Generous Authority: Stepping into Yourself to Hold the Room

The workshop was going fine until it wasn't.

I was facilitating an intensive one day session in Edmonton. The kind of work I'd done many times. There were about a dozen people in the room, and I knew them all to varying extents. I wasn't at my best, there was something heavier going on in my life at the time. I was functioning, I was just running on less than a full reserves.

The morning went well. We ran through the opening exercises and did a critical analysis and deconstruction of a large process map that represented the steering committee's workflow.

In other words, we attended to the practical elements of the agenda efficiently, openly and with some very good discussion. I had a clear understanding of the agenda, and what we wanted to achieve. And there was buy-in from the group.

It was in the afternoon that things started to go off the rails.

One of the participants started steering. There was a shift in the framework of the material that we were discussing. It moved from a practical reflection on material that was provided, to more of a conceptual idea of what our next steps were as a group and as a program.

He had a strong view about how the work should proceed, and he began advancing it. Not aggressively; persistently. A reframe here, a suggested path there.

I felt it happening. And instead of holding the process, I pivoted. Adjusted the agenda to accommodate his direction. I told myself I was being responsive to the group.

I wasn't. I was avoiding a confrontation I didn't have the energy for.

Once this participant had established his direction, the group followed his lead instead of mine. I became a servant to him, not the process.

The process didn't collapse dramatically; it deflated. Like air going slowly out of something. By the end of the day, we'd produced work that reflected his priorities, not the purpose I’d designed for. One moment of abdication, and the downstream consequences were noticable.

The question I keep coming back to: what would it have looked like to hold the room?

Authority isn't what you think it is

Facilitation has a complicated relationship with authority. I was trained to serve the group, to follow the energy, to hold space rather than take it up. That instinct is right, up to a point, the idea that stepping back is the same as making space. That the less we impose, the more the group owns the outcome.

Priya Parker, in The Art of Gathering, offers a term I keep returning to: generous authority. It describes a method by which a host can run a gathering with a strong, confident hand, but selflessly, in service of others. It informs my byline: leadership through service. That framing landed for me the first time I read it, because it described something I'd been circling for years without being able to say clearly.

Here's the part that matters and is evident to many; just because you declare authority does not mean that you hold authority. I opened this session with a clear purpose and a solid set of ground rules and I still lose the room by the early afternoon. I was not willing to enforce what I had established. That participant wasn't setting out to hijack anything. He was filling the space I had left open.

The process belongs to the group. The container belongs to you, the facilitator. Those are different things, and the second one is not optional.

The cost of false neutrality

There's a version of facilitation that focuses on neutrality. We are not domain experts, and therefore act as a neutral participant in the process. In effect, though, that is just avoidance dressed up as virtue. I have told myself that I’m holding space. Sometimes I’m not holding anything.

The truth is, we are domain experts. We are experts in process, in the outcomes defined by the group using a process we designed. A room with no one at the helm doesn't become more democratic. It becomes more susceptible to whoever is most comfortable taking up space, which is almost never the person with the quietest voice or the least positional power.

In governance contexts especially, where the power differentials are real and the stakes are high, being neutral isn't neutral at all. Abdicating process expertise advantages the people who know how to work a room.

What generous authority actually looks like

Four things, in practice.

Confidence to take up the space you’re paid to hold. I didn't show up at 100%, and that was reflected in my lack of confidence to serve the group and exert my expertise in the domain of process. In this instance, a bit of conflict would have benefitted the group.

Protecting the group. The courage to interrupt, to redirect, to name poor behaviour before it takes hold. Kindly, graciously, but firmly. It's not about being the authority in the room; it's about keeping the room safe enough for real work.

Equalizing the guests. In any group there's hierarchy, positional or otherwise. Cultural. Historical. Part of your job as a host is to actively design and enforce norms that keep those differentials from determining who gets heard. You can't pretend they don't exist; you can refuse to let them run the table.

Connecting the guests. The measure of a successful gathering isn't how many good ideas came from the facilitator. It's whether the connections between participants deepened. A gathering that starts with more host-to-guest connections than guest-to-guest connections, and ends with those tallied reversed, has done something real.

Back to the room

So what would generous authority have looked like in that workshop?

I would have interrupted him earlier, before the group had started to follow his lead. I would have named what was happening without making it about him. Something like: we've drifted from where we need to be, and I want to bring us back. Not dramatic. Not hostile. But it requires you to be willing to be the person who says it.

That's the thing facilitation culture doesn't say out loud enough: the willingness to be mildly disliked in service of the group. Generous authority isn't a destination. It's a practice, and some days it asks more of you than others.