Impactful Facilitation Techniques for Building Multicultural Teams

A conversation with Ma Roselle Junio, Global Head of Quality, Training, and Optimization for Audit and Capture Services at SAP

“I think that is my superpower. I do connect. I believe that no one can be successful without the other. We need each other to thrive and we have to realize that we are strong in certain areas and others are strong in other areas. And together, when we do connect, we can do really incredible stuff. So I like connecting people, where people are talking to me and in my mind, I’m already thinking who am I going to introduce this person to so he or she can make his dream a reality. And that sort of kicks in automatically.” – Ma Roselle Junio

In this episode of the Facilitation Lab podcast, host Douglas Ferguson talks with Roselle, Global Head of Quality Training and Optimization for Concur Expense Audit and Capture Services at SAP. They discuss the importance of facilitation in the workplace, with Roselle sharing her journey and experiences in leading diverse teams. She emphasizes the value of connecting people, understanding multicultural dynamics, and having a growth mindset. Roselle also shares her approach to meetings and the importance of debriefing. She expresses her passion for creating safe, inclusive spaces and her plans to build a facilitation community within her team.

Show Highlights

[00:05:50] The importance of connecting people

[00:12:27] The importance of facilitation skills

[00:13:58] The growth mindset and room for improvement

[00:19:36] Building empathy and understanding in a multicultural team

[00:25:49] The debrief and becoming better facilitators

[00:28:49] Creating a facilitation community

Links | Resources

Ma. Roselle on Linkedin

About the Guest

Roselle Junio is a devoted mother to two exceptional and independent children, aged 5 and 14. With an unwavering commitment to shaping a better tomorrow for her children and future generations, she channels her passion into fostering a culture of collaboration and crafting transformative spaces for her global team and the communities she supports. Meet our esteemed alumna, a fearless female leader of a diverse team spanning across 5 countries in Asia, Europe, and South America. With a deep commitment to continuous growth, she’s a dedicated life-long learner, certified coach, and a skilled facilitator who enables others to find joy at work and in life. Her fierce optimism fuels her passion to be a shining example for her team and children, empowering them to create conditions that will allow them to flourish.

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a facilitation academy that develops leaders through certifications, workshops, and organizational coaching focused on facilitation mastery, innovation, and play. Today’s leaders are confronted with unprecedented uncertainty and complex change. Navigating this uncertainty requires a systemic facilitative approach to gain clarity and chart pathways forward. We prepare today’s leaders for now and what’s next.

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Transcript

Douglas Ferguson:

Hi, I’m Douglas Ferguson. Welcome to the Facilitation Lab Podcast where I speak with Voltage Control Certification alumni and other facilitation experts about the remarkable impact they’re making. We embrace a method agnostic approach so you can enjoy a wide range of topics and perspectives as we examine all the nuances of enabling meaningful group experiences. This series is dedicated to helping you navigate the realities of facilitating collaboration, ensuring every session you lead becomes truly transformative.

Thanks so much for listening. If you’d like to join us for a live session sometime, you can join our Facilitation Lab Community. It’s an ideal space to apply what you learn in the podcast in real time with peers. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab. And if you’d like to learn more about our 12-week Facilitation Certification Program, you can read about it at voltagecontrol.com. Today, I’m with Roselle Junio at SAP where she’s the global head of quality training and optimization for Concur Expense audit and capture services. Welcome to the show, Roselle.

Roselle Junio:

Glad to be here. Douglas,

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s so great to be chatting with you and love featuring our alumni on the show. We published a blog post not that long ago so we can hit on some of the things we talked about there and dive even deeper. So as usual, I would like to start with how you got your start in facilitation. What was some of those moments where you started to realize that facilitation was an important skill or something to bring into the workplace to improve outcomes?

Roselle Junio:

I think I started becoming a leader since I can talk, but my leadership journey started getting stretched when I started working with a multinational company where I led hundreds of people and I had foreigners as bosses. And I realized all through my young life, it’s easy for me to organize meetings and talk to people locally. Because again, like I said, I think since kindergarten I’ve been doing that.

