Chapter Thirteen
Contracting
Deciding Whether and How to Work with a Group
In this chapter, I discuss the contracting stages that you and your clients go through to develop an agreement about whether and how you will work together to help the group accomplish its goals. For each of the stages, I discuss the issues that often arise and how to address them.
Before you agree to work with a group, you want to understand who is asking for help, what the group wants to accomplish, what might prevent it from achieving those objectives, and how the group sees you helping it. Likewise, the group often wants to know about your experience and how you can help it. Through the contracting process, you and the client begin to develop a working relationship by exploring these questions, and you reach an agreement about whether and how to work together.
During the contracting process, you and the client develop the foundation of your working relationship. This contracting approach rests on the premise that only the primary client—the group you will be facilitating—has the relevant information to contract with you. You and your client invest time in the contracting process, recognizing that ineffective contracting almost always leads to problems later.
Why Contract?
Contracting has several purposes. First, it ensures that the group and you understand and are committed to the conditions that govern your working relationship. This means clarifying expectations each of you have for each other: the objectives and boundaries of the work your role and the roles of group members and the formal group leader, how decisions will be made, how you will intervene with the group, any ground rules the group will use, issues of confidentiality, and when the work ends.
Second, because contracting is a microcosm of the larger facilitation, consulting, or coaching, it gives the group members and you an opportunity to observe each other work and to make a somewhat informed choice about whether you want to work with one another. Members can observe how you intervene with the group, and you can observe how they interact with each other and with you. These data help you anticipate some of the issues arising in the project and the kinds of interventions you may need to make.
Third, the contracting process enables the group and you to develop the trust necessary for you to serve in your facilitative role. This trust emerges from a variety of feelings. Group members may wonder whether you will treat them fairly, if you can help them create the future they want, and/or address the difficult conversations they haven't been able to manage effectively on their own. They may be excited about the possibility of improving their group and may feel vulnerable both for needing help in the first place and because you're asking questions about the group. Likewise, you may be excited to be working with a new group, eager to see how you can help it, and somewhat anxious about whether you will like the group and the group will like you. Trust develops as members find that you can help them discuss important topics in a way that doesn't place blame and that combines compassion and accountability, even while recognizing the ineffectiveness of the group's behaviors. As you learn about their situation and they learn about your approach, often your concerns about whether you can help them and whether they will find your approach useful dissipate.
I've learned that many of the problems I face during a project stem from my not having addressed an issue in contracting. Ineffective contracting creates problems later in the work.
Five Stages of Contracting
We usually think of contracting as occurring between the time you initially speak with someone from the client organization seeking the help and the time the client group and you reach agreement about the goals of the facilitation and the conditions under which you and the group are to work together. That describes the predictable part of the contracting process. In addition, you'll likely need to contract and recontract throughout the facilitation process itself.
Exhibit 13.1 shows the five contracting stages. Because the agreement defines how the group and you will work together, ultimately all members involved directly in the facilitation need to be part of the agreement. This ensures that all members are making an informed choice.
Exhibit 13.1 Contracting Stages and Major Tasks
| Stage | Major Tasks |
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Stage 1: Making Initial Contact with a Primary Client Group Member
Stage 1 begins when someone contacts you to explore your facilitating a group he or she is associated with. You may be contacted by e-mail, text, or phone. The heart of this stage occurs either on a phone or video call, or an in-person meeting. In any case, the conversation may take from less than 15 minutes to more than an hour, depending on whether the person contacting you is a member of the group you will be facilitating; how complex the situation is; and on how much the client understands about facilitation in general, and your approach in particular.
Stage 1 has a number of purposes. First, it lets you determine whether the contact person is part of the group asking for help and, as a result, whether and how to continue the initial discussion. It also enables you to identify who the financial client is—the person responsible for paying for the services. Second, it enables you to make an initial diagnosis of the client's situation, to understand the extent to which the client contact can describe the results the group wants, and the degree to which the client has already identified ways to address its needs. Third, the conversation gives the potential client information about your approach. Fourth, you and the contact client use all of the information you have learned from each other to decide whether to move to stage 2 of contracting.
