The F Word: How To Make Facilitation Facile Again for Executives & Their Teams
The F Word: How To Make Facilitation Facile Again for Executives & Their Teams
For many executives committed to promoting innovative thought leadership among their team members, wrapping a room of egos around the next challenging steps toward transforming an organization is anything but “easy.” Appeasing head nods, the flat-affect-smile, sighs, arms crossed, or even the classic stonewall, can all become stereotypical reactions in the board room when it is time to step up leadership and build accountability. Making this worse, you have consultants running around telling CEOs what the expert solution is to the organizational issues. As Stolovitch says so well, “telling ain’t training and training ain’t performance.” Any OD recommendation needs facilitation for not only minimizing sabotages or gaps in the organizational chains, but to ensure commitment across the board.
Though organizations are aware that “things need to change around here,” there seems to be only improvements on becoming less ineffective and not maximally effective. It is like taking pride in the fact that you are working out everyday before stopping at Burger King for lunch. Can we afford to break even in this new age of increased investment in cultural capital? I think not.
Here are five strategies that will make your executive conversations more “facile” and therefore more driven towards change and not the appearance of such:
1. Radically change meetings. This is done by changing conversations, not by reducing meeting time. If I am ineffective in solutions in a one hour meeting, shortening them to 15 minutes if the style of the meeting conversation hasn’t changed format-driven discussions to a more natural expression of human dialogue will not get human transformation.
2. Get a culture assessment. In my practice, I always start with a culture assessment that gives me a temperature read of how the employees really think of the company. Facilitation amongst executives satisfies some “other” goals and not true alignment with the pulse of their organization if discussions of where to go are not grounded first by where we are.
3. Seek disconfirmatory evidence. Discussions are naturally flowing towards some external rule-oriented process that set up how we speak. This is necessary in much of communication but not in effective facilitation. From this innate structure of language positioning, we get comfortable as we simultaneously become unaware of unchecked assumptions along the way. Purposely “turnover” all your findings in facilitation to find the missed surprises and the unknowns.
4. Get 360 Assessments. This one is plain and simple. All it takes is one person, ignorant to how they are really coming across, to throw a huge kink in any facilitation process. 360 Assessments aid in closing the gap between one’s self-perception and others’ perceptions of them. Facilitation needs full-presence, engagement and awareness of all its people.
5. The external “chair.” In my Ph.D. defense at the University of Notre Dame, as well as in many universities, it is common practice to bring in an “external chair” to represent an outside voice, bring in a completely unrelated subject matter into the room and to make a topic truly interdisciplinary while testing this linking-like knowledge of the candidate. Organizations are systems. Facilitation is freed up and we get outside our own ontological lenses when our discussions are centered around what works–for the common good.
Reprinted with permission by Executive Decision Magazine, September/October 2006
The F Word How To Make Facilitation Facile Again for Executives Their Teams - To learn more about this author, visit Kevin Fleming's Website.
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fa·cil·i·ta·tion (f -sil’i-ta’sh n) n. The act of making easy or easier.
For many executives committed to promoting innovative thought leadership among their team members, wrapping a room of egos around the next challenging steps toward transforming an organization is anything but “easy.” Appeasing head nods, the flat-affect-smile, sighs, arms crossed, or even the classic stonewall, can all become stereotypical reactions in the board room when it is time to step up leadership and build accountability. Making this worse, you have consultants running around telling CEOs what the expert solution is to the organizational issues. As Stolovitch says so well, “telling ain’t training and training ain’t performance.” Any OD recommendation needs facilitation for not only minimizing sabotages or gaps in the organizational chains, but to ensure commitment across the board.
Though organizations are aware that “things need to change around here,” there seems to be only improvements on becoming less ineffective and not maximally effective. It is like taking pride in the fact that you are working out everyday before stopping at Burger King for lunch. Can we afford to break even in this new age of increased investment in cultural capital? I think not.
Here are five strategies that will make your executive conversations more “facile” and therefore more driven towards change and not the appearance of such:
1. Radically change meetings. This is done by changing conversations, not by reducing meeting time. If I am ineffective in solutions in a one hour meeting, shortening them to 15 minutes if the style of the meeting conversation hasn’t changed format-driven discussions to a more natural expression of human dialogue will not get human transformation.