But when I was dealing with different people with different cultures, it just struck me that other people need to be engaged differently. And that, again, became very apparent when I joined SAP and I evolved my role from a local leader to supporting more than 100 people in five different locations and engaging partners and stakeholders, I don’t know, in maybe 12 different locations and several region across the globe.

And that’s where I said, okay, hold on. I’m making so many mistakes. I’m pissing off so many people, and I have to learn different approaches, whether I’m doing one-on-ones or small groups or engaging hundreds of people in a meeting. And that’s where I said, okay, I need some work. I obviously started just learning by myself, like anyone, right? We would go and look up for e-learnings.

I reached out to different people in the organization to mentor me, give me advice. I was introduced to Liberating Structures. I looked at Mural templates, see how I can use them, et cetera. And that’s where I stumbled upon Voltage Control and your certification. And I say, okay, if I want to be successful in my role and as a person, as a professional, I need to be formally trained on this. So I engaged and everything is opened up for me after that.

Douglas Ferguson:

Nice. I want to come back to the kindergarten moments. Tell me about some of these early leadership moments. I love to hear a story about how that showed up.

Roselle Junio:

Small things. We’re in your school. You’re being asked to do group work. And when you’re kids and you’re looking at each other and figuring out who’s going to say the first thing, and I would always go and say, “I am Roselle. What is your name? I am five years old. How old are you?” So I would start those conversations and I became the person that gets people to get to know each other and work together. So that’s me.

Douglas Ferguson:

A connector from a young age. Yeah, I love that. Does that still play out in your work today around connecting people and helping people get to know each other and building alignment in that way?

Roselle Junio:

I think that is my superpower, Douglas. I do connect I think because I believe that no one can be successful without the other. We need each other to thrive, and we have to realize that we are strong in certain areas and others are strong in other areas. And together when we do connect, we can do really incredible stuff. So I like connecting people where people are talking to me and in my mind I’m already thinking, who am I going to introduce this person to so he or she can make his dream a reality? And that kicks in automatically.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, the connection piece also makes me think about, you were talking earlier in the pre-show chat around this idea of the multicultural team and how you had to learn from each other. And so I wonder if this ability you have around connection, the superpower that you have, did that make you more apt to tune into that need?

Roselle Junio:

Yeah, I think so. Like I said, because it automatically kicks in for me, I look for opportunities for us to build trust. It’s almost like I see every human interaction an opportunity for us to grow with one another. I don’t know if that’s cheesy, but because I am a connector, I intentionally look for these things and understand, what are those pain points for that other person?

What does he want to gain from this conversation? And then that’s where I go and think about either I can help with that or somebody from my other team can help with that. That’s I think my answer to the question.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, so it made me think about… I love these opportunities of trust, and I’m curious if any stories come to mind around where you are presented with something that might’ve even been a challenge and you were able to turn that into a trust building moment or even just any time where the trust really thrived and you felt really proud of that moment.

Roselle Junio:

I’m working with different leaders where in meetings, in conversations, there’s always sort of a power play. And there will be times when my overeagerness to help might be misconstrued as my taking over their job or expanding my control, if you want to call it that. At the time when I was speaking in the meeting where I wanted to just really help, I didn’t tune into the apprehensions in there. And this was in a call, so I couldn’t see their faces. There’s just no signs that, hold on, you’re crossing a line there, girl.

And after I started asking questions about what they thought about my proposal and how they think my team’s role is in this type of work, it was almost like silence. And that was very interesting to me. So what I did was obviously I started thinking about what was going on. You have to read the room. And I realized that I overstepped my boundaries. And like you said, it’s a challenge, but also an opportunity for me to engage them differently. So what was the issue? I felt like they felt that I was a threat in some way.

