Harvard Business Review recently published an article called Every Team Needs a Super-Facilitator. It’s a good read for anyone interested in building strong, inclusive, high-performing teams.
I’d never heard this phrase before… have you?
Nonetheless, the article highlights that the best teams aren’t led by superstars or lone geniuses—they’re led by people who know how to bring out the best in others. They’re called super-facilitators, and your team needs at least one.
Lucky for you, super-facilitation isn’t a magical personality trait. It’s a skill set that can be taught, practiced, and modeled at every level of an organization.
It’s October – National Bullying Prevention Awareness Month – so for fun let’s dig into the difference between a leader who bullies and a super-facilitator, and why this matters for your culture, your people, and your bottom line.
Bullying Behavior Fixates on Competence; Super-Facilitators Unlock Collective Intelligence
People who engage in bullying behavior are most often driven by a need to prove their competence. Whether it’s belittling others, hoarding information, or taking credit for team wins, the behavior comes from insecurity masked as dominance. They need to feel valued, and leaving others feeling devalued is one way to achieve that goal.
What those leaders are missing is that great teams aren’t built on individual genius or a single competent leader. They thrive on collective intelligence: a team’s ability to think, solve problems, and innovate together. And leading with fear inhibits all of that – people can’t think openly about solving problems because they’re too busy consciously and unconsciously managing their survival instincts.
Collective intelligence happens when super-facilitators know how to:
- Make space for everyone’s input
- Elevate quieter voices
- Reduce power plays
- Focus on how the group works—not just what it produces
- Bring out the best in people
- Lean on each individual’s strengths
In other words, good things happen when someone is facilitating the team’s success, not dominating the team’s success.
Diversity Fuels Collective Intelligence
Collective intelligence is made even better when the team is diverse. A group of people who think differently, come from different backgrounds, and see the world in different ways raise the bar as they look at problems from different perspectives. That’s key to reaching the best possible outcome.
But this only works if people feel safe enough to share their perspectives, knowledge and experiences. If your team dynamics are driven by fear, hierarchy, or politics, you’ll never get the full range of ideas available in the group.
With a super-facilitator on the team, bridges can be built between differences and psychological safety is more likely to flourish. They invite tension that leads to growth, not division. And they know how to hold space for the messiness of diverse thinking without shutting it down.
Super-Facilitator vs. Leaders Displaying Toxic Behaviors
So think about it: the difference between a super-facilitator and a leader displaying toxic behaviors is night and day.
Super-Facilitator Playbook
Super-facilitators are:
- Intentional about creating space for others—they invite voices into the conversation, ask open-ended questions, and listen with the goal of truly understanding.
- Focused on the team’s success, not their own image, and so they share credit and lean into diverse perspectives.
- Build psychological safety by ensuring every person knows their input matters.
- Clear that if they desire to be seen as a leader valued by others, they must value others first.
As a result, the team becomes innovative, resilient, and collaborative, producing outcomes no single “star” could achieve on their own.
When Leadership Behaviors Turn Toxic
Leaders can sometimes slip into behaviors that harm rather than help — often without realizing it. These behaviors might look like:
- Dominate conversations, shut down dialogue that goes against their own point of view, and surround themselves with “yes” people who won’t challenge them.
- Focus on the team’s success, but through a lens that has them believing the leader is supposed to be the most successful out of the team members.
- Use fear, intimidation, and control as their tools, and therefore hoard credit, pass blame, and silence dissent.
- Believe that to be seen as a valuable leader, they must be the ultimate mascot of the team’s success.
It’s the difference between a team that grows stronger together and one that slowly crumbles under the weight of a single ego.
What To Do With This Information About Super-Facilitators
Consider who is already acting as a super-facilitator in your team or within your organization, and what they need to hone in on that skill. Do they know how to shut down toxic behavior from others before it escalates? Do they know they’d be supported in doing so?
Then consider who could grow into super-facilitatorship (we made that word up) and what they need to get there. How can you help them understand that this is a goal they can grow into? What training or mentoring do they need? What would be the benefits for them to make this leap?
Lastly, who should be a super-facilitator but is functioning in the negative? Who are the antithesises (made that one up too) of super-facilitatorship, and what can you offer them to grow out of that toxic behavior and into the amazing leaders you need them to be? Feel free to use our Abrasive Leader Assessment Tool as you answer. It will help you put words to the behavior you experience or hear about from others.
These questions are worth answering. While you do so, keep in mind that super-facilitators can be individual contributors, managers, and leaders.
Apparently Supermanagers Are Also Needed
Then there’s this article – The Rise of the Supermanager. In short, Josh Bersin posits that with the rise of AI, managers have more opportunities to think strategically and optimize work. They won’t need to supervise so much as they’ll need to, and have more time to, coach and mentor. He says that, “Performance management and supervision become the ‘table stakes’ of management, and it’s the re-engineering, experimentation, and growth that differentiate the best.” Supermanagers experiment, embrace new ideas, are open to and sharing out others’ ideas, and in terms of AI, they find new ways to use it without a directive from the top.
Super-Facilitation and Supermanagement: Are They Really New Concepts?
Both of the articles we’ve mentioned are fascinating – but as we wrote this blog we started to wonder how new these concepts really are. Collaboration, psychological safety, and lifting people up have all been on the list of good team membership and good management for a long time.
Perhaps these new phrases just serve the purpose of differentiating between the “regular” managers we’ve all experienced, and the really great managers we’ve hopefully all had at least once in our careers?
Given our recent blog post about Conscious Unbossing, which highlights that Gen Z doesn’t want to manage given all of the underpay and overwork they’ve witnessed in their own managers, it seems unlikely that tacking the word “super” onto their job is going to make it more appealing.
What This Means for Your Organization
Whether you call them super-facilitators and supermanagers or not, both of these articles simply highlight that despite all of the advancement in AI and technology in general, people skills are still super important.
So if you need our super-facilitators to facilitate your training programs to build up your super-facilitators and supermanagers, contact us for a strategy session. Of course we offer all sorts of programs to elevate your managers’ people management skills.
