The IAF Handbook of Group Facilitation

Best Practices from the Leading Organization in Facilitation

Sandy Schuman

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118429648
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Organisational Behaviour
• Index: Business

Sponsored by the International Association of Facilitators, The IAF Handbook of Group Facilitation offers the need-to-know basics in the field brought together by fifty leading practitioners and scholars. This indispensable resource includes successful strategies and methods, foundations, and resources for anyone who works with groups. The IAF Handbook of Group Facilitation provides an overview of the field for new and aspiring practitioners and a reliable reference for experienced group facilitators, including chapters on

• Creating positive ongoing client relationships
• Building trust and improving communications
• Facilitating group brainstorming sessions
• Drawing out the best in people
• Developing a collaborative environment
• Designing and facilitating dialogue
• Managing conflicting agendas
• Working with multicultural groups
• Using improvisation
• Understanding virtual meetings
• Facilitating team start-up
• Assessing group decision processes
• Building expertise in facilitation
• Reviewing core facilitation competencies
• Modeling positive professional attitudes

Part One

Create Collaborative Client Relationships

1. Develop working partnerships.

• Clarifies mutual commitment
• Develops consensus on tasks, deliverables, roles, and responsibilities
• Demonstrates collaborative values and processes such as in cofacilitation

2. Design and customize applications to meet client needs.

• Analyzes organizational environment
• Diagnoses client need
• Creates appropriate designs to achieve intended outcomes
• Predefines a quality product and outcomes with client

3. Manage multisession events effectively.

• Contracts with client for scope and deliverables
• Develops event plan
• Delivers event successfully
• Assesses or evaluates client satisfaction at all stages of the event or project

Chapter One

The Big Picture

Creating an Ongoing Client Relationship

Nadine Bell

Susan Nurre

We received a call from Judith, an information technology (IT) executive in search of facilitation training for her team of project managers. We explored in general terms what she was seeking and arranged a meeting to talk in more detail about her needs.

Arriving at the meeting prepared with materials and questions, we began our discussion with the specifics of the requested facilitation class. We then asked Judith how her team would use the facilitation tools that we would be teaching and what problems she hoped these skills would address. During our meeting, Judith and we exchanged ideas, experiences, and methodologies as we established rapport and began to build a foundation of credibility and trust. It became clear through the interview that besides general facilitation, Judith wanted her team to learn how to apply those skills to specific IT sessions.

When we asked about our competition, we learned that we knew both of the other candidates since we were all part of the local facilitator network. We told Judith that although we wanted her to choose us, she would not go wrong with any of her choices.

Later that afternoon, Judith called requesting some information on mind mapping. We quickly pulled together and e-mailed some resources, then followed up with a telephone call.

We delivered our proposal to her within a few days, recommending two classes and follow-on coaching for maximum success. Shortly after, she accepted our proposal, and we delivered the classes. Two weeks later, we met with Judith to debrief the classes, review the evaluations, and discuss next steps.

At a celebratory dinner, Judith shared that she had received many positive comments about the training. She had told a number of people, both inside and outside the company, that she thought our training would be of great benefit to them. Judith also recommended opportunities to showcase our services, such as speaking at the local Project Management Institute meetings. During the course of the conversation, we also explored her current challenges. We brainstormed a variety of solutions, identified where we could provide assistance, and recommended other resources for services that were beyond our expertise.

At a subsequent luncheon meeting, we agreed that our interactions were so rich that we wanted to take our collaboration to a new level. We discussed submitting a proposal to deliver a joint session on facilitation and project management at the 2004 IAF conference.

Since that time, Judith has referred colleagues to us and asked us to submit another proposal for both a repeat of the course we delivered and two additional courses.

As we continue to keep in touch with follow-up telephone calls, e-mail, and occasional lunches, we offer Judith assistance in defining issues and brainstorming solutions. We also serve as a sounding board for her ideas and make referrals to resources to meet her specific needs. When other managers ask her for assistance with their challenges, she does not hesitate to recommend us because our continued, productive contacts have kept our name and services fresh in her mind.

CREATING THE BIG PICTURE

Developing a relationship with clients based on trust and collaboration goes beyond working with them to prepare for a single workshop or series of sessions. The skills we use to design and facilitate sessions—clarifying mutual commitment, customizing the session to meet the client’s needs, emphasizing collaborative values and processes, deciding which participants to include, and reaching understanding on scope, deliverables, roles, and responsibilities—do not merely result in successful sessions.

We use these same skills to establish rapport, credibility, and trust with our clients as we help them look beyond the current engagement to the big picture in which they define their problems from a comprehensive organizational point of view. It is through this process that we establish mutually beneficial partnerships that provide our clients with a trusted adviser to help them define their problems, explore possible solutions, and refer to appropriate resources (books, courses, and other people). These partnerships provide us a source of repeat business as well as positive referrals to other potential clients.

As we use our facilitation skills to help our clients broaden their view and fit their immediate needs into their Big Picture, we make it a point to:

Be prepared.

Interview effectively.

Gain trust.

Practice empathetic listening.

Invest in quality.

Communicate intentionally.

