Role Description
Congratulations!!
As filler of a circle facilitator role, you run circle meetings. You create an inclusive space where everyone’s voice is valued and where things get done.
We (your fellow circle facilitators past and present) have found that the following information super helpful. Read on, enjoy, and circle back with your own contributions to this guide!
Aims: What you do
Basics
- Planning the agenda
- Facilitating circle meetings
- Making sure people are following meeting agreements
- Guiding the process of creating proposals and making decisions
Advanced
- Ensuring that everyone involved in decision-making is included and contacts those not present in the meeting to give input asynchronously
- Surfacing and guiding the process of addressing interpersonal and group tensions
- Training other members on the facilitator role
Domains: What you manage
- Meeting Agenda
- Prioritizing backlog items
Related Circles, Roles, and Policies
- Collaborate closely with secretary and coordinator role holders to plan meetings
The First 30 Days
1. Share your new role
- Announce that you are the circle’s new facilitator role holder (or make sure that you’ve been announced!)
- Update the Members and Roles section of your meeting notes
2. Join Circle Role Holder Groups
- Circle Role Holders on the Hub. This gives you special access to Hub features like being able to edit other people’s posts.
- Circle Role Holders on Google Groups. This gives you permission to do things like change the YPC Admin Calendar and manage Shared Drive members.
-
#governance
on Slack to have a community of fellow role holders to learn from and support
3. Become an expert in the top how-tos and policies related to your role
- Basics of sociocratic governance: Many Voices One Song: Shared Power with Sociocracy
- How to use the meeting notes template
As you grow in your skills, check out all the docs
4. Ask your circle to give you feedback after you’ve been in your role for about three meetings.
- How am I doing with facilitating circle meetings?
- How am I doing with ensuring every voice is heard?
- How am I doing with separating my facilitator voice from my member voice? (Did you always know whether I was speaking as a member or as the facilitator?)
- How am I doing with supporting agenda planning as needed?
- Anything else?
5. Update this post to make it even better for future facilitators.