Recognizing Different Types of Clients
As you begin to contract, you'll encounter people who play different roles in the contracting process. It's important to recognize what role each of these people is playing to ensure that you're contracting with—and only with—the people who have the information and ability to contract with you. You may encounter as many as five different client roles.
The primary client is the group that has accepted responsibility for working on the issue—the group that you may eventually facilitate. To ensure that the primary client group and you have relevant and valid information about the situation and that this group can make an informed choice about working with you, only the primary client group can agree to work with you.
However, as Edgar Schein has noted, you encounter other kinds of clients who may or may not also be members of the primary client group (Figure 13.1).1 The contact client makes the initial contact with you. The contact client may be a staff member or an administrative assistant who is not a member of the primary client group but who has been asked to contact a facilitator or consultant on behalf of the primary client. An intermediate client serves as a link between the contact client and the primary client and is involved in the early part of contracting. You might get a call from an administrative assistant (contact client) who asks whether you're available to help her manager work with a group experiencing conflict. In conversation with the manager, it becomes clear that the manager is an intermediate client, not seeking help for himself but for a group of employees. HR managers frequently serve as intermediate clients, helping find a consultant for the leaders and teams they support. The financial client/sponsor is the person who decides whether to fund the facilitation and support it. This may be two different people.
Figure 13.1 Five Types of Clients
Finally, the ultimate clients are “stakeholders whose interests should be protected even if they're not in direct contact with the consultant or manager.”2 The ultimate clients include the organization as a whole, the customers who use the services of the organization or buy its products, and the larger community or society. As Figure 13.1 shows, an individual may fall into more than one client category.
Working with the Contact Client
Because only the primary client group has the information necessary and the ability to contract with you, it's important to quickly determine whether the contact client is a member of the primary client group. You determine this by asking what group would be using your services and whether the caller is a member of that group. After you've determined this, you can ask a series of questions and share relevant information. Exhibit 13.2 lists the questions to ask a contact client.
Exhibit 13.2 Questions to Ask the Contact Client
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If you learn that the contact client isn't a member of the primary client group, you ask who the primary client group is, explain why you need to talk with a member of that group, and give the contact client sufficient general information about yourself to share with the primary client, who can decide whether to contact you.
Identifying the Primary Client Group
Determining who is the primary client isn't always easy. In one case, Ken, a county manager, called me to seek help for his public works director, Harris; some employees felt Harris had acted in a racist manner when he fired an African-American employee. Ken stated that Harris was interested in getting help and asked if I would come in, interview people, and give him (Ken) a report. I described my role and explained how giving him a report would be inconsistent with my role as facilitator. I then said that if Harris was interested in working with me, I would be happy to talk with him. I stated that if I did work with Harris, Ken was, of course, free to talk with Harris about the facilitation, but I wouldn't discuss the content of the facilitation with Ken. Because Ken had described Harris and his staff as having the problem, I defined my primary client as the group that included Harris and his employees.
In another case, Warren, an HR executive from a global bank, called to see if I could help Eduardo, a senior executive, and Helene, one of Eduardo's direct reports. The employees who reported to Helene and Eduardo considered Helene autocratic. Eduardo also believed he needed to improve his own relationship with Helene. In this case, Eduardo was a primary client because he had expressed responsibility for part of the problem—his relationship with Helene. Helene's employees were also primary clients because they were willing to discuss their ineffective relationship with their boss. However, Helene was only potentially a primary client, because she hadn't yet expressed an interest in working on the problem identified by her boss. The principle here is that individuals are not primary clients until they've made a free and informed choice to ask for the facilitator's help.
When There Is No Primary Client
In some cases, the contact client may represent a primary group that doesn't yet exist. The executive director of a health care foundation called to ask whether I was interested in facilitating a large commission to deal with health policy. The commission would comprise public and private leaders, and its report would be used to draft legislation. The foundation would appoint the commission, but no members had yet been appointed, nor had the commission chair been selected. Further, no member of the foundation, including the executive director, would be a member of the commission, so there was no primary client. I talked with the executive director about how I could work with the commission, but I stated that the commission members, when appointed, would need to decide whether they wanted to work with me.
