Why the Most Effective Tourism Leaders think like Facilitators
5 Ways a Facilitator’s Mindset changes how you lead
You own nothing, nobody reports to you, nobody has to follow your lead. Yet you are responsible for the performance of an entire destination.
That is the defining condition of tourism leadership which makes it unlike most other senior leadership.
You cannot mandate co-operation between a local authority, a tourism body, a community group and a private operator. You can only create the conditions where cooperation becomes possible. That requires a particular kind of leadership built on a distinctive set of instincts.
The leaders who do this well have something in common. They have developed a Facilitator's Mindset.
Here are five shifts that mark out that kind of leadership.
- They behave like a catalyst
There’s an unspoken expectation that comes with seniority or perceived authority: that you arrive with the answer. It plays out like a performance with an unwritten script. The leader sits at the top of the room, the agenda names the most senior people first, decisions wait on your desk until you've weighed in, action plans are drafted but held until you've seen them, people copy you on everything and move only when you do…
I've observed very capable leaders carry that weight for years, feeling they need to be the expert with the answer. The performance becomes the role and then the role eventually becomes a ceiling on collective progress.
The most effective tourism leaders I work with seem to have let go of that charade. They have understood that in complex, multi-stakeholder systems, the most valuable thing they can do is unlock the thinking of others, not supply their own.
- They read the system
Facilitators are trained to hold two levels of attention simultaneously. There’s the content of the conversation such as the agenda, the objectives, the decisions to be made. Then there’s the dynamics beneath the conversation such as who has voice, who doesn’t, where the energy is, where the resistance lives, what’s being said and, much more crucially, what’s being left unsaid.
Leaders who develop the capacity to hold these two levels of attention become significantly more effective at reading what’s actually going on in their sector or their destination. This makes them significantly better at knowing where and how to intervene.
Destinations house a myriad of tensions, between public and private, between short-term and long-term, between state agencies, amongst competing operators, between hosts and guests, to name just some.
While most leaders tend to treat the dynamics as an obstacle to get past, a Facilitative Leader treats them as the most important information available to them.
- They slow down
Public sector tourism leadership operates under constant pressure to move, to produce strategies, to develop supports that deliver on those strategies, to show measurable progress, to satisfy ministers and boards that things are really happening. I once heard a senior leader express it, with not a small note of exacerbation, as ‘we always seem to be moving fast but not getting very far’.
Did you ever have the feeling leaving a room that a decision was made but that those in the room weren’t really ready to make it? Consultation happened but there wasn’t time for you to really consider what was being discussed?
The facilitator’s instinct is to slow things down enough to ensure that what’s decided is actively decided and that people feel a sense of ownership because they reached the decision together.
While the leaders who do this well may not win an award for the speed of their progress, their initiatives tend to land and stick over the longer term.
- They lead through trust
In most tourism systems, alignment trumps authority. In such contexts, building trust is an essential leadership skill. A leader needs to consistently create conditions where people feel genuinely heard, where disagreement is expected and where all perspectives are explored.
This is what facilitators call ‘holding the space’.
The leaders who build the deepest trust in their sectors are those who are secure enough to hold the space without a need to win every exchange. They are able to sit with disagreement and tensions without having to rush to resolve them. In a sector built on voluntary contribution, this is much more than a soft skill. It is actually what the core of the job is.
- They know when to step back from facilitating
In important conversations, two roles are present in the room. One role is to hold the space. To design the conversation, ensure all voices are heard, and guide the process toward something the group could not have produced alone. The other role is to participate. To bring your knowledge, authority and judgement to the discussion itself.
These two roles require different kinds of attention and they cannot be performed well at the same time. When a leader tries to do both simultaneously, they tend to do neither well. The facilitation becomes subtly shaped by their own agenda and their contribution gets constrained by their responsibility to manage the process.
The most effective tourism leaders I work with have learned to recognise this tension and to make a conscious choice about which role they are in before they walk into any significant room.
Knowing when to step back
Once you've made that choice honestly, you may realise that sometimes what the room and the topic actually needs is for you to be fully present as a participant and for someone else entirely to hold the process.
There are moments where this becomes apparent: a stakeholder strategy where relationships between parties are strained and an independent voice would change what people are willing to say; a board conversation where your credibility depends on being fully in the room, not managing it; a community engagement process where your institutional position, however well intentioned, changes what the community feels safe enough to tell you.
In those moments, commissioning the right conversation is a more powerful leadership act than leading it. Bringing in an experienced outside facilitator who is credible with all parties, and who has no stake in the outcome, protects the quality of the conversation. It also protects your ability to contribute fully within it.
What Facilitative Leadership produces
Tourism is a system which depends on sustained cooperation. You can only cultivate it through a long series of conversations that leave people feeling that the direction is, at least partly, theirs.
Leaders who think like facilitators understand this at a deep level. They design for shared ownership. They know that the most important outcome of a strategy process is not the strategy itself but the relationships and the collective commitment that a well-run process generates along the way.
In short, they create movements: sustained momentum in a common direction, with a shared sense of purpose that people have chosen for themselves.
In a sector built on the willing cooperation of people who have no obligation to cooperate, that is a serious job of leadership.
Tina O’Dwyer is a professional facilitator, leadership coach and keynote speaker. Contact Tina on [email protected] and, if you haven’t already, sign up for our newsletter to receive this monthly article and
