EP062 - How to master facilitation as a team with Gianluca Gambatesa at All Star Teams
About the episode
This episode focuses on how we can boost collaboration within teams. My guest, Gianluca Gambatesa from All Star Teams, leads and facilitates workshops for remote and non-remote teams. His insights help us uncover how facilitation works and how you can create a collaborative environment for your teams that will boost your company's overall productivity.
About the guest
Gianluca works alongside people and organizations engaged in complex challenges, freeing and enhancing their potential.
Gianluca is the Director of Innovation of All Star Teams, a People Empowerment System that helps individuals, teams, and organizations play to their strengths.
Firestarter of different projects focused on facilitation, complexity, experience design, narrative ecosystems, and anticipation, Gianluca loves to engage and be involved in exploring and shaping new possibilities.
Connect with Gianluca on LinkedIn.
About the host
My name is Peter Benei, founder of Anywhere Consulting. My mission is to help and inspire a community of remote leaders who can bring more autonomy, transparency, and leverage to their businesses, ultimately empowering their colleagues to be happier, more independent, and more self-conscious.
Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Want to become a guest on the show? Contact me here.
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Welcome everyone on the leadership anywhere show. Today we will discuss, how can we boost collaboration within teams? My guest, Gianluca Gambatesa from All Star Teams leads facilitated workshops for remote and also for non-remote teams. His insights, help us to uncover how facilitation works and how can we create a collaborative environment for your teams that will boost the overall productivity of your company at the end. Gianluca, welcome to the show. I'm so happy that you are here.
Thanks Peter. I'm really happy to meet you again and to be here.
Thank you for your time. And yes, we met before personally in Budapest and that was a lovely chat. And after that conversation, we decided that we should have this conversation on the podcast as well, because you are doing a lot of facilitation for other companies, either online and offline, and you're doing so many stuff. And I don't even understand that how should I introduce you, so allow me to ask you to introduce yourself. Who are you, what are you doing, and how did you end up working remotely?
Absolutely. So as you said, I'm Gianluca and I used to say that I'm a consultant that leverages facilitation. So I'm involved in different projects as a partner. And the topics mainly are people, strategy and futures. And I feel that all these topics are really interrelated because when you work with people you need to create the environment so that they can thrive as individuals, as teams and as organizations. That's why I really love saying that facilitation is the magic tool for the consultants of nowadays.
And when you say about so what exactly means, and just like that should be the starting point of this discussion, what do you mean by facilitation? Because when we talk about facilitation, people often assume that it's almost like a direction of conversations between each other, between each people. And I personally believe that it's more like setting the environment instead of the direction.
I think that, facilitation makes people think that you make the things easier, but in reality, your role as a facilitator is giving space and creating an environment where people can work together in a way that is effective. So I think that facilitators need to be not at the center of the stage. The stage is for participants and your role. My role as a facilitator is working on a topic that sometimes is clear, sometimes it's not and being able to follow team dynamics in a way that you are truly in service of the group. Because, sometimes you start with an idea, with a challenge, and while people work together, they discover that there's something that they want to explore further. And you need to be able to follow them and create the environment to follow their intentions. Otherwise it's being at the center of the stage and asking people to follow you. This is not how facilitation need to work. But this is my approach cause, as I was saying, I discovered facilitation by chance. I was working as an employee and I felt that what was missing in my experience was the chance to express myself as an individual within my organization. And when I discovered that there was something that help people work together, bringing their own experience and giving shape to stuff together. I say, this is what I want to do. And then I started working as a facilitator. Really working as a consultant, because sometimes another problem with facilitation is that it seems like that you're there only to create the space and you are not responsible of the outcomes. I really like being responsible of the outcomes. And at the same time being in service of the group and these two things would be coexisting the same time.
But it also means that the facilitation, which is an, let's be clear, the facilitation is also an event. So there's an event where people come together and do some things. But if you are also a consultant, meaning that you are you're solely or partially responsible on the implementation. It also means that the meeting has a goal obviously, right? So can you share some tips on or just experiences that how were you able to set those goals or setting the goals itself as an activity is also maybe part of the facilitational event?
