Schuman S. - The IAF Handbook of Group Facilitation (2005)(en)

It may not be most appropriate to use the meaning-centered approach in times of emergency, when tough decisions need to be made quickly. In such situations, individuals given the responsibility, expertise, and position to make decisions should be allowed to do so without the elaborate exercise of team building and consensus building among all members. This approach may not be effective in electronic meetings, because it would be difficult for the facilitator to create a climate of trust, caring, and safety through digital media.

Once you make a commitment to three fundamental values and beliefs (respect for human dignity, appropriate stakeholder voice, and a belief in the power of collaborative action) everything changes: how you lead, how you organize, how you reward employees, how you use technology, and what new skills and competencies are required. (For the case for collaborative organizations and communities, see Straus, 2002.) For the purposes of this chapter, collaborative organizations have the following characteristics:

•Aligned around shared purpose and meaning as expressed in vision, mission, values, and strategic direction

•Organized collaboratively across a number of dimensions

•Dependent on core skills of facilitative leadership, teamwork, and collaborative problem solving

•Committed to supporting and rewarding lifelong learning and teamwork

•Socially responsible

•Enabling collaboration and access to information by using new technologies

•Reliant on a new social contract of rights and responsibilities between the organization and employee

A successful systemic change effort must address all aspects of an organization. In addition to culture, you must bring into alignment the reward systems, technology systems, and organizational structure. That is why an effective organizational change effort will likely have to involve other disciplines in addition to facilitation. In this chapter, I address only the cultural aspects of change and focus on organizations, although most of these approaches apply to communities as well. By culture, I mean the norms, values, beliefs, and basic assumptions of an organization (Schein, 1985). In a collaborative culture, the expectation is that everyone will work collaboratively with the maximum appropriate level of stakeholder involvement. A collaborative environment has been built when the following conditions exist:

•Leadership has made an explicit commitment to the core values of collaboration and is demonstrating this commitment through its actions.

•Critical issues throughout the organization are being resolved successfully through collaborative action.

•Managers and employees throughout the system have acquired and are successfully applying collaborative attitudes, skills, and behaviors within their normal work environments.

•A corps of internal change agents with the necessary skills of training, facilitation, conflict resolution, and change management has been developed, and its services are widely used.

CONDITIONS FOR SUCCESS

In my experience, organizations come to understand the strategic importance of a collaborative culture and consciously commit to building it only after completing several successful and significant collaborative efforts. First comes the problem: how to build alignment around a new strategic plan, how to downsize with maximum employee support, or how to increase customer satisfaction, for example. Next, the organization experiences a measure of success in tackling a number of these strategic issues collaboratively. This leads it to realize that cultural change is a necessary and efficient way of institutionalizing collaborative capabilities. Leaders begin to ask how to make collaboration the norm, how to spread collaborative capabilities through the organization, and how to become less dependent on outside process consultants and trainers.

If you want to be in a position to support an organization to change its culture, there are some important implications for you as a consultant and facilitator. First, you and your colleagues must have been lead consultants in the design and facilitation of one or more collaborative efforts involving top management. You must have facilitated some strategic meetings with the leadership team and have worked closely with the CEO. Moreover, the CEO must see you as a respected adviser and coach, and you must trust each other. Undertaking a cultural change effort requires a huge leap of faith on the part of a leader. This person will need to trust that you will be there when needed, can offer honest feedback, and possess the experience and credibility to provide the required consulting and training services.

Indeed, you must be seen as more than a facilitator or trainer. You can support an existing change effort from below, but to partner in the leadership of change process, you must be working with the top team. The internal human resource (HR) department staff should be allies but not, as so often happens, gatekeepers to the top. This is a difficult triangular relationship to manage. You need to have

open access to the CEO and top leadership and be included in strategic meetings, an access the director of HR may not have. At the same time, you need a good working relationship with the internal training and organization development departments, which should see this effort as a way of increasing their strategic impact and role in the organization.

THE CHALLENGES OF SYSTEMIC CHANGE

At some point, you must answer the inevitable question: How do we institutionalize collaboration throughout the organization? Systemic change is incredibly difficult. In times of stress, organizational systems tend to snap back to old behaviors unless new norms are deeply ingrained. Ask fellow consultants how many clients have successfully implemented some change that is still in place five years after the intervention was completed. Usually it does not take many fingers to count. This has been true in my career as well. Therefore, I offer the following ideas with great humility, realizing what a difficult task it is to build a truly collaborative culture.

