Facilitating Success

Images

« Prev Next »

If you are designing a fun team-building challenge or athletic competition, you may not need to know more than your participants’ level of competitiveness and how the teams are to be divided.

However, in a true experiential learning program, the goal is often to push people out of their comfort zones by creating a dynamic activity that offers processes, roles and responsibilities that simulate the work environment. If the lead facilitator has thorough knowledge of the participants, the company culture and the specific program goals, he or she has a much better opportunity to meet and exceed the client’s expectations.

Additionally, if participants can learn more about their work styles in advance via an assessment, they will have a better foundation to fully maximize both the individual and team learning opportunities.

Facilitating your Facilitator

A quality facilitator, with a background in experiential learning and adult education, is invaluable. He or she can make a team building program with just a few supplies work as well as a full-blown themed team experience with props, themed challenges, music, etc.

In particular, trained facilitators know how to design programs that focus on participants learning by doing and then help them process the information through reflection and discussion, ultimately applying this learning to the workplace.

Can you just send a good facilitator, or team building company, into a program blind, without collecting key information about the company and its participants? Yes, but only if the program goal is to have fun or act as a casual icebreaker.

In most cases, however, when you’re looking at a team building program with specific strategic objectives, the answer is no. It is important to allow the lead facilitator to speak with the person directly responsible for managing the program, and ideally a random sample of participants, in order to design a meaningful program.

We live and work in a fast-paced and competitive world. It is easy to skip this communication step, especially knowing you have secured an excellent facilitator or team building company and that your client (internal or external) is excited about the program. But taking the extra step to allow your lead facilitator an opportunity to conduct a needs assessment will allow you to look like a hero when the program turns out better than expected.

The Right Information

What information can be gleaned from facilitator/program content manager meetings that often cannot by just a planner’s conversation with a client? How about…

• A better understanding of company culture, its norms and style
• Management expectations/goals relating to the program and participants’ true expectations/goals
• The type of experiential learning participants have had previously

• Participants’ ability to work as a team, if they are an intact workgroup or just brought together for this event?

• The team’s current challenges and/or projects

• Where the team wants to be in the future — its “picture of success”

With your program facilitator having a firm grasp on this information and other client-specific issues, you are assured your client’s expectations will be met.

Audience Assessment

From a facilitator’s perspective, it is very helpful to speak with a handful of program participants to understand their perspective and expected outcomes from a team building experience. It is important to give participants the resources they need to maximize their takeaway from the program.

While there are many ways to accomplish this prior to the event (participant surveys, interviews, etc.) and on-site (reflection, discussion and debrief), one unique solution is to have participants complete an online work styles assessment.

While there are several assessments on the market, including Myers-Briggs, DiSC or Insights, a facilitator or team building company is often trained and licensed in only one or two. Discuss with your team building contact which assessment tool the company uses and its potential pros and cons. All assessments should help participants understand their work style (i.e., are you creative and look at the big picture, or exact and focus on the details?), and, if delivered properly, focus on positive ways their style helps their team and what they may need to consider when communicating with others.

It is impossible for these assessments to be perfect (mine suggested I was good with colors and incorporating them in design, which I am not), but they do offer a very comprehensive and amazingly on-target evaluation of how you interact with others.

If a facilitator or team building company has these tools available, the extra investment in incorporating it into your program can be very valuable. Since a quality team building program mimics a work environment, if a participant knows he or she usually takes the lead, this is an opportunity to let others lead and experience the team process from another perspective.

By contrast, if a participant tends to be very analytical, it gives him or her a chance to take a risk and make decisions before all the information is in. Obviously, mistakes in a team building atmosphere may pale in comparison to mistakes in the work environment, but this simulated risk-taking may give that person added encouragement to act similarly in the future.

One word of warning: As helpful as assessments are to understanding a person’s approach to work, they should not be used in a negative context, or be forced to be shared with others, including the lead facilitator, without a participant’s approval. We can all improve our way of communicating with others, both at work and beyond, and there should never be any negative connotations to our efforts to better understand who we are and how we fit in with a team.

About the author: Ed Graziano

Ed Graziano is the founder of Chicago-based Corporate Event Enterprises, a national supplier of interactive and team-based programs for event and meeting planners.

Contact: ed@corpevent.com