Absolutely. The fact is that usually let's talk about the perfect world. You have the time to talk with your client. You have the time to harvest all their needs, their challenges, and you are able to design an agenda. And sometimes it's happened. This happens sometimes not but I think that the real work of facilitation is creating the space in a way that people sometimes say this facilitation is about psychological safety and it's true because you need to express yourself without judgments, without feeling that people are. Thinking things about you without saying directly, but you feel like really judged. I think that the real role of facilitator is making things so that people share the responsibility of the process. It's not the facilitator that creates psychological safety, it's the group that creates psychological safety. Talking about facilitation, it's not so easy because people tend to say that it is an art, there's a bit of science, there are processes. I think that my aim is working with people, giving them the chance to share their thoughts. And I usually, I work a lot with a set of methods that is called Liberating Structures. And Liberating Structures are a perfect way to work with a group of five people, ten people, hundreds of people. Because, it's like fractals. When you think about fractals, you have, no matter the part of the image that you see, you have the same structure. And facilitation, It's quite similar because the things that I ask people to do, if they are five are the same that I asked them to do if they are hundreds, because in reality, you work with small groups and step by step, you help them share things, discover things together, creating what usually is called collective intelligence. The magic of collective intelligence is when You and I are able to create something that we cannot do alone, because I start saying something, you add something, we give shape to the things together, and working with Liberating Structures with small or big groups is exactly the same, because you have bit of time to think alone about the topic and then you have a few minutes to exchange thoughts with a few colleagues. And then you have a bigger group because usually the real magical facilitation is that you create the space for people to be heard that the real problem in organization is that people sometimes feel that they are not heard and they are not appreciated. So I ask you a question about, it could be a challenge like, what do you think about this brand new product, this brand new challenge, whatever, and you start talking with your own words about the topic and people listen to you and then vice versa, you listen to people and you start sharing things in a way that you feel that there's a place to create something together. So I could absolutely say that methods are important. There are lots of tools, tool sets, is plenty of tool sets about facilitation. There's design thinking, there's liberating structures, there's lego serious play, whatever. But what is at the core is the chance for people to listen to the others and to express themselves.
How others can be honest? I think that's the first ever question that pops in my head with these type of events, because like plain and simple, I'm working for a company, I'm an employee, I'm bound to a contract, paycheck yada, yada. Suddenly I got pushed slash pulled into a group of a meeting. I presume it's a meeting. Meanwhile, it's a facilitated workshop or something. The leaders and my supervisors and managers are also part of the meeting. And the facilitator either part of the organization or an external person, doesn't matter at this point, asks questions about the product or the service that we provide to share some honest feedback or honest opinion about something that's internal and it's work related. How can be super honest and how a facilitator can help create a space where people are free to express themselves. I think that's the biggest challenge, don't you think?
I think so. You, I agree. And facilitation is needed when you have a challenge that you cannot solve alone. You need people effort to reach something together and it's all about the invitation. It's all about the question, the prompt. A good question is a question that is an open question and is focused at collecting people points of view. So there's no right and there's no wrong. I wanna listen to your opinion. And I understand totally there are companies organization where they have a culture where it's quite easy to talk honestly and to speak and to share thoughts with your colleagues, sometimes less. But the real role of facilitation is having the chance for people to share their thoughts with a simple question. You don't need rocket science. It's Okay, better. What about your experience with this client or your experience with working in this team? And usually I tend to talk about challenges instead that obstacles for a simple reason. Cause facilitation is a lot about language too. Cause something is saying, what are your problems? Something is saying, what are your challenges? It's always a positive lens. This is my approach. And I think that it's really more about making people in a position of understanding that behind every challenge, there's an opportunity. So the way you phrase questions, it's a huge part of the success of facilitation. Simple question, open questions.
Sure. And I assume that and I'm happy that you said this, that, but I assumed as well that when your problems are pressing enough that they drive you, to be honest, because there is no other way around, you are on the bottleneck and if you don't provide honest feedback on that bottleneck. You won't get out from that stuck ever, so probably, the next question should be, I think is that when people should need a facilitated workshop or a facilitated approach of discussion and collaboration, what are, what could be the generic problems that are like pressing enough or big enough to grab some time for a facilitated collaboration? What is your experience?