Of course, they won’t say that, but I have to understand what was going on and clarify one and one with the people in that room, what support did they need from my team, and then come up with a way to utilize the strengths of each of the groups to solve the problem with me just helping in a way they want me to help there. It’s difficult, especially in this time when AI is taking over our lives and cuts are being made and people are anxious. In conversations you can feel that anxiety in the air and we have to tune into that in conversations.

Douglas Ferguson:

Absolutely. I was going to actually ask you about signals, which is really interesting because talking about tuning into conversations, and you were also talking about thinking about who might I connect this person with or what’s happening for them and how can I be in service of that?

And I’m curious, when you think about these signals, is it more of a real-time thing, or is it something that you’re planning ahead of time? Or are you reflecting after the fact around signals you noticed and then coming back and repairing things or embellishing things that need attention? Or is it a mixture of all three? I’m curious how that shows up for you.

Roselle Junio:

It’s a mixture of all three, because I do prepare for meetings. Before I go into a meeting, if I was the one invited, I will ask, can I add value in this meeting? Or if not, I’ll just politely decline. If I do accept a meeting, I try to understand who’s there, what their needs are. I try to forecast that somehow. But of course, I can everything, right? And then within the meeting, I have learned over time, especially since I facilitate a lot, I think it’s really that skill, facilitating,- allows you to look at the dynamic more than the content.

So you’re going to have to see what energy is in the room, whether it’s face-to-face or in a virtual call. And because I intentionally work on my facilitation skills where you’re more tuned into other people’s thoughts and also be conscious of your own, it happens real-time. And then even afterwards, a lot of times I go and have a conversation with somebody in that meeting and I ask, was I too forward, or did I come off too strong? What could I have done better? Or did I not tune into something that I should have? So things like that.

Douglas Ferguson:

I think I’m picking up on a general theme of curiosity and just what can I know ahead of time and be curious about, and then being curious in the moment and then retaining that curiosity after the fact. Because even though we get great at what we do, there’s always room for improvement. So it’s that growth edge too.

Roselle Junio:

Yeah, that’s true. It’s like the growth mindset. There’s always room for improvement. That’s the first thing I learned from my first leader in the call center world. I was this smug girl who graduated from a top university in the Philippines, and I was like, I’m too good for this. And every time she would coach me, I would have all this excuses why I didn’t do it or whatever.

And then she said, “Think about what you just said to me and think if those statements will help you grow.” And of course, because they are excuses didn’t, right? So she said, “Okay, what do you think can help you grow?” And then I started thinking about it. She said, “See? There’s always room for improvement.” And ever since, that’s always been how I saw my growth. We never stop.

Douglas Ferguson:

That reminds me of something you mentioned in the blog post, which was this appreciation for the diverse cohort and how you were learning from others. I think it was Baxter that was preparing his service menu and thinking about how he’s going to launch his professional services organization. And I thought that was pretty remarkable because some folks would think, well, I’m not going to be selling consulting services, so how does this apply to me?

That closed mindset around what are the direct things I need to know and learn can be very limiting, right? Because you’re already making the assumption that I know the things I need to learn. It’s like not open to new things and where the edges might be. And I thought that was really remarkable that you took those insights from him and thought, how is that going to impact me at SAP and how I communicate the services we offer and what we provide to the folks around us, to our partners, to our coworkers. It’s really cool.

Roselle Junio:

Yeah, I thought he was really cool too. And I was like, oh my God, the confidence that he had. The fact that he just wanted to make a difference. Those are the kinds of people we all want to be around with. And when he shared that, I said to myself, if my team were a service organization separate from SAP, I would love my team to operate in the same way. It’s really cool. Which reminds me, I should reach out to him and have a short chat and just check in.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, of course. It’s that connection piece. You got to reach out and connect.

Roselle Junio:

Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

I was thinking about your multicultural team a little more, and you were talking about this idea of learning from each other. And it sounded like there are some really interesting dynamics just around how you all need to show up to support the different ways that everyone thinks about solving problems or thinks about communicating or even the words they choose to use. I’m really fascinated about that.

