Week 13 Coaching Assignment - Group and Team Facilitation

By Muriel Guillod

One of the worst facilitation experience that I ever had actually happened here at the University Laval. Even though I’ve had plenty of group work during my study life (6 years at university) and my work life (5 years within the same organisation), I never experienced so many problems that in my group project for a management class. The final project of this course consists of a case-study analysis, where we have to encompass the theory studied in class during the whole semester. We started to work on the project early, so as not to be in a rush at the end of the semester. Indeed, our first meeting was already before the reading week. I was sure we would do a great job, be able to identify the problems raised in the case-study, talk about the causes and consequences, find solutions and recommendations and eventually split the writing so as to be as efficient as possible. Of course, the first meeting was a bit messy: we needed to brainstorm, try to make sense of the task, and organise our ideas. Therefore, we decided of a strategy to divide the work: everyone should analyse the case at the light of some specific theories. As a result, we came up with a whole bunch of problems, causes, consequences… We’ve been analyzing the problem so deeply, that we got lost into the details, loosing track of the bigger picture. We’ve been meeting every week since the break, usually for at least 3 hours long, and every time I was entering the meeting full of hope that we will get some clearer direction, and every time I went out of the meetings exhausted, and quite disappointed about the progresses made – or should I say the non-progresses made. These meetings have been costing me a lot of energy and time, without being really rewarding, as the grades were not worth the effort put into it.

So why have those meetings always been going so badly – and still are? Well, of course one obvious reason is that we lack a facilitator. First of all, we are lacking a true leader, someone who sets directions and make the group move forward. Above that, no one is neutral and fully detached: every student is involved into the project and wants to reach a certain level of quality in order to get a good grade. On the other hand, even though everyone wants to go into the same direction, is engaged in the sense that he or she cares about the quality of the decision taken, no one is able to formulate clear decisions nor to enact the decisions taken, not even to take responsibility for the group processes. For instance, we have never set any kind of group rules or norms. As a result, it happens that suddenly people start talking about their personal lives, another course or projects that they are currently doing, and any other kind of topics. Even though there is always someone to stop the discussion and re-center it towards our project, we loose precious time and more importantly our focus and the bigger picture of what was being discussed before.

I have the feeling that we would have needed an external person to figure out the dynamics of the group, help us make sense of everything that we have to say and take the best of each of us. By being non-judgemental and detached, an external facilitator would probably have eased our decision-making process. A good facilitator would have been able to bring us to a new level of awareness or courage, thus helping us being way more effective. For instance, we’ve been lacking a way to cope with divergent opinions and opposing ideas. So far, when team members are not able to find a common ground, we feel kind of a bitterness fulfilling the room, but we’re not able to properly solve the problem and agree on one solution. A facilitator would probably have helped us deal with that, by developing our skills in smoothly confronting our colleagues. Due to our numerous meetings, each of them seemingly quite alike as the previous ones, most of us – or at least for sure myself – have lost hope of finding a way to come up with a good structure for our project. A good facilitator would have been able to galvanize hope among the team and convince us that the effort is worth making. Maybe, he would have even been able to read in ourselves and make us discover how to follow our intuitions and inner voices. Most certainly, we would have needed a facilitator able to help us focus our energy at the service of the task, what is called intentionality meaning to take whatever it takes to deal with the situation. Finally, it is very likely that a good facilitator would have helped us take the most of this group experience, even if it has been a very tough job. He would have known how to make us take the best out of it and learn from it, take some lessons out of it. To some extent, he would have brought us some sense of wonder which, at this stage, we are honestly not able to develop by ourselves.