I would say, I teach facilitation too. I discovered that I really like teaching facilitation for a simple reason, because from my point of view, I prefer talking about facilitation as a skill than facilitator as a role because every company needs facilitation as a skill, because when you are having a meeting with your colleagues, if you are aware of the dynamic of facilitation, you will have a great advantage. So if not the focus must not be on the topic, but on the interaction. So I will say that the easiest answer is that no matter the topic, if you have a facilitated conversation, it's quite better because if you ask people, how do you behave? How do you behave during a meeting? Everyone will say, I'm the perfect guy. I'm the perfect teammate. I always listen but sometimes it's not true and it's not about being not a good teammate. It's the fact that if you don't have a few constraints. You will not be able to free people potential. So as an example, timing be having conversation that there are time boxes. It's quite better than say, okay, let's talk about topic X without paying attention to time because you have people that talk more people that talk less. And if you create a set of simple rules and principles. It's quite better because sometimes you have a great colleague that is shy, tends not to talk. But if you say, let's start talking in smaller groups. And talking in smaller groups is a great way to engage people that are shy. And then you create a bigger group and a bigger group. This is a good way to say, no matter the topic, let's agree that we need to follow a set of principles to be able to engage everyone listen to the voice of everyone. Building something together. My suggestion is consider facilitation as a skill. Try to work with a few structures, a few methods, and you will be definitely a better teammate.
And also, by the way, this works really bad when you standardize the whole approach, it works a bit better with cross functional teams as well. Just from my experience I work with a lot of tech companies, and and they're usually, they do have a engineering team and a marketing team and that two teams, they never, the discussions between the two are either not happening or they are inherently different and in a standard, the standardized approach might be a bit more helpful for them, right?
And another principle that I follow is always start with individuals. Cause even if you're working with a team, people need to be heard. Maybe you are trying to collect a solution that is collective, but first step must be asking individuals to think about it because I bring something to the table, I have the chance to think about the topic. Because usually, the worst thing is when someone asks you something and you don't have the time to think about the answer. Okay, Peter is asking me something. I need to be fast. I need to give the first answer that comes to my mind, no way you have your time, your quiet time, one minute, two minutes, you think about the topic and you share your point of view. And another thing is that when you start with individuals and then you ask people to work together, they feel that at the end of the process, the answer will be there will be in the answer a trace of their contribution, because if you work well with a group at the end of the interaction, you don't know, you are not able to say this was better idea. This was Gianluca idea because they build on each other thoughts. And this is magic. That's called collective thinking. And you have another great result is that people feel that there's a part of their effort at the end in the outcome. So it's easier to create commitment.
Sure. Let me be the devil's advocate here. Like it if we have a facilitated workshop, we have, let's say 10 people within the workshop, maybe it's too much, I don't know, or too many. But let's say 10 most of them are contributing to the product that they are working on in a level, but they some one or two, they are contributing to the product even more. If we have this collective approach that yes, of course, we'd start with the individual, but at the end, the takeaways are all collective, wouldn't we lose the input of the I wouldn't say, and I don't like these words, but like high performance and a players within the group and what they think about the product and maybe just dilute their thoughts and thinking to the general mess of the group.
It depends on your aim. If you need the help of your colleagues, you need to be able to listen to their ideas. We are talking about product, but it could be really everything. You can have a conversation on your team culture or your team dynamics and things like that. I think that what I usually say to people is that I'm interested in their knowledge. And I sometimes work even with, I had more than a few experiences in the healthcare sector and I facilitated a conversation between doctors, patients, caregivers. And the nice thing is that every time when you have people with different roles, they bring something different on the table because they have a different point of view. And if you want to achieve the whole picture, you need to collect different points. That's why because the challenge that the challenges that we have in our life, in our work are so complex that you need different POVs. That's why I usually suggest even if you are working on something that is your domain, it's a good thing, inviting to the table, people that come from a different domain because they help you seeing things from a different point of view, because when you are immersed in your domain, you tend to think that usually things go in a certain way. It's not true. Is the fact that you are immersed, it's being not able to bring oxygen to the conversation. That's why maybe that it's plenty in the last few years of philosophers, people that come from humanities that are starting to work in consultancies. And the thing is that we need people able to shape questions, we need people able to say, stop, let's try to see this thing from a different point. And this is part of the facilitation itself.
You threw up the ball. What's your personal background, by the way? Do you, have you studied philosophy or something?