I work from a few basic assumptions about systemic change:

•You cannot consult or train your way to change. You must do both. Doing and learning to do feed off each other and must go hand in hand. You learn a great deal by participating in a well-facilitated collaborative effort. And when you learn new collaborative skills, you become a more effective leader and participant.

•Change must occur simultaneously in many parts of an organization. Otherwise, the system at large will seal itself off from the innovation as if from an infection. If one part of an organization is getting all the attention and resources, resentment can build elsewhere. If the intervention is seen as being focused only on the top or bottom of the organization, other parts will discount it.

•The change must be seen as a strategic response to some internal or external challenge, the so-called burning platform phenomenon, where standing still is not an option.

•Dealing with the problem must be seen as critical to survival and growth.

•Top leadership must model the values and behaviors of the new culture.

•Other organizational systems—rewards and recognition, technology, and structure—must be aligned to support the cultural change.

A FIVE-PRONGED APPROACH TO BUILDING A COLLABORATIVE ENVIRONMENT

Based on these principles and mindful of the difficulty of the tasks, I offer a fivepronged approach to building a collaborative environment.

Link the Change to the Organization’s Mission and Strategy

The first prong is to build leadership and ownership at all levels of the organization by linking the change to the mission and strategy and forming a cross-functional, multilevel team to guide and own the change effort.

A basic principle of collaboration is that if you do not agree on the problem, you will never agree on the solution. Building a collaborative environment must be seen as a solution to a strategic issue, not just a good thing to do. There must be some pressing business reason to become more collaborative and cross-functional. Otherwise the change effort will fail as soon as economic hard times hit.

In general, a cultural change effort should be preceded by a strategic planning process. Fortunately, the need to increase collaboration is a strategic issue for many organizations today as they try to respond to escalating customer demands. In industries such as health care, manufacturing, financial services, and energy, customers expect integrated solutions delivered globally. Teamwork across disciplines and geographies is essential. However, an organization must arrive at this conclusion itself. The logic and rationale for increased collaboration must be clear to all, and this usually means an effective process of strategic thinking, which itself should be conducted with maximum stakeholder involvement.

The cultures of organizations are finely crafted systems—even in their dysfunctionality. Everyone colludes in maintaining the existing culture, even though many may complain vociferously. Everyone gets something out of maintaining the way things are, even if it is just predictability. Therefore, the first phase of a cultural change process should begin with describing and acknowledging responsibility for the current norms, values, and behaviors. People in the organization must look at how things actually work—not at the professed values and procedures but at the unwritten rules of the road. To get at the current norms, we often ask the question this way: “If you were briefing a new member of your team about how to get along, how to fit in, what would you tell him or her about how to succeed— how not to rock the boat?” This often elicits smiles from the group and makes it okay to discuss matters that are usually left unsaid.

Some of the norms and values may be positive, and the organization may want to hold on to them. Others may be clearly destructive and inappropriate for the culture it wants to build. Leaders must make it comfortable for people to discuss the current culture but, more important, to acknowledge their role in keeping things the way they are. It is important for leaders to model openness and vulnerability, to take responsibility for how they collude in the negative aspects of the current culture. If leaders cannot do these things themselves, they cannot expect them of their direct reports.

A good example of this kind of leadership comes to mind. Hospitals are notorious for adversarial relationships between administrators and physicians. In one hospital where I did consulting work, everyone (president, physicians, administrators, nurses, even the board) complained about a very autocratic, command- and-control culture and open warfare between the president and the division chiefs, who were physicians. After some coaching and the creation of an appropriate setting, the president openly admitted to his physician chiefs that he rather liked the fighting—that it kept him in control and kept the chiefs from developing too much power. Besides, he had to meet with them only for two hours each month.

The division chiefs admitted that they too colluded in the system. By conducting one-on-one budget negotiations with the president, each division chief thought he could make a better deal for his division and did not have to worry about tradeoffs with other divisions. Both the president and the division chiefs confessed to each other that they would have to give up these perceived benefits if they were to move to a more collaborative culture, one they agreed they needed to survive in a rapidly changing, competitive external environment.

