You’ve been in every meeting. Prepared every time. Contributed solid ideas.
Yet somehow, the person who wanders in late with half a thought gets the green light.
What happened?
The formal meeting isn’t where it happened. The decision was made before you walked in – in a hallway conversation you weren’t part of, over coffee you weren’t invited to, in the “by the way” moment after the meeting you didn’t stick around for.
This is the game most leaders don’t know they’re losing.
Defining Facilitas
Facilitas: Latin, meaning ease, readiness, and affability. Cicero used the term as a social virtue in public life – often glossed by modern scholars as ease in interpersonal relations. Where gravitas commands respect through seriousness and dignity, facilitas invites connection through warmth and approachability.
Most leadership training develops gravitas. Almost none develops facilitas.
This blind spot costs careers.
The Skill Nobody Teaches
70% of leadership influence comes through relationships, not authority. Yet conventional leadership training focuses almost exclusively on the formal: presentations, negotiations, feedback frameworks, conflict resolution scripts.
It teaches people how to command a boardroom – not how to read one before they walk in.
Facilitas is the undertrained skill that operates in the spaces between formal interactions – the hallway, the coffee chat, the elevator ride, the “walk me to my car” moment where real allegiances form. It’s what determines whether people want to help you succeed.
This ‘wanting’ matters more than you think.
Gravitas vs Facilitas: The Distinction That Changes Everything
Gravitas has dominated leadership literature for decades. Derived from the Latin gravis (heavy, weighty), it denotes seriousness, dignity, and authority. The Romans considered it essential for anyone in a position of responsibility.
Gravitas was never meant to stand alone.
Cicero, writing on the qualities of an ideal leader, listed gravitas alongside a complementary virtue: facilitas – ease in interpersonal relations, the ability to generate trust through accessibility rather than authority. Where gravitas makes people listen, facilitas makes them lean in. Where gravitas commands the room, facilitas commands the corridor.
The distinction in practice:
| Gravitas | Facilitas |
|---|---|
| Commands respect | Invites connection |
| Dominates formal settings | Operates in informal spaces |
| Projects authority | Projects accessibility |
| Makes people comply | Makes people want to help |
| Trained extensively | Rarely trained at all |
Most leaders have one without the other.
Those with gravitas but no facilitas are respected but not sought out. People follow their directives but don’t volunteer information, don’t offer help unprompted, don’t advocate for them in rooms they’re not in.
Those with facilitas but no gravitas are well-liked but overlooked. Pleasant to have around. Never considered for the serious work.
The leaders who rise – who seem to accumulate influence effortlessly – have both.
Why Facilitas Matters More Now
The architecture of modern work has shifted substantially. Hierarchies have flattened. Matrix structures proliferate. Cross-functional collaboration is no longer optional. Remote and hybrid arrangements have fragmented the informal spaces where facilitas traditionally operated.
Informal communication has declined precipitously in remote and hybrid work environments. Research shows that on remote workdays, the spontaneous, personal, non-work-related interactions that serve as “social glue” in organisations pretty much fall off a cliff.
This creates a paradox. At precisely the moment when formal authority has less grip than ever – when influence must be earned through relationships rather than imposed through hierarchy – the natural opportunities to build those relationships have evaporated.
The leaders who understand facilitas are adapting. They’re engineering informal touchpoints that would have happened organically in the old world. They’re treating relationship capital as an asset to be cultivated, not a byproduct to be hoped for.
The leaders who don’t understand facilitas are wondering why their ideas keep dying in committee.
The Anatomy of Informal Influence
Facilitas isn’t charm. It’s not schmoozing. It’s not “networking” in the transactional sense that word has acquired.
It’s a specific capacity: the ability to create ease in others so that connection becomes possible.
What facilitas looks like in practice:
- Pre-meeting consensus building: The skilled practitioner never walks into a meeting uncertain of the outcome. They’ve had the conversations. They know where everyone stands. The meeting is confirmation, not deliberation.
- The “by the way” moment: After the formal discussion ends, as people gather their things, a brief exchange that plants a seed, surfaces a concern, or cements an understanding. Ninety seconds that shapes the next six months.
- Hallway intelligence: Knowing what’s actually happening – the undercurrents, the concerns, the unspoken objections – because people tell you things they don’t put in emails.
- The easy yes: When you ask for something, people want to say yes. Not because they owe you, but because helping you feels uncomplicated. You’ve made it easy to support you.
This is the territory facilitas occupies. If you’ve never been trained in it, you’re competing against people who have – without knowing what game they’re playing.
The Body Problem
There’s a reason facilitas can’t be taught through scripts and techniques.
It requires a regulated nervous system.
Think about what happens when you approach an informal interaction from a tense, depleted, or anxious state. Your breath is shallow. Your shoulders are rolled up and tight. Your attention is fragmented because your body is signalling threat even though you’re just walking to get coffee!
Others sense this. Not consciously – but their nervous systems respond to yours. The conversation stays surface-level. No real connection forms. You walk away having exchanged words but built nothing.
