So let's cut to the chase...

You may be a great consultant, one who effectively applies his or her wisdom and experience to help his or her client solve some tough business problem.   That's all fine and well.  When it comes to facilitation, though, it's a different ballgame and a very different approach to problem solving.  I like to think of the difference as follows:

In Part 3 of Persuasion Atrophy, I delved into the importance of connecting with your audience. Professionals now and in the future need to be intentional about how they build and exercise the persuasion muscle. This will ensure the skill doesn’t give way to equating persuasion to shaming—and thinking critical copy/pasting is in and of itself persuasive.

To continue with my case, I’ll use The Four C’s of Compelling Presentations as the roadmap for exercising the persuasion muscle and avoid persuasion atrophy. This installment focuses on securing credibility.

Some years back, one of my assignments was to research potential business process offshoring (BPO) partners we could potentially use for some finance and administration functions. A vendor caught wind of the initiative and asked to meet with me to discuss his company’s BPO capabilities.

The vendor came to my office, pulled out a presentation, and started reading the slides to me. I was genuinely interested in learning more about their capabilities and asked a number of questions. With each question, he responded, “I need to get back to you on that.”

Read more at ProjectManagement.com.

Several years back a colleague of mine (I'll call the colleague "Nellie") was managing a very high-visibility project. This project was high on the radar of key executives all the way up to the CEO of the company and any major mis-steps would send fireworks up the chain faster than lightning.  This was one of those "thrill-seeker" projects; definitely high risk but also of high reward if the project was successful.  Nellie was up to the challenge and willingly accepted the assignment.