Roselle Junio:

What’s interesting about having a multicultural team is that you can recognize their bias immediately. Because one difficulty or challenge in dealing with the other group, they just say, “Ugh, it’s because they’re Filipinos, or they’re Americans, or they’re British. That’s why they’re like that.” And we have to always intentionally think about, why are they like that? And you talk about curiosity, and that’s what I keep telling the team. Let’s be curious about each other. Why are they pushing back on a policy that you think is so usual in the Philippines?

An example would be we work in a environment where we have to be staffed 24 by seven. I have a number of people across the globe filling those slots, but I still need a couple of people in different places to be in the night shift to fully cover the load that we have. And one of the sites said that they just couldn’t. And of course, because they couldn’t, the other site need to stretch themselves and cover the night shift. And in the past they would just kind of, ugh, that’s how they roll or whatever, and the animosity increases.

There’s loss of trust and all these things. Until one person said in the meeting, “Would you mind sharing with us why is it difficult for you to cover the night shift?” And then they said, “Oh, because it’s not safe in the streets. The majority of the group are female and it’s just not safe.” And that just shifted the energy in the room where we realized that, oh my God, that is what they’re dealing with in that part of the world. And we were here thinking they were just unreasonable.

So yeah, that’s an example of us changing the conversations, asking questions, being more facilitative in our approach and really understanding each other and connecting with each other and building the empathy so that we can work together better because trust is there.

Douglas Ferguson:

I remember also you talking about the China team and deploying some different techniques and meetings there to get them more engaged.

Roselle Junio:

Yes. The China team, they’re very soft-spoken. If you don’t call on them, they will not speak. So we really have to make sure that when we have them in meetings and we have to always have them in the meetings because they’re integral part of the team, we either make sure that we call on them. Or if we feel like they’re not comfortable speaking in the big groups, we would have breakout sessions just specifically to get them to speak. It’s a one-on-one thing.

We would have several co-facilitators be in calls with them in separate breakout rooms with them and just talking to them one-on-one and getting them to share their thoughts and their ideas, and those co-facilitators are just writing all of these down. And then when we go back to the big group, we share what we learned as facilitators in those breakout sessions. And then if they’re comfortable, and usually they are after the one-on-ones, they can expound out in the bigger group.

And now we hear their voices and they feel that their opinions matter, that we are including them in the conversation. It takes a while, and they still go and climb up. But as facilitators, we need to figure out how to pivot within the meeting to get everybody to speak and share their thoughts and ideas.

Douglas Ferguson:

And you mentioning the co-facilitators reminded me of how you talked about that being a really important leadership opportunity for you to bring others in and encourage new behaviors on the team, so giving them opportunities to lead and co-lead sessions really level them up. So I’m curious to hear how that’s going and maybe what was critical in making that successful?

Roselle Junio:

To be honest, I have to show them that it’s okay to make mistakes in sessions, because that’s what they’re afraid of. That’s why they don’t want to lead conversations. They don’t want to facilitate. And I can’t facilitate all of our meetings. We have probably, I don’t know, 40 meetings a week. So we really needed people to step up to lead these things. And I don’t want to generalize. I’m talking about my team. My team is generally not confident in themselves, and they get struck by imposter syndrome all the time.

I’m not enough. I don’t have the right to lead meetings with directors or managers in my calls. And that’s what they need to overcome. They have the potential to be great facilitators, but it’s the fear of messing up that really keeps them from thriving. Anyway, going back to your question, it’s just me being on calls with them before the meeting, prepping for the meeting, being in the meeting with them side by side and showing them it’s okay to pause. It’s okay to go back to your notes.

It’s okay to say, “I need your help to do this, Mark. What do you think, Dave?” So those kinds of opportunities within the meeting where you tell them that you’re going to… Well, I prep them though. I do tell them that, “I’m going to call on you, okay,” so they don’t get too scared or nervous because they know I’m going to call on them. And then after that we debrief. We talk to each other and say, “What do you think you did well? What are the things that didn’t work out? How do we become better facilitators?