This type of situation isn't unusual. Organizational planners, working on projects that may use a third-party facilitator, often try to identify a facilitator who can be available to the group immediately after it is formed.
After determining that the contact client isn't a primary client, you might say something like, “I'd be glad to talk with you in general about what I do as a facilitator. However, to figure out whether I can be of help to your organization, I would need to talk with the person who heads the group I'll be meeting with. This gives the person and me a chance to make sure that we clearly understand the situation. Do you see any problem in doing this?”
On the basis of the principle that the primary client is responsible for seeking help, I prefer that primary clients call me if they are still interested. This reduces the chance that I will call a primary client who isn't ready to pursue the conversation with me.
When the Contact Client Is a Primary Client Group Member
When the contact client is a member of the primary client group, consider yourself fortunate that you don't have to solve the can-you-find-the-primary-client puzzle. You use the initial conversation and the questions in Exhibit 13.3 to begin to understand the client's situation, identify factors that might affect the success of the facilitation, determine whether you have the skills and interest to facilitate, and discuss your approach to facilitation.
Exhibit 13.3 Questions for Diagnosing the Primary Client Situation
| Opportunity-Oriented Issues |
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| Identifying Problems |
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| Effects of Problems on the Three Group Results |
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| Potential Design Causes—Process, Structure, Organizational Context |
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| Motivation and Resources for Change |
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| Experience with Facilitators and Current Request for Help |
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| Measuring Success and Return on Investment |
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Some primary clients aren't sure what kind of help they need. Others have already defined the problem or opportunity, have identified a specific process for you to facilitate, and want to know whether you can deliver the service they're requesting. In the latter case, you're more useful to the client if you explore with them how they reached their diagnosis and proposed process. This enables you to make your own judgment about the situation and talk with the clients about how your views may differ.
For example, a manager asked that I work with him and his board to develop funding priorities for the county. The manager said the board functioned by funding projects piecemeal, without a consensus on a larger set of goals. In our conversation, the manager also said that his relationship with the board was strained. The board had circumvented his hiring authority and excluded him from other important decisions. It became clear to me that the strained relationship between the manager and board would make it difficult for the group to set funding priorities. The manager agreed with me but was reluctant to discuss the relationship, fearing the situation would become worse. After discussing what could be done to reduce his concerns, he agreed to discuss the relationship with the board. Had I accepted the manager's definition of the problem, I would have worked with the board without understanding the full problem and thereby hindered the chance of their accomplishing the task.
So that clients don't misinterpret the reason for your questions, it's important to share your reasoning with them. After clients briefly describe their situation, you might say, “To figure out whether and how I can help you, I'd like to ask you some questions that improve my understanding of your situation and how you see it. Then I can share my thoughts with you and get your reaction. How does that sound as a next step?”
Conducting an Initial Diagnosis
Whether a group seeks help to solve problems or seize opportunities (for example, acquire another organization or expand its products or services), Exhibit 13.3 lists questions you can ask in the initial conversation with the primary client member. The questions help you identify the client's problem or opportunity, the impact on the group, and the potential causes of the issue or change. They also explore the client's motivation and resources for change, as well as experience the client has had with facilitators and how the current request for help came about. You don't need to ask all of these questions for each client; select them according to the client's situation. You may need to modify some questions according to the specific purpose of the facilitation.
The goal at this stage isn't to develop a complete diagnosis of the client's situation—that's impossible to achieve in one conversation—but to begin the diagnosis and determine whether facilitation is an appropriate method for helping the client. A skilled facilitator is flexible enough to begin diagnosing where the client begins the story, rather than requiring the client to respond in the facilitator's preset order of the questions. In fact, a general principle underlying diagnosis and intervention is to begin with the client's interests and concerns.
