Facilitation is leadership: What a McKinsey report and facilitation have in common

McKinsey identified 21 leadership skills, and almost all of them have something to do with facilitation

McKinsey identified six leadership competencies that determine success in the 21st century. The research draws on hundreds of interviews with CEOs and leadership teams worldwide. The result: positive energy and inspiration. Servant leadership. Continuous learning with humility. Resilience and determination. Levity. And stewardship.¹

Anyone who reads this list and regularly runs workshops will notice it right away: this is a precise description of facilitation as a leadership skill. Or more precisely, of what a good facilitator practises every day.

That's no coincidence. The competencies McKinsey classifies as AI-proof develop exactly when you lead groups through decision-making processes under real pressure, again and again. No model replaces that. Neither does a seminar on leadership concepts.

Positive energy: workshops either give energy or take it away

McKinsey starts with something many people underestimate: positive energy, balance, and the ability to inspire others. Leaders who are burnt out themselves can't inspire anyone. Groups without energy make bad decisions.

Anyone who runs workshops knows this. A badly structured half-day session leaves everyone more exhausted than before. A well-run one leaves them ready to act. The difference isn't the topic. It's how the process is led.

Energy management is an underrated craft. When does the group need movement? When does it need silence? When do I need to cut off a discussion that's run too long so people can think clearly again? As a facilitator, I make these calls dozens of times a day. That's facilitation as a leadership skill, in one of its most direct forms.

Servant leadership: the loudest person in the room doesn't win

McKinsey describes the "servant and selfless leader" as someone who doesn't think about their own performance, but about the team's. The best leader isn't the one with the most answers. It's the one who creates the best conditions for everyone else.

That's literally the basic mindset of a facilitator. I don't walk into a workshop as the expert on the subject matter. I'm the expert on the process. The answers come from the team. My job is to build the structure they emerge from.

A leader who internalises this leads differently. Not through authority, but through clarity of process. Not "I'll tell you where we're headed", but "I'll make sure we work out together where we're headed." That's a fundamental difference. And it can be trained. McKinsey calls it servant and selfless leadership. I call it my job.

Levity and determination: why humour isn't a luxury

According to McKinsey, leaders with a sense of humour are 27% more motivating than others. Teams led by them are twice as creative. At the same time, companies where leaders consistently make decisions and stand by them are 4.2 times more likely to be healthy than their competitors.¹

That sounds like a contradiction. In practice, it's two sides of the same coin.

A facilitator needs both at once. After three hours of intense discussion, the room gets heavy. Nobody's thinking clearly anymore. That's when it's my job to let some air in. A joke at the right moment isn't wasted time. It breaks the mental logjam and gives the group back the energy it needs to make a real decision.

And then comes the moment when a decision has to be made. Not "let's revisit this next week." Not "sounds interesting, but..." A commitment from specific people to specific next steps. That's not a democratic process. That's leadership work in a workshop.

Continuous learning: curiosity as a leadership technique

McKinsey's "continuous learning and humble mindset" describes leaders who don't see themselves as the smartest person in the room, who ask questions instead of giving answers, who use their own uncertainty as a strength.

A facilitator works this way whether they want to or not. Every workshop is different. Every group brings new dynamics, new conflicts, unexpected turns. Show up with ready-made answers and you lose the group. Really listen to what's being said between the lines, who's dominating the room and why, what tension hasn't been voiced yet, and you get results that wouldn't happen otherwise.

After hundreds of workshops, I've learned that the decisive moments aren't the ones where I say something. They're the ones where I ask a question and then stay quiet.

Stewardship: leaving the room stronger than you found it

McKinsey describes "stewardship" as the ability to think long-term and leave the team stronger than you found it. Leaders as stewards, preparing the team for its next step instead of their own indispensability.

That's the opposite of what classic consulting often produces. A facilitator is good when the team can keep working without them after the workshop. When the decisions belong to the team. When the next steps are clear and belong to specific people.

The same standard applies to training. After good facilitation training, a team lead should be able to run their own meetings and get real outcomes, without me, without outside support. Anyone who genuinely teaches facilitation as a leadership skill makes themselves redundant.

Facilitation as a leadership skill can be trained, just not in a seminar room

McKinsey is clear on one point: these six competencies aren't personality traits you either have or don't. They can be developed. But the most effective form of learning doesn't happen in a classroom. It happens in practice, under real conditions, with real responsibility.²

That matches what I see in my own work every day.

What sets Full Stack Leadership Training apart from classic leadership programmes: it's not a seminar about concepts. It's practice under real pressure. You don't learn decision-making from a framework. You learn it by sitting in a workshop with a group that's arguing and getting something out the other end. You don't learn levity from a book. You learn it by feeling the mood in the room tip, and knowing what to do about it.

I explain what actually happens in this kind of training, and who benefits from it, in my article on Facilitation: The Skill AI Cannot Replace. What facilitation is as a method, distinct from moderation, training, and consulting, I cover in my article What is Facilitation?

Your next step

McKinsey describes the leadership skills that will make the difference over the next decade. I teach leaders and teams how to apply them in practice. If you want to see what that could look like for your team, get in touch.

¹ Bob Sternfels, Daniel Pacthod, Kurt Strovink and Wyman Howard: "The art of 21st-century leadership: From succession planning to building a leadership factory", McKinsey, October 2024, mckinsey.com
² Bob Sternfels, Daniel Pacthod and David H. Berger: "Scaling the 21st-century leadership factory", McKinsey, July 2025, mckinsey.com

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