Okay, next week you’re going to be the lead facilitator. I’ll just be in the background and help.” Now that’s what I do. I rarely lead meetings nowadays. I’m mostly in the background, and it hurts me because I am not practicing my facilitations skills that much, so anyway.

Douglas Ferguson:

Another thing I was curious to hear more about in person was this idea that other people in the organization are starting to notice that your meetings are run really well. I’m curious, any stories there or just any anecdotes to make that come to life?

Roselle Junio:

So I was in a meeting with some leaders and we were talking about how my team is going to help with several business problems we need to solve. And I did say, “Okay, out of the maybe 10 things that we talked about, we can help with one, two, and three.” And then one of the directors after the meeting she said, “As we go through all of these things, I hope that every after a meeting or a workshop or whatever, we send a summary, and we follow up on actions, and we just organize it better.”

And then she said, “Well, I’m not going to say that to you, Roselle, because your team always does that anyway.” So that was in front of a lot of leaders and I felt validated. My team really does their homework and make sure that we prepare not just ourselves, but also the participants and run the meetings as expected based on the goals, objectives that we’ve set, and then make sure that we summarize, we follow up, and be prepared for the next meeting. So I felt that that was really cool, and then I shared that with my team. I was, “You guys just make me look good.”

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s awesome. So a couple things as we wrap up. First, what’s your next big thing? What’s on the horizon?

Roselle Junio:

In our conversation last time where I build my facilitation portfolio, I wanted to build a facilitation service. But I realized that’s not what is needed in the organization because a lot of people lead meetings, facilitate workshops, and like us are accidental facilitators too. Instead of building that service, I just wanted to create a community within, first, my immediate team or the team that we support. I don’t know if it grows and it grows like a facilitation community. Very similar to what you do, Douglas.

I like copying people, but also to encourage everyone to take formal classes too. Because in SAP, even though we’re a big company and we can learn from each other, the tools that I learned from the cohort in Voltage Control, I don’t think I would’ve picked up some of them within SAP. I don’t know, right? But it just felt like it just opened so many things for me. Right now I’m reading a book recommended by one of the cohort participants. It’s called Good Talk.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, Daniel Stillman’s book.

Roselle Junio:

Yeah. So I’m just starting and it’s like, oh wow. It’s like this is powerful. And it’s not just meetings, it’s also relationship conversations. It’s beautiful. Again, something that I’m still benefiting from months after the cohort, and I am very grateful for that.

Douglas Ferguson:

Nice. Well, I want to give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Roselle Junio:

I’m very passionate about creating safe, inclusive, and empowering spaces for people, whether it be virtual or face-to-face, either in families, in communities, in the workplace, especially for multicultural team. And what I learned really is that whether it’s multicultural or not, the approach is going to be different per group, per person. It’s not a one size fits all approach.

And I use different tools and approaches, advice from different people, things that I learned from the cohort to intentionally exercise, trust building actions and different approaches that embraces the differences, the diversity in the groups that I interact with, because I think anyone can lead as long as you have the right tools and the right intention and if your purpose is aligned.

Because after all, we’re all humans. We eat the same food. We love the same way, I’m sure. Our hearts break maybe differently, but I’m just saying that we’re all just humans trying to navigate and wanting to be happy and belong. So let’s be beautifully flawed together.

Douglas Ferguson:

Incredible. Well, Roselle, it’s been a pleasure chatting with you today and thank you for that final sentiment. And I look forward to talking to you again sometime soon.

Roselle Junio:

Thank you, Douglas. Thank you for the opportunity. I had fun, and I’ll reach out to some of my classmates, because it made me think about them and I’ll connect. Thanks, again, Douglas.

Douglas Ferguson:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of the Facilitation Lab Podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please leave us a review and be sure to subscribe and receive updates when new episodes are released. We love listener tales and invite you to share your facilitation stories. Send them to us on LinkedIn or via email. If you want to know more, head over to our blog where I post weekly articles and resources about facilitation, team dynamics, and collaboration, voltagecontrol.com.