The questions about problems, effects on results, and potential causes, which are based on the Team Effectiveness Model I described in Chapter 6, enable you to quickly get an initial understanding of the team. The questions about problems don't correspond to a particular element of the model. Instead, they give clients a chance to begin describing the problem as they see it.
By learning how previous facilitators worked with the group and how the group found those facilitators helpful or not helpful, you can quickly identify what the group might expect from you. You can also start to explore whether you would be a better fit for the group than the previous facilitators they've used.
Understanding how the client came to contact you is also useful information. Knowing who referred the client to you is information about the client's expectations. Finding out whose idea it was to contact you, how the idea was received, and who was involved in deciding to make the contact can also offer information regarding support for you and for facilitation in general.
Describing Your Approach to Facilitation
At some point during the conversation, it's important to describe your approach to facilitation so that the client can make an informed choice about whether the client wants to continue exploring working with you. This includes describing exactly how you would help the group accomplish its goals, explaining why you would do it that way, how you see your role as facilitator, distinguishing between basic and developmental facilitation if it's relevant, and explaining how all this translates into working with the client given the client's situation. The challenge is to describe your approach so that the client gets a clear picture of what you would say and do and why you would do it—all without using facilitation jargon.
By describing your approach in the latter part of the conversation, you're able to refer to some of the issues the client raised with you, and you can refer to your own behavior in the conversation to describe how you would work with the group. You might say:
I'd like to describe how I work as a facilitator and get your reaction. As a neutral party, I don't offer my opinion about the content of your discussions, but I will help the group have the most productive conversation it can have. I'll do a number of things to help that happen. For example, you mentioned that group members often dig in to their preferred solutions and as a result have a hard time making decisions. One thing I would do is help the group members step back from their solutions and identify the underlying needs they're trying to meet through their solution so they're better able to come up with solutions that work for the whole group.
I would also help the group manage its time effectively and efficiently. That means that if I think members are going off the track that they said they wanted to be on, I would point it out, but they would decide how to spend their time. When I think members aren't agreeing on what important words mean, such as strategy or authorization, I'll help them reach a common understanding so there won't be misunderstandings. I'll help members explain the reasoning behind their comments so everyone can better understand what everyone's thinking. I was explaining my reasoning earlier when I explained why I was asking you the questions that I was asking. If I think people are making assumptions about the situation or about each other, I'll help them test out those assumptions so they'll know whether or not they are accurate. This will increase the team's ability to make decisions based on solid information. I tested an inference with you a few minutes ago: I asked if you had asked Alan whether he thought you were micromanaging the group or whether you were just guessing that he felt that way.
In short, I'll help team members be transparent about what they're thinking and be curious about what others are thinking so the team can make informed decisions that ideally everyone can commit to. What are your thoughts about how I would work with your group?
If the group is seeking developmental facilitation, I offer a much more detailed explanation and have a conversation with the client group about whether it wants to learn this approach to build its own capacity.
Assessing Your Interest and Ability to Help
Assuming that facilitation is appropriate for the client's request, during the initial conversation you tell the primary client whether you have the ability to help and whether you're interested. Facilitators sometimes have types of work they prefer to do and types of work they choose not to do. Some facilitators choose not to work with a group that seeks to accomplish objectives at odds with their own strongly held values and beliefs. If you believe strongly that women have the right to control their reproductive lives, you may not be interested in facilitating a group that is seeking ways to make abortion illegal. Likewise, if you believe that life begins at conception and that the rights of that life take precedence over a woman's right to control her reproductive life, you may not be interested in facilitating a group that is seeking ways to increase women's access to abortion. Whatever your values and beliefs, it's important to be aware of how they may affect your interest in working with particular client groups and/or your ability to remain neutral.
Summarizing and Agreeing on Next Steps
After you have enough information to make an initial diagnosis, share it with the member and ask if she sees anything differently. Assuming the issues are appropriate for facilitation and you're interested and able to help, describe how you think you can be most effective with the group, and then ask for the client's reactions.