2. Get a culture assessment. In my practice, I always start with a culture assessment that gives me a temperature read of how the employees really think of the company. Facilitation amongst executives satisfies some “other” goals and not true alignment with the pulse of their organization if discussions of where to go are not grounded first by where we are.
3. Seek disconfirmatory evidence. Discussions are naturally flowing towards some external rule-oriented process that set up how we speak. This is necessary in much of communication but not in effective facilitation. From this innate structure of language positioning, we get comfortable as we simultaneously become unaware of unchecked assumptions along the way. Purposely “turnover” all your findings in facilitation to find the missed surprises and the unknowns.
4. Get 360 Assessments. This one is plain and simple. All it takes is one person, ignorant to how they are really coming across, to throw a huge kink in any facilitation process. 360 Assessments aid in closing the gap between one’s self-perception and others’ perceptions of them. Facilitation needs full-presence, engagement and awareness of all its people.
5. The external “chair.” In my Ph.D. defense at the University of Notre Dame, as well as in many universities, it is common practice to bring in an “external chair” to represent an outside voice, bring in a completely unrelated subject matter into the room and to make a topic truly interdisciplinary while testing this linking-like knowledge of the candidate. Organizations are systems. Facilitation is freed up and we get outside our own ontological lenses when our discussions are centered around what works–for the common good.
Reprinted with permission by Executive Decision Magazine, September/October 2006
The F Word How To Make Facilitation Facile Again for Executives Their Teams - To learn more about this author, visit Kevin Fleming's Website.
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Dianne CramptonDianne Crampton is an executive leadership coach, team culture consultant, author and president of TIGERS Success Series, Inc. Dianne has been helping CEO's and Executives connect their employees to their core values and goals for over 20 years using the trademarked TIGERS team culture process, which stands for trust, interdependence, genuineness, empathy, risk and success. To download a free white paper on behaviors that build strong teams and behaviors that will predictably tear them down go here. Dianne's contribution to the 2010 Pfeiffer Consulting Journal (an imprint of John Wiley and Sons Publishers) entitled TIGERS Hearted Teams is available in November 2009. Her new book TIGERS Among Us: 5 Winning Business Team Cultures And Why, Three Creeks Publishing will release in March 2010. To receive publishing discounts, subscribe to the free TigerTracks Newsletter here. - Visit Dianne Crampton's Website |
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Kim CastleWith nearly two decades in the advertising and design business, with clients like Domino's Pizza, General Motors, Direct TV, Pedigree, Wolfgang Puck, Higher Octave Music, Hollywood Celebrity Products, Disney, and Paramount, as well as thousands of entrepreneurs around the world define, structure, communicate, and position their business for greater profits, BrandU(R) co-creators Kim Castle and W. Vito Montone discovered that entrepreneurs could experience the same power that big brands command for a fraction of the cost with the world's only process-based results-drive Integral approach to business creation. BrandU(R) is helping entrepreneurs grow with the power of extreme clarity from idea...to brand...to market(TM) and helping one million entrepreneurs become successful and whole so that they can make a difference in the world. Are you one of them? If you want to experience clarity all the way to the bank(TM), get started now at http://www.brandu.com. - Visit Kim Castle's Website |
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George LudwigGeorge Ludwig is a recognized authority on sales strategy and peak performance psychology. An international speaker, trainer, and corporate consultant, he helps clients like Johnson & Johnson, Abbott Laboratories, Northwestern Mutual, CIGNA, and numerous others improve sales force effectiveness and performance. Though it's George's strategies and processes that help corporations increase productivity and performance, it's his tremendous energy and dynamism that spark the transformation. Again and again, clients remark on his amazing ability to unleash human capacity and inspire men and women to break out of their comfort zones. The result is a whole new type of salesperson. His customized presentations teach achievers to make stunning advances in their lives. From helping salespeople realize cherished dreams to helping corporations exponentially accelerate revenue streams, George Ludwig leaves audiences and individuals empowered, emboldened, and clamoring for more. George is the best-selling author of Power Selling: Seven Strategies for Cracking the Sales Code and Wise Moves: 60 Quick Tips to Improve Your Position in Life & Business. - Visit George Ludwig's Website |
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