This is why facilitas cannot be separated from physiological capacity. The ease that others experience in your presence isn’t manufactured or ‘performed’ – it’s transmitted.
You cannot transmit what you don’t possess.
A chronically stressed leader can study every technique of informal influence and still fail to generate it, because their body is broadcasting something their words are trying to override. The Shen Power Diagnostic identifies whether your bottleneck is physical vitality, nervous system regulation, or presence – because facilitas becomes accessible only when the foundation supports it.
Renaissance Courtcraft: The Historical Lineage
So Facilitas isn’t a modern invention dressed in Latin…
It was actually the central study of Renaissance courtiers – diplomats, advisors, and nobles who understood that influence at court required more than formal position. Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier (1528) codified what these practitioners knew: that sprezzatura – studied effortlessness – was essential for navigating informal social space.
The courtier’s challenge was your challenge today: how to influence decisions when formal authority is limited. How to build alliances among peers. How to be the person others want to support, not just the person they’re required to tolerate.
Modern corporate life is the court of the Renaissance, reconstituted. The dynamics are identical. The formal structures exist – but the real game operates alongside them, in conversations that happen before and after the official agenda.
The courtiers studied this. They trained in it. They practiced it deliberately.
We pretend it doesn’t exist, then wonder why some people seem to have invisible advantages!
Why Most Leaders Lack Facilitas
Three reasons explain the deficit:
1. It’s never been named.
You can’t develop what you can’t name. Most leaders know they’re missing something – they sense the gap between their capability and their influence – but I so often hear them attribute it to politics, luck, or “personality”. Facilitas gives the gap a name and makes it trainable.
2. It’s been stigmatized.
Informal influence carries a whiff of manipulation in cultures that valorize meritocracy. We want to believe that good ideas win on their own merits, that formal processes are sufficient, that relationships shouldn’t matter. This is comforting. A great pipe-dream in a utopian world. It’s also false. Facilitas isn’t manipulation – it’s the skill of making genuine connection possible. Manipulation requires the other person to lose. Facilitas creates conditions where everyone wins. Big difference.
3. It requires the body.
What I learned through 4 years of full-time professional training as an stage and screen actor, you cannot ‘perform’ ease. You can only embody it. This means facilitas depends on capacities – nervous system regulation, physical vitality, authentic presence – that cognitive training cannot develop. Most leadership development ignores the body entirely. Facilitas punishes this omission.
Developing Facilitas
Facilitas can be trained. But not the way you’d expect.
Start with regulation, not technique.
Before working on what to say in informal moments, develop the physiological capacity to be genuinely at ease. This means breath practices that train vagal tone. Posture that signals safety to your own nervous system. The ability to be present without performing presence.
The Shen Power Method™ develops this foundation through what I call Axis A: the regulated body that makes authentic expression possible. Without it, facilitas (Axis B) remains theoretical – a concept you understand but cannot embody.
Map your informal spaces.
Where do decisions actually get made in your organisation? Who talks to whom before meetings? What are the “by the way” moments that shape outcomes? Until you can see the patterns and informal architecture, you can’t navigate it.
Engineer collisions.
In the old world, informal connection happened accidentally – at the water cooler, in the elevator, walking between buildings. In hybrid work, you must create these collisions deliberately. Arrive early. Stay late. Take the long route. Be in spaces where spontaneous conversation can occur.
Practice the coffee chat.
The low-stakes informal conversation is where facilitas is built. Not networking events. Not formal one-on-ones. The five-minute chat about “nothing in particular” that becomes, over time, the foundation for everything that matters.
The Integrated Outcome
Facilitas alone is incomplete. Gravitas alone is insufficient. The integrated state – where presence commands respect and invites connection – is what I call Somarisma™: charisma that emanates from a regulated body rather than performed from an anxious mind.
Please know, you don’t have to become someone else. You should never abandon your true self. Rather, it’s about accessing what’s already there – the natural ease that chronic stress, physical depletion, and nervous system dysregulation have buried away – until now.
When you develop facilitas, you stop competing for influence. You start accumulating it – in hallways, in coffee lines, in the moments that don’t appear on any agenda but determine every outcome.
The formal meeting becomes confirmation of what you’ve already built.
That’s the game. Now you know it exists.
Key Takeaways
- Facilitas is the Latin term for ease and fluency in informal interactions – the complement to gravitas that leadership training almost universally ignores
- 70% of leadership influence comes through relationships, not authority – yet we train almost exclusively for formal settings
- Gravitas commands respect; facilitas invites connection – leaders who rise have both
- Informal influence (hallway conversations, coffee chats, pre-meeting consensus) determines outcomes before formal meetings occur
- Facilitas requires a regulated nervous system – you cannot perform ease, only embody it
- Renaissance courtiers studied this deliberately as “courtcraft” – modern leaders pretend it doesn’t exist
- The Shen Power Method™ develops the physiological foundation that makes facilitas accessible through integrated body-first training