I studied electrical engineering.
That's totally something I wouldn't imagine.
I studied electrical engineering and my first years were in the facility management sector. I used to design services for people, but in reality, I discovered that I was designing services for the owners of the companies you have an hospital or most municipality, whatever the worst thing is that we talk a lot about human centric, but in reality, most of the services are not designed with users in mind in the last few years, more and more attention is paid. But when I started in the public sector, it was not so easy to be in touch with the users because, you have your client and they had their clients. That's why I decided to switch. And I leave the facility management sector. And I started working more on the hardware. I say, okay, I'm an engineer. Let's work with machines with something that is really about the hardware, how things work. And then I discovered that even in the hardware and so in the production environment, what was missing was always. Giving the chance to people to share their thoughts, because there's the guy who designs the instrument, there's the guy that is in the marketing, there's the guy that is working with the technical stuff. And usually there was no way to bring different points of view at the same table. And I say, okay, no way I need to switch. And really, by chance, I discovered facilitation and I said, okay this could be really the perfect lever create a safe environment and an environment where you really help people do their best.
Sure. It's pretty much you started as an engineer, but moved into innovation consulting right? And what are you doing now?
I'm following a few projects that I really love. I'm the director of innovation of a startup that is called Heliotrope Imaginal. And we have this product that is called All Star Teams. And we call it a people empowerment system. So consider it is a product that is focused on three dimensional individuals, teams, organization. So we have individuals grow within their company while working better with their teams so that you are able to design an environment in your organization that at the same time makes people thrive while you're thriving. And it's based on a lot on facilitation because we have designed this product. We have different phases. You have a personal assessment that is individual that is online. Then we have designed a board. It's a whiteboard that works on Mural, Miro or whatever. And you have time to reflect on your strengths, your experience. Then we have a team meeting that is designed to help people understand how to work better together and how to be better teammates. And then we are able to create the whole picture of the company with all the people that are part of the company with their strengths. And the nice thing, the thing that I like the most is that at the end of the experience with team, you have the chance to design your own growth plan because, it's plenty of people that are really smart and great at doing their work. And a chance to make people part of your organization in the future is giving them the chance to grow as individuals because sometimes there's this misconception that you need to work on team. No way. You need to work on individuals so that they can be better teammates. It's like having two different planes, but in reality, they are really interwined. I used to say that we measure a few things in our assessment. We measure four strengths that are planning, thinking, empathizing, and acting because no matter your job role, no matter your challenges, you will need to be empathetic, being able to decide to make things you need to be able to plan and you need to be able to think about your situation. And the magic happens when people understand that the best way to work as a team is creating this environment where everyone who will work on the things that they are good at and sometimes, people don't know a lot about themselves. That's why we focus a lot about on self reflection because people don't know what they want to do in the next few years. People usually don't think about their purpose. So we create the chance for them to focus on their experience as employees, their experience as teammates. And that's why we say people empowerment system.
I really like the three distinctions, by the way, that it starts with empathy all the time because with empathy, you have understanding, so you understand what you will do and what will back will be, or, presumed effect. Then you go with the acting, so you actually do the thing and because you already have empathy, which is the first building block. Then at the end you have the self reflection, which is the feedback loop that how the action that you made felt by others and also by you. So maybe you need to next time you act, you need to revise something.
It's really true, but it's not always this way because, we talk about empathy thinking, planning, and acting calls. Different people have different approaches. I have colleagues of mine that are really, they tend to approach challenges by thinking about the challenge alone. I don't know if you had the chance to be in the same room with people during a meeting. You always will find someone that say, I needed a few materials before meeting because I need to think about the topic because not everyone feels safe to start talking about the topic without the chance of thinking about it alone. So it depends on your approach. The nice thing is that with our approach, you have the chance to discover how your teammates tend to work at their best. It could be that you are really empathetic. It could be that you love planning and every time at the end of a meeting or when there's a project you feel the need of planning. The more you know about your teammates, the better. And that's how you can create the perfect environment. Of course you need to understand, especially remote, people have no so many chance to meet. Maybe in a retreat or whatever. And maybe you are based in New York. The other colleague is based in Europe. Understanding how people work at their best. It's really crucial.
And is this system plug and play? So meaning that that I have a company and and I can just use this system for once or continuously and it integrates into my system too.
