Natural Facilitators: A Key to Successful Organizations

Book Title: Natural Facilitators: A Key to Successful Organizations

Author: Kim Marvel

Publication Information: Fort Collins, CO, RGH Press, 2020, 157 pp., $15.99, paperback

Kim Marvel, PhD, has spent his family medicine educator career carefully observing individuals, teams, leaders, and learners and providing performance feedback. He brings these talents as an intentional observer to his recent book, Natural Facilitators: A Key to Successful Organizations. The book expands on the paper he published in 2019 with Kristen Bene, PhD.1

Many faculty members in family medicine have learned how to facilitate conversations and projects either formally through training or informally by reflecting on successes and failures. In this book, Dr Marvel turns his attention and curiosity to those facilitators in organizations who come to their role intuitively and with energized passion. Marvel describes the phenomenon cogently: “Ultimately, I added the term natural to emphasize these people are not trained facilitators. Their facilitation skills are inborn or learned at a young age. They bring facilitation skills with them into their formal job responsibilities” (p. 14).

The book is the culmination of an extensive qualitative analysis of research interviews with natural facilitators and their colleagues. What would he learn about their talents and capacities and the ways they contribute to their teams? What could they tell us about what makes them tick? How are they looked upon and valued by those who supervise and work with them?

The book is accessible due in great part to Marvel’s inviting writing style that is chock full of personal sharing and illustrative case examples. After an introductory chapter that lays out definitions and contours of natural facilitation, Marvel dives into a rich description of the qualitative research study that is the backbone of the book.

Dr Marvel approached a variety of organizations in education, government, healthcare, private business and public utilities and asked a leader of each of 11 organizations to nominate natural leaders for him to interview. This process led him to his 17 research participant interviews and 12 supervisor interviews which became transcripts that he coded for key themes.

The results of this qualitative analysis make up the central core of the book that explicates the attributes of natural facilitators. These range from staying organized and having a positive presence to remaining calm and genuinely caring about the organization and teammates. Direct quotes from the interviews breathe life into the concepts and skills that underlie successful natural facilitation and leadership, and the reader will recognize many of these capacities in themselves and others. For example, regarding the caring and compassion of facilitators, Claire describes herself in this way: “What brings satisfaction? People’s success: that makes me happy… but I’ll also get these cards or candy, and things like that, for them (coworkers). Kind of getting them out when they’re down in the dumps” (p. 91). Claire’s supervisor describes her in this way: “Claire is someone who, first and foremost, genuinely cares. I mean, that’s the start of it… some level of internal knowledge of, ‘Hey I made a difference’ ‘Is this person’s life better?’ ‘Is this person’s job easier?’ I think those are the biggest cup-fillers for her” (p. 92). The reader meets many extraordinary individuals in the book who would be fantastic to work with.

Given that this book and research is primarily qualitative and descriptive, the reader who is looking for recipes and skill-building guides to grow natural facilitation will be disappointed. Toward the end of the book, the author does provide a few suggestions about how the findings from the book might translate into leadership development, but they are not particularly elaborated nor detailed.

The book would perhaps be strengthened by a reflection on the findings through the lens of Angela Duckworth’s writings on grit.2 Duckworth argues that success is built less on one’s natural talents and more on what one does with these talents. To what degree are the facilitation behaviors collected in this volume representative of truly natural gifts or reflective of the shaping and honing of these interpersonal skills by individuals with grit who have applied them to success (theirs and those around them)? What are the roles of passion and perseverance in combination with natural talents in determining how one shows up in the workplace?

Dr Marvel’s cohort of interviewees is narrow in representation and would be improved with greater breadth of inclusion. Whereas the author concedes that his recruited sample is composed almost completely of White women, bereft of any People of Color, this admission does not make up for important limitations on relevance, generalizability and inclusion, and reflects a lost opportunity to explore the importance of natural facilitation in a complex and diverse world. A future extension of this work built on data from a more diverse sample may yield precious wisdom about the role of natural multicultural facilitators in healing the divisions in our organizations and our society at large.