Think about clients.

Understand needs.

Recognize challenges.

Evaluate satisfaction.

BE PREPARED

Preparation is the backbone of our facilitation. (See Chapter Four.) The preparation we do at the front end of a facilitation session—understanding the objectives, interviewing the client and participants, crafting sample deliverables, and designing a suitable agenda—lays the foundation necessary to achieve the desired results.

That same focus on preparation is important in managing client relationships and helping clients to see their challenges within the context of the Big Picture. Being prepared for client interactions before and after the session is as important to creating an ongoing client relationship as being prepared for all that we do during the session. Being prepared builds trust, nurtures the client relationship, and develops clients’ confidence in our ability to meet their needs.

As we prepare for each interaction with our clients, we determine the objective of the client meeting and design a suitable agenda for accomplishing the objective. For some of our interactions, we may conduct research on the Web, review periodicals, read company materials, and talk with others in order to learn about their company and industry; identify legislative, economic, and environmental issues affecting their business; and become aware of what their competitors are doing.

Just as preparation pays off in a facilitated session, there are many dividends to the preparation we do to nurture client relationships. The better prepared we are, the easier it is to ensure that we achieve the objectives we set for our client relationships: ongoing partnership, additional work, and positive referrals.

INTERVIEW EFFECTIVELY

When we ask facilitators what their most versatile tool is when facilitating a session, they often answer, “Questions.” We ask questions of potential clients to obtain the information we use to determine whether to accept an assignment and, if we do accept it, how to proceed. During the session, we ask questions to get information, clarify what was said, elicit more detail, and determine if we have consensus.

Well-phrased questions assist clients to identify issues, concerns, and goals that are broader than our current assignment. By taking a Big Picture view, we encourage clients to explore both the scope of a single engagement and the way it fits into the organization’s initiatives for the year. In addition, questions are excellent tools to learn about circumstances that currently exist elsewhere in the company and explore in what other ways we may be of service.

We have found that using the journalist’s questions—who, what, when, where, and how—is the most effective way to help clients identify issues because these questions provide data with which we can work. We tend not to ask “why” questions because they are likely to put people on the defensive and often produce one of two nonproductive answers: “I don’t know” or “Because.”

We ask questions to determine what is in place to support the successful integration of the product of the session. Questions that explore obstacles to success, bottlenecks, and emerging problems reveal information that will assist us in maximizing the results of the session and surface additional areas in which our services can provide valued assistance.

Questions designed to explore the likely impact of industry trends and practices on our client expand the perspective to the Big Picture. Through our questions, we can discern if it is important to the client to be on the cutting edge in his or her industry, what it would take to achieve that end, and how we might assist in reaching that goal. By enlarging our clients’ perspective to the industry as a whole, we help them to anticipate and plan rather than react.

Many of the same questions that we use to ask clients about a specific engagement can be broadened to help them focus on the Big Picture. Examples of Big Picture questions include:

• What are the key issues and problems with which your company is dealing?
• How do these affect your department?
• Who are the stakeholders outside your department who are affected?
• How will the resolution of these issues affect other teams, departments, and divisions in your company?
• What are your competitors doing regarding these issues?
• What is a trend in your industry that you believe will affect your company? When did it emerge?
• What areas need improvement to stay abreast of the developments in your industry?

A good resource for session-related questions that could be broadened into Big Picture questions is The Skilled Facilitator (Schwarz, 2002). Schwarz identifies four areas—process, structure, organizational context, and behaviors—for which he has developed a series of questions to help diagnose the client’s issues and determine whether to work together. For the Big Picture, we can identify which of Schwarz’s questions are appropriate for the particular client’s situation and broaden their perspective beyond asking about a specific engagement. Asking about a session, Schwarz uses the question, “In what ways does the organization help or hinder the group?” (p. 279). The Big Picture question, “What is it about our organizational culture that has a negative impact on our people and puts them at risk?” could help a floor covering company focus on what is happening within the entire company that results in the manager of every one of their stores suffering a heart attack.

Whether exploring a single engagement or managing a productive client relationship, effective questions assist us in putting clients in touch with information we can use to support them in achieving their objectives.

GAIN TRUST

In our facilitated sessions, we strive to build trust in order to maximize the people, the process, and the product. (See Chapter Six.) Trust creates a safe environment that enables the participants to open up and share freely without criticism. We build trust by providing operating agreements on communication, respect, and confidentiality, as well as using inclusive techniques to encourage broad participation.

When we have created a relationship that is built on trust, clients are more willing to explore their problems and challenges with us as we address their Big Picture.

We establish our trustworthiness by demonstrating reliabili...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Preface
• About the Contributors
• A Superlative Task
• Part One: Create Collaborative Client Relationships
• Part Two: Plan Appropriate Group Processes
• Part Three: Create and Sustain a Participatory Environment
• Part Four: Guide Group to Appropriate and Useful Outcomes
• Part Five: Build and Maintain Professional Knowledge
• Part Six: Model Positive Professional Attitude
• References
• Name Index
• Subject Index
• How to Use the CD-ROM
• Download CD/DVD content
• End User License Agreement