It could be absolutely be integrated. We start with individuals, so we give the access to our assessment, then you will have the need of working with a facilitator, but we train in house facilitators too, the fact that it could be used continuously, because as I was saying, there's this growth plan that is the perfect starting point for a coaching path too. Because we really usually when we talk about assessment, we think about something that typologize people, measure people, no way. We say that we help people discover something more about themselves and their colleagues. And we really invite people to think about their future because it's not only about what are you doing now what's your job role? It's really about what's your purpose? What moves you? How do you think that makes sense to move forward in your career because in the beginning of the conversation, I say that people's strategy and futures are really interwined. It's so cause future is something that does not exist, but you need to think about your future because the more you think about it, the more you can be intentional and the more you can leverage your agency.
Sure totally understand. You mentioned remote, and this is a remote leadership podcast. Is there any crucial or key differences that you see facilitating online and facilitating offline? Because again, just for the audience to understand we know each other personally from a bit previous conversation and you are calling from Puglia uh, I'm calling from Tuscany we met in Budapest, so it's like weird. And you mentioned that you, yes, you provide most of the services online, but you also do it a lot offline as well, mainly in Italy or video, so you have like both viewpoints doing that remotely and also non remotely as well. So how do you see what are the key differences between the two?
I usually work in offline facilitation mainly in Italy and Italy is not a country where you easily find people coming from different places. So the first huge difference is that remote opens really the doors to different cultures. And it's beautiful because my team as I was saying with our product, we come from Canada, we come from Detroit, we come from Frankfurt, I'm based in Italy and it's fascinating. Because you really appreciate the nuances of being humans because you have different cultures, different lens. And this is really something that enriches your conversation.
Yes.
For sure. What I really like of the offline is. the chance to work with artifacts. I really like methods like Lego series play, the fact that you can build your own metaphors working with bricks or the chance to work with collage, but collage, you can even work with collage on the, on mural or whatever. But I think that the huge difference is that sometimes you can have a great workshop. Offline and the same workshop online, and it's great in two different environments. And sometimes maybe it's quite better having a certain kind of workshop only online or only offline. It depends. I used to say it's like with all the tools that we have Slack, we have lots of platforms. I always suggest to teams to start thinking about their needs, and then you will be able to find the perfect tool for facilitation is the same. It depends on your aim. What you want to achieve with this meeting. Maybe it's okay having it online. Maybe it's quite better in it offline. So I think that context is key. I usually say that context is key. It depends on your objectives. And I really like meeting people offline because, during the coffee break, you can have a chat, you can talk about different things, and it's a great way to create bonds between people. But remote is, I really like remote because you can bring together different voices, and it's a plus.
Totally. You have to be honest here. Do you spend more energy and efforts facilitating Italians together to talk to a certain different time frame and stick to that time frame than other cultures maybe?
In reality, not. Because the way I approach facilitation, as I was saying, it's time boxed, so yeah I set a few rules. When you give people the chance to talk without being interrupted, talking more than two minutes is a lot. What I really appreciate every time is that people say, I spent two minutes talking about myself with someone listening to me and seem like that it was so long because usually we interrupt each other and it's really hard to have a conversation. Instead if you create the chance and the situation where people can speak up and talk without being interrupted you don't need so much time.
It's interesting. Gianluca, thank you for your time. Please share what are you working on right now and where people can find you?
Absolutely. As I was saying, my efforts are on All Star Teams. And you can reach us at allstarteams. com and I'm working other two different projects. One is called Alibi Design and it's about merging immersive experiences with faciliation and you can reach us at alibi. design. And the easiest way to have a conversation with me is knocking at my LinkedIn profile. I'm always happy to interact with people. Absolutely. So I always say that if you have a brand new contact on LinkedIn and you don't try to interact, it's really a missed opportunity.
And I have to be full transparent and honest here. You are one of the few people on LinkedIn I actually clicked on the bell because most of the stuff that you share are sometimes it's like a little bit too deep for LinkedIn in general, I think for most people but it's full and packed of content. I also encourage everyone to follow you.
Thanks a lot. Appreciate.
Seriously. So thank you again. Thank you for your time. Enjoy the sunshine in Puglia. Thank you very much.
Thanks a lot. Enjoy your day.