In another example, the administration of a large private school I worked with wanted to become less paternalistic and more collaborative in its decision making. The breakthrough occurred when the vice president realized that she treated the president very formally and never confronted him directly when she disagreed with him. She (and he) saw that this behavior communicated to the management team and the rest of the school that openness and directness were not welcomed or permitted. Real progress was not possible until they acknowledged that their actions sent the wrong message and then changed their behavior.

It is important to balance the top team’s ownership of the effort with involvement from other levels of the organization. A senior leadership team can easily become insulated and may not be the best judge of what is going on in other parts

of the organization. Even if the senior leaders are working very hard on their own teamwork and collaboration, they may assume the rest of the organization is equally engaged in this effort when it is not.

You can resolve this dilemma through the structure of the strategic planning process itself. While the senior leadership team should be responsible for the overall strategic planning process, it should charter cross-functional, multilevel teams to plan and oversee the implementation of specific strategies. One of these strategies would be concerned with the need to build a more collaborative culture. While the team responsible for this strategy, sometimes called a key result area (KRA), should include one or more members of the senior leadership team, it should also include relevant stakeholders from different parts and levels of the organization— a diagonal slice. Members might include staff from the HR and training departments, middle managers, and employees from the front line of the organization. In this way, the KRA team can provide a reality check on the effects of the change effort. The KRA team should report regularly to senior management and advocate for the necessary resources to support the change effort.

Demonstrate the Power of Collaborative Action

The second prong of the approach is to demonstrate the power of collaborative action throughout the organization by addressing and resolving issues collaboratively.

A powerful feedback loop links facilitating and teaching facilitation. When you facilitate, you are subtly teaching participants about collaborative problem solving; when you are training, you are providing opportunities for participants to practice their skills on work-related problems, as well as showcasing your skills as a facilitator. To put it another way, the change you want is the change you begin with. If you want to build a collaborative culture, you must work collaboratively from the beginning. There is no better way to build credibility for the effectiveness of multistakeholder collaborative problem solving than to resolve a strategic business issue by means of a highly visible collaborative planning process.

Often managers resist trying a new idea or process with their own direct reports until they have experienced it somewhere else. For example, after a manager participates in a facilitated meeting convened by someone else, he or she may be willing to try facilitation in his or her own meetings. A theory of change that emerged in the 1980s maintained that rather than targeting your existing organization, you should create a parallel informal organization that models the behaviors and skills that you want and then let the formal organization begin to absorb these new

behaviors. In other words, rather than demanding that all managers become more facilitative, top leadership should involve these managers in collaborative planning efforts. Managers can witness that their leaders are serious about stakeholder involvement and that consensus can be developed efficiently around strategic issues. Then, if offered training and consulting support, these managers can introduce more collaborative management practices in their own work groups and organizational units. While at some point senior leadership must make clear that facilitative leadership and appropriate stakeholder involvement are expected to become the norm, these parallel collaborative efforts can be an effective front-end phase of building a more collaborative environment.

Build the Collaborative Capability of the Workforce

The third prong is to increase the number of people at all levels of the organization who have internalized collaborative skills and applied them to real issues.

Collaboration requires an integrated way of looking at the world. It involves new mind-sets and skill sets as well as heart sets. While your heart may learn through experience, your mind and skills can be trained. The collaborative capability of a workforce can be built through an integrated curriculum of skill training in such areas as facilitative leadership, facilitation, teamwork, process design and management, strategic thinking, and coaching. The challenge is to determine who needs what training and when. Not everyone needs to be an expert facilitator or process designer. Only a few need to be good process trainers. People need different but related skills depending on their role or function. What is important is building a common language about collaboration and problem solving, and ensuring that different training modules easily integrate and build on each other. It is very helpful if everyone means the same thing when using terms such as process, content, strategy, vision, strategic moment, stakeholder, solution space, facilitation, and sponsor.

The best learning moment is when you have a need to know but have not struggled so long that you are frustrated and want to give up. Training is most effective when it is delivered just-in-time and can relate to a specific need. This usually implies that training is delivered on-site by internal resources. It is important that collaborative skills training is available when needed and can be delivered to intact teams. This kind of training is powerful because real work issues can be used, and the skills transferred are directly related to the task at hand.

Training is best conceived as a learning process rather than a specific event or workshop. Participants need to be supported after classroom workshops in order