Sunland Construction

Joe Cimbak

I 'd like to start with my operational definition of meeting facilitation. It is ‘the management of agenda design to achieve desired outcomes plus behavioral management techniques within a meeting to keep participants heading toward meeting goals.’

Given that definition, what does it take to become a company with excellent cultural facilitation skills? What are the key factors for success? I'd like to focus the remainder of this article on that.

If you want your company to be good at ‘meeting facilitation,' there are two intertwined work components.

1. Gain commitment from executive leadership to build facilitation into the company's culture.

2. Select and train the right people on how to design agendas and then how to manage behaviors inside of meetings.

To begin, you must educate executives on what meeting facilitation is, and then they need to make these executive commitments.

• A paradigm shift in the company culture for using facilitation in all key meetings.

• Agreement to select and train the right internal people to become practicing meeting facilitators.

• Allow trainees to be away from normal work during classroom training while developing post-training skill practice and then frequent use thereafter for all major company meetings.

• Demand that trainees are required for all large group meetings taking place in the future. This is amplified when executives call for the facilitation of their own key executive meetings, such as strategic planning meetings.

• Agreement to allow trainees to do skill development with cross-organizational work groups. This is because the best crucible to practice skills is with work groups the trainee does not know.

• A financial budget for the role of an internal project manager, such as an organization development professional who sources and manages external skill development trainers and who oversees the development of internal facilitators.

These commitments must be in place if meeting facilitation hopes to become embedded in the culture. During the last decade of my career, I have experienced executives asking, ‘Can you do it in an hour? Can you do it for no cost?' These requests degrade proven approaches, rendering them ineffective at building more than an awareness of the skill.

As I reflect upon my experience learning the world of ‘facilitation’ at United Technologies (now Raytheon Technologies RTX), I recall that any time UTC did something, they did it 'right.' After all, they make spacesuits and jet engines, and those must work, so they also built facilitation skills quite well.

Our program was about three weeks of classroom skill training delivered by experts who came out of the University of Tennessee, along with at least a couple of months of mentored skill development where newly trained facilitators mentored under the external partners in actual meeting facilitation. Part of the model suggested that people selected for the role of facilitator would leave their incumbent roles during the training and mentoring period and that there would be no negative employment impact on them at the end of the development work. Total immersion.

UTC invested heavily in my training, and I took it quite seriously. By the time I was ‘certified’ by our TN partners, I was being asked to facilitate executive-level boardroom meetings. Quite scary? Well, no, because I had to pass muster with my mentors by that time, so I was ready.

So, I ask you – are you doing facilitation skills training for culture change, or are you just playing with the skillset? Because the answer to your question can have lasting meaning for your company!

Leadership at UTC used their group of meeting facilitators a lot. The executives got used to turning agenda design over to us because they knew if we helped them design it, we could then move the groups to the end zone. We agreed with them that a good facilitator could handle about 7-10 teams for continuous support. So, as the culture demanded more and more facilitation skills, we had a simple rubric to decide how many facilitators to put into training.

At one point in time, our business declined, and we started to lay off employees, but our facilitation team seemed to be immune. Then I was asked to bring the facilitator cadre budget into a meeting, and I thought for certain we would have to take a haircut. Instead, the VP of Finance gave a speech supporting facilitation, saying, “We have fewer people, and we are more productive per person now, and I can only attribute that to our work in building a facilitation culture.”

I was ever so lucky later in my career to find myself at Columbia Gas, which then became NiSource. The executives there were even better at knowing how to use meeting facilitators, and my career was ever so rewarded because of it. I have earned a good and honest living doing a lot of facilitation.

So, I ask you – are you doing facilitation skills training for culture change, or are you just playing with the skillset? Because the answer to your question can have lasting meaning for your company!