This is also the time to discuss any decisions or tentative decisions the client group has made that are likely to reduce its ability to achieve its stated objectives and to ask whether the client group is willing to reconsider those decisions. For example, you may note that the group has allocated insufficient time for the objectives it wants to accomplish. Or you may point out that excluding certain individuals is likely to reduce the group's ability to actively discuss the issues on which it seeks consensus. If any group decision is likely to reduce the group's effectiveness to the point where you're unwilling to facilitate unless the decision is changed, state that, share your reasoning, and ask the client if she is open to discussing this.
Finally, you and the client agree on the next steps. If the client is interested in pursuing your help, the next step is for the client to discuss your conversation with the full primary client group. If the group is interested, the contact client can arrange a conference call or meeting with either the primary client group representatives or the full group and you.
Stage 2: Planning the Facilitation
The planning stage is similar to your stage 1 conversation with the primary client group member. The differences are that you're having the conversation with a group and you're actually planning the facilitation. Ideally, this planning meeting occurs in person, but videoconference calls or even phone conference calls can be used. The meeting usually lasts about two hours.
The purposes of this stage are to (1) continue to explore the client's request for help and the factors that affect facilitation, (2) tentatively plan the agenda, and (3) agree on conditions for the facilitation. In the planning session (or sessions, if you need more than one), the client group and you discuss the same kind of information that the primary client member and you discussed in your initial conversation. You also discuss and agree on the conditions of the facilitation and logistical issues: questions that are listed in Exhibit 13.4.
Exhibit 13.4 Questions for Developing an Effective Agreement
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Before the planning meeting, you send a brief letter to the primary group members (through the initial primary group contact) asking that it be distributed to all members invited to attend the planning meeting. (Exhibit 13.5 presents a sample letter.) The letter explains the reason for the planning meeting, the objectives, and offers a proposed agenda for the planning meeting (not the facilitation itself). I usually include an electronic copy of two of my articles: “How to Hire a Team Facilitator,” which describes what to look for when hiring a facilitator, and “Eight Behaviors for Smarter Teams,” which describes the mutual learning behaviors I use as a facilitator and the behaviors I will ask the group if they want to use also.3 Both articles are free to download on the Roger Schwarz & Associates website: www.schwarzassociates.com/resources/articles.
Exhibit 13.5 Sample Planning Meeting E-Mail
| To: | Executive Leadership Team |
| Through: | Julius Marx, CEO |
| From: | Roger Schwarz, President |
| Re: | Planning Meeting for Executive Leadership Team Off-site |
| Date: | October 14, 2016 |
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Who Should Be Involved in the Planning Meeting?
If feasible, it's best to have the full primary client group involved in the planning meeting. This enables you to watch (or listen to) how the full group works together, which is the group you'll be facilitating. It also increases the chance that you'll hear and be able to resolve any differing views among team members about what the facilitation purpose, process, and your facilitative role should be.
In basic facilitation, if the entire group is unable to attend the planning meeting, then you can ask for a representative subset of the group to be selected. The key word here is representative, which I explain below. In developmental facilitation and in long-term basic facilitation (that is, basic facilitation lasting more than a few sessions), in which the group is making a significant commitment of time, it's important that all members of the client group be involved in the contracting process after the initial contact. In any case, until the whole group concurs, all agreements between the primary client group representatives and you are tentative.
Finding a Representative Subgroup
If the entire primary client group can't attend the planning meeting, then it's essential that the subgroup that attends is representative of the full group. By representative, I mean the subgroup includes people who together reflect the range and intensity of the differences in the full group that will be relevant to the facilitation. This increases the chance that you and the planning subgroup will have all the relevant information necessary to craft an agenda that the full group can support. If the subgroup isn't representative, those whose views are omitted may not attend the facilitation itself, let alone support decisions made during it.
The subgroup doesn't have to be representative of the full group in every way; only on those dimensions that are relevant to the facilitation. For example, a board of education and its superintendent once asked me to facilitate a meeting regarding the superintendent's performance after the board had voted (four to three) to reduce the superintendent's salary supplement. In this case, the client asked me to work with a subgroup comprising the superintendent and the board chair. However, it was critical to represent two other stakeholders for planning: the groups voting for and against reducing the salary. Because the chair had voted to reduce the salary, we added a member who had influenced others to vote against reducing the salary.
The Problem with the Formal Leader Delegating the Planning to Others
Problems sometimes occur when the formal leader of the group delegates the planning to others. The secretary of a state agency had delegated planning for a retreat of the top 60 leaders to a deputy secretary and a planning manager, both of whom were members of the primary client group. After my initial contact with the planning manager, I reluctantly agreed to plan the retreat with the planning manager and deputy director, with the condition that we would jointly meet with the secretary for the final planning session. In the first two planning meetings, the planning manager and deputy director emphasized that the secretary wanted the retreat to focus on long-term planning. However, in the final planning meeting, in which the deputy secretary, planning manager, and I presented the tentative plan to the secretary, the secretary emphasized the need to focus on building an effective team, given a recent reorganization. As a result, we had to redesign the retreat, which cost the organization more time and effort.
In retrospect, I contributed to the contracting problem. By planning with the deputy secretary and planning director, who were responsible for the retreat, I was trying to honor the division of labor in the organization. But by doing so, I failed to test whether their assumptions about the retreat were the same as the secretary's. We would have quickly discovered the different assumptions and been able to get agreement on them if all of us had met in the beginning of the planning process or if we had sent the secretary an e-mail testing our assumptions.
In some cases, the planning is delegated to an internal consultant who isn't part of the primary client group. An internal Organization Development consultant from a pharmaceutical firm asked me to work with one of the leadership teams he supported. He knew of my work and liked my approach to facilitation, but when I suggested that our next step would be to talk with either the head of the leadership team or the full team, he declined my request. He said that it was his job to contract on behalf of his client and her team. I responded that my interest was to ensure that his client and I—and ultimately the full team—had the relevant information necessary to figure out whether and how to work together and that the only way I knew of achieving that goal was for us to talk directly. I added that I would prefer for him to be part of that conversation. He insisted that he could represent his client and the team, and that I couldn't speak with them before we agreed on the work. I declined to work with him and the leadership he supported.
The principle here is that the planning stage process must allow the facilitator to directly understand and explore the formal leader's relevant information, interests, and assumptions that guide her need for the services she is requesting. Without this access, the facilitator will likely make uninformed choices that will create problems for the group and the facilitator.
Meeting Individually with Group Members and the Problem of Confidentiality
Sometimes clients ask you to meet individually with group members before you meet with the full group. You're likely to receive this type of request when the group is experiencing conflict and mistrust. Once I was asked to facilitate a meeting of the executive director and key individuals in a public health research organization. The executive director asked for my help in part because several incidents in the organization had led her to believe that people didn't trust her. Even before the planning meeting, the executive director told me that individuals would prefer to meet with me individually to discuss the retreat.
In another case, I was asked to facilitate resolution of a dispute between a developer and a town council that was being sued by the developer for not approving a subdivision plan. If the facilitation was successful, the developer would withdraw the lawsuit. The town council wanted to meet with me individually (in a session legally closed to the public) to assess my acceptability to them and to share their concerns with me. The attorney for the developers also wanted to talk with me privately to see whether I was acceptable to her client.
Many facilitators also prefer to meet with individuals before meeting with the full group. But if you meet with group members individually, you can quickly become entangled in and reinforce the group's ineffective dynamics. The facilitator and group members see the meetings as an opportunity for the facilitator to learn how different members think about the group and the challenges it's facing. The facilitator considers these meetings rich diagnostic interviews that can shape the agenda for the group and even for the interventions the facilitator may make. The facilitator reasons that group members will be more forthcoming in individual meetings, especially if they are promised confidentiality, than in the full group meeting—and the facilitator is correct. By the end of these interviews, the facilitator has become the central repository for members' hopes, dreams, and fears about the group. The facilitator may now know more about the group than the group does.
But when you offer confidentiality in this situation, you create a three-horned dilemma that leads you to act incongruently with the mutual learning core values of transparency, informed choice, and accountability. The first horn is this: If you honor the individual confidential conversations, you can't share with the group what individuals said and you certainly can't share who said it. That means if you use any of the information during the facilitation to make an intervention or suggest a process, you can't fully share your reasoning for it. This fails the transparency test. Because members know that you've met with them and others before the meeting, your lack of transparency makes it easy for group members to make high-level inferences about what others told you that led you to intervene the way you did. In short, you're now contributing to potential conflict and mistrust in the group.
For the second horn, even if you obtain permission to share information from the individual sessions, you're still reducing group members' accountability to each other by raising for them the issues that are theirs to raise. In short, you're carrying group members' water.
If you don't meet with members individually, you avoid these problems, but now face the third horn of the dilemma: your concern that you won't find out about important group issues or dynamics until you begin the actual facilitation, and some issues may not get raised at all by group members.
Managing the Three-Horned Dilemma of Confidentiality
There is a way to manage the dilemma of individual meetings. If members ask for individual meetings, it's likely they're facing conflict and mistrust and don't know how to raise these issues safely. The solution lies in jointly creating the conditions for members to say in the group what they want to but feel they cannot say.
You can ask to talk first with the members as a group. You can raise the dilemma that the group and you face, talk with members about their concerns regarding sharing information in the full planning session or facilitation, and ask what leads to these concerns. If members are willing to share some of their concerns, you can then ask, “What would need to happen for you to be willing to raise and address these concerns in the full group?” If group members—including the formal leader—agree to create these conditions (for example, no retaliation for raising an issue), they can then discuss issues that they previously chose not to discuss.
However, if members still don't want to continue planning in the full group, you might agree to talk to individuals or a subgroup if the planning group (1) agreed on how the information discussed in private meetings would be shared in the full group and (2) agreed that the responsibility for raising issues remained with group members. The purpose of these individual sessions would be for you to coach members on whether and how to raise these issues. You help them explore how they can raise the issues they want to discuss, including their concerns about doing so. You can also role-play with them to find the words to do this. You can make the same promise to all group members: “I can't raise your concern for you, but as soon as you raise your concern, I will do everything in my role to make the conversation as psychologically safe and productive as possible.”
Ultimately, each member gets to make a free and informed choice about what to share and what not to. As facilitators, our role is to respect that choice, even if we would make a different one. A nonobvious but powerful implication of combining informed choice, accountability, and the principle “go slow to go fast” is that we serve the group better when we ask each member to control what he or she shares and doesn't share with the group. This may take more time, but it ensures that the group moves no faster than it chooses to move.
Deciding What Ground Rules to Use and How
Ground rules are the rules the group commits to follow when you're working with it. Because the mutual learning approach has a set of eight behaviors that can be used as ground rules, you and the group have three decisions to make.
Three Decisions
First, the members must decide whether they're willing to have you use the eight behaviors to intervene with them. This decision is really about whether they want to work with you at all because it's not possible to use the mutual learning approach without using the eight behaviors. If the group were to tell me that they didn't want me to use the eight behaviors (this has never happened), I would find out what the group's concerns were, and if I couldn't address their concerns, then I would decline the work.
The second decision for the group members to make is whether they want to practice the behaviors during their work with you. The group can revisit this choice if, after practicing and understanding them better, members have new concerns about using them.
In the course of making the first two decisions, the group and you make a third decision: whether to add or modify any ground rules. A group might add a ground rule about whether the information discussed in the meeting is confidential. It's important that any changes or additions be consistent with the underlying mutual learning core values and assumptions. Even if group members decide not to treat one of the eight behaviors as a ground rule, you can still intervene on that behavior if it's decreasing the group's effectiveness.
To help group members make a more informed choice about whether they want to use the eight behaviors, you can attach a copy of the “Eight Behaviors for Smarter Teams” article to the e-mail you send in advance of the planning meeting. You can ask them to read the article so that at the planning meeting you can discuss their questions and reactions. You can explain that the eight behaviors are an important part of