positive outlook), green (creativity), and blue (process control). Each different perspective helps offer a different type of thinking about an issue, a situation, or a problem. It’s an approach known to enhance group collaboration, and promote comprehensive decision-making.

Facilitators can also introduce a conversation about safety (see some process suggestions below). Encourage people to share what they are experiencing, their perceptions, what their expectations are and what feels unsafe. Find out what needs to be attended to for people to feel safe. Explain that everyone needs to take responsibility for their own safety. Safety agreements can be made and monitored, but they cannot be guaranteed. We always need to take responsibility for ourselves – even the group facilitator.

• Encourage people to make requests of one another and the facilitator. Collective agreements can be added to the culture.
• Provide opportunities for choice — having the space to choose what to take part in — the right to say no and set limits.
• Interrupt peer pressure on individuals or minorities.
• Raise consciousness about ‘groupthink’ (especially when making others wrong outside the group and then blaming and scapegoating them).
• Encourage people to speak up as an antidote to peer-pressure and groupthink. Discourage people from ‘just going along with the group’ when they feel unsafe.

The facilitator is the guardian of the culture not the ‘parent or boss’ of the group. This means encouraging everyone to take part in guarding the culture rather than waiting for the facilitator to take care of them. Over-protectiveness by the facilitator will set up a parent-child relationship in the group which will also inflate the power given to the facilitator.

While we appreciate that both trust and safety are necessary for a group to succeed, the issue of safety is highly diverse. On the one hand you could ask is safety about creating situations where people will be 100% safe and not be likely to ever be triggered into distress? Or is it a matter of alerting people to the possibility of this happening and providing tools for people who become triggered to protect or heal themselves?

Groups with a clear purpose and a supportive culture are often highly resilient. However, whenever facilitating, it is important to alert people to the danger involved in taking risks in a group setting, and if possible, to signpost the extent, or the level of risk you perceive may be involved in any intervention you intend to make. If you see the group are moving into ground that may be unsafe for some, consider pausing to name that is where the group is at in its process, where it may be heading, and consider creating some options to help participants to prepare for that eventuating. That way participants can make a free and informed choice about their involvement.

Process ideas

Exploring safety

Explore these questions individually, in pairs or in a group:

• What are your beliefs about safety?
• How does it feel to be safe/not safe?
• In what areas of your life do you feel really safe and really unsafe?

Do you feel safe with others in:

• lending your car?
• lending money?
• meeting a stranger at the door?
• looking after your children, a parent or a beloved pet?
• Do you have the same sense of safety as others? Are others similar or are there big differences?
• What are your limits and boundaries around safety?
• What do you imagine are other people’s safety needs?
• What are your gut feelings around safety with others in the group around you?

References

De Bono, E. (1985). Six thinking hats: An essential approach to business management. Granica Editions.
Hunter, D., Bailey, A., & Taylor, B. (1999). The essence of facilitation. Tandem.
Hunter, D. & Thorpe, S.J. (2005). Facilitator Values and Ethics. In Sandy Schuman (Ed.), The IAF Handbook of Group Facilitation. Jossey-Bass.
Janis, I. L. (1972). Victims of groupthink: A psychological study of foreign-policy decisions and fiascos. Houghton Mifflin.
Pierce, V., Cheesebrow, D., & Braun, L. M. (2000). Facilitator competencies. Group Facilitation: A Research and Applications Journal, (2), 24.
Rogers, C. R. (1957). The necessary and sufficient conditions of therapeutic personality change. Journal of Consulting Psychology, 21(2):95-103
Thorpe, S. J. (2016). Online facilitator competencies for group facilitators. Group Facilitation: A Research & Applications Journal, 13.
Tuckman, B. W., & Jensen, M. A. C. (1977). Stages of small-group development revisited. Group & Organization Studies, 2(4), 419-427.