The Best Way to Get More From Every Leader

How to get better results with the team you already have.

The difference between leadership teams that move fast and evolve and those that stay stuck often comes down to one underrated skill: facilitation.

In a recent blog, we covered why strategic alignment is the foundation of great team performance. Here's one of the most practical and underinvested ways to actually build it.

Facilitation sounds unglamorous, but done well it’s a force multiplier for every leader in the room.

It can compress weeks of discussion and planning into clear decisions and shared agreements, driving the kind of rapid learning that’s never been more critical for navigating the disruption facing every business leader right now. We’ll share how we came to facilitation, what we wish we knew sooner, and some practical tips to help you get started.

Before my time at Pivotal Software, I thought long, PowerPoint-heavy meetings were how leaders achieved and maintained alignment. I didn’t yet realize they were flawed by design.

Folks joked about “Death by PowerPoint.” Endless slides jammed with content. Very little time for debating, aligning, and deciding. Discussions were often chaotic with the loudest voice winning. The wild thing is that as a developing professional, I thought this was normal.

Then, I joined Pivotal Software and experienced great facilitation. Watching the software teams’ uncanny ability to get disparate individuals and teams aligned around complex topics and moving forward quickly was game changing. In two hours, they accomplished what would take other teams two months. It appeared effortless. I needed to understand how they did it.

While Pivotal was widely known for its software expertise that earned them recognition from Fortune 500 companies, the team members were not unicorns. They were a talented group of individuals who practiced a shared set of facilitation methods grounded in Lean and Agile principles.

Facilitation was not just an internal practice. When the U.S. Air Force stood up Kessel Run to modernize mission-critical systems, they partnered with Pivotal to train their teams in agile ways of working. Within months, they were delivering real tools into production, dramatically improving how missions were planned and executed. The shift wasn’t just technology. It was how teams worked together.

While these principles are not new, they are more important now than ever. Every leadership team is facing massive ambiguity, complexity, disruption, and let’s face it, the unknown. The best leaders and thinkers in the field (like Eric Ries) recognize that an organization’s advantage no longer comes from more planning, more resources, or more headcount, but from better, faster decisions and rapid organizational learning.

In practice, this comes down to a few simple behaviors that most leadership meetings get wrong:

1. Making thinking visible Get every idea out of people’s heads and in front of the group at the same time. When everyone speaks at once, the first voice anchors the entire conversation, a well-documented cognitive bias that silently shapes every response that follows. Externalizing all the thinking at once means the group can react to the best ideas, not just the first ones.

2. Shortening feedback cycles

   Make decisions in smaller, faster loops so the team learns what’s working based on real evidence, before too much time or energy has been spent going in the wrong direction.

3. Making sure every voice is heard The quality of a group decision is directly tied to the range of perspectives that actually shaped it. When people feel their input is welcome and won’t be dismissed, they share the risks, assumptions, and dissenting views that turn out to really matter. Structured facilitation creates the conditions for that to happen.
   

What Happened When We Scaled Facilitation

After several months of participating in meetings and offsites that leveraged these facilitation techniques, I decided to personally learn them and then scale them across the company. The impact was unmistakable: better, faster decisions, less fatigue, better inclusion of ideas, and an enormous sense of pride in how this capability improved our ability to execute and deliver outcomes that mattered to the business. Work also became more fun.

As leaders, we care about driving better, lasting outcomes. Facilitation is one of the fastest, most cost-effective ways to achieve better results with the people and resources you already have.

Bad Meetings Are Expensive. So Why Do We Keep Having Them?

As my team and I embraced facilitation, I started to see the cost of poorly run meetings everywhere and, importantly, why they continue. It’s not because teams lack conviction or talent. It’s that great meetings won't just happen by accident, and facilitation is a critical leadership skill that is rarely taught.

The costs are real. The good news is that this is a solvable problem. Most teams just haven’t discovered that facilitation is the answer.

Decisions take longer than they should because outcomes and the path to achieving them were never defined. Discussions drift, critical perspectives surface too late or not at all, and teams end up relitigating the same topics over and over. A few voices dominate while others hold back, which means the risks and assumptions that most need to be surfaced never are. Over time, this wears teams down. Decision fatigue sets in, morale erodes, and commitment to the bigger picture wanes.

What Facilitation Is 

Facilitation isn’t magic. It’s a craft and a set of practiced skills that the best operators invest in.

Facilitation is guiding a group through a structured process so everyone contributes, the best thinking surfaces, and the outcome is a decision the whole team understands and commits to.

What It Is:

• Designing a clear process so the group can focus on the thinking, not the mechanics of the conversation

• Creating conditions where every perspective gets heard and the best ideas rise to the top

• Moving the group deliberately from divergent thinking to shared understanding to decision

• Leaving the room with something everyone understands, owns, and will act on

For a long time, I thought facilitation meant keeping the meeting on track and moving through slides. We got to the end on time, but we didn’t get anywhere.

This is a learnable skill set. Most teams just haven’t been taught it.

A Few Practical Tips to Implement Today

1. Be clear on the outcome from the start

   Before anyone shows up, decide whether you're there to brainstorm, debate, decide, or reflect, and tell people upfront. Most meetings fail before they start because no one has explicitly defined the outcome or expectations.

2. Run retros every week, not just at the end of projects Take 10 minutes to candidly discuss: what worked, what didn’t, what should we do differently next time? Small course corrections compound and create a culture of candor and learning.

3. Create space for thinking before talking

   Give people a few minutes to write their thoughts down before discussion opens. Then start with the most junior person in the room and work your way up.

4. Invest in facilitation as a core capability Build the capability inside your organization so it becomes part of how you operate, and bring in outside expertise for your highest-stakes moments like offsites, critical decisions, and transformational inflection points.
   

Parting Thoughts

Your leadership team’s time is one of your most expensive and valuable resources. Facilitation is one of the fastest, most cost-effective ways to get more from the team you already have.

Most teams don’t need more meetings. They need better facilitation.