Facilitation

Skilled facilitation ensures that your planning session produces results and builds commitment.  Organizations make a significant investment when they take away a senior team for hours or days to make plans and solve problems.  A skilled facilitator helps ensure the payoffs—clear direction, actionable decisions and plans, and high levels of commitment.

Our Expert Facilitators™ help ensure that groups collaborate to solve organizational problems, make wise decisions, and commit to action. A Facilitator is not a meeting manager, but a skilled neutral partner who helps you capitalize on the power of groups. 

What do AlexanderHancock Expert Facilitators™ do?

• Meet with you to understand the objectives, success criteria, the context, the group members, relevant history, the issues facing the group, and anticipated obstacles to success

• Work with you to plan the process, agenda(s), and the communication to stakeholders

• Provide to those steering the process guidance and expert counsel based on years of experience

• Apply their expertise in group dynamics to ensure open and productive dialogue

• Keep groups focused and moving

• Help groups adhere to their own ground rules

• Ensure that issues are brought to closure

• Provide a written summary of group decisions and actions

• Make themselves available by phone or email to respond to on-going questions or concerns

Where is Expert Facilitation™ needed?

• Planning retreats for management teams and elected officials

• Strategic planning processes at all levels

• Key task forces working on important, often enterprise-wide, projects

• Any situation where stakeholders have conflicting views, goals, or agendas

• Any situation where the usual meeting leader needs to be free to participate

What are the payoffs for investing in an outside Facilitator?

• Group members commit to decisions because they can see their fingerprints on it.

• A high degree of consensus develops through open and productive dialogue.

• Group members have greater respect for and openness with each other.

• All relevant points of view get aired.

• Long-standing troublesome issues get brought to closure.

• Creative solutions are developed for complex problems.

• Group members learn to practice effective group process behaviors.

• More is accomplished in less time.

• Groups gain the benefit of expert guidance and counsel on the organizational issues they face.

Case Study  

Traditionally the Departments of city governments have operated as separate entities, disconnected silos loosely forming a confederation rather than a cohesive enterprise. While this approach worked reasonably well in the past, rapid changes in recent years have prompted progressive public administrators to redesign their business processes.

Several years ago, the progressive CEO of a large municipality identified collaborative problem solving at the leadership level as essential for successfully addressing the complex issues facing the community.  She asked AHA to facilitate a planning retreat at which this challenge would be the focus. In planning meetings, we asked if she was willing to make collaborative problem solving a part of the Department heads’ accountabilities. She agreed to communicate this at the retreat.  

At the retreat we facilitated several group exercises to explore what collaborative behavior meant and where it might be in conflict with running their own Departments, barriers and obstacles to collaborative behavior and how to overcome them, designing a structure for collaborative work, and identifying strategic issues demanding collaborative work. In addition, the group developed their own operating procedures and guidelines.  

The Department Heads were organized into two strategic problem-solving teams, one focusing on organizational issues and the other on external or community issues. These teams began meeting monthly and for the next two years we were asked to facilitate these meetings, as well as at the annual management team retreats. Our contribution was to ensure a strategic focus, provide strategic thinking tools and guidance, work with a staff liaison to ensure a results-focused agenda for each meeting, facilitate to ensure a valuable product or output from each meeting, ensure full and free dialogue, help the group abide by its own operating procedures and guidelines, and ensure follow up and closure of open items.  

Periodic self-assessment in each team showed a high degree of satisfaction with the new processes. Tough and sometimes sensitive issues were getting addressed, business processes were streamlined, and creative solutions were developed and implemented. Most importantly, the Department Heads, who for the most part had typically focused on operational issues within their own department, began to engage with their colleagues on a strategic level about issues that touched many departments across the organization. This was not only a process change, it was a culture change.

Links

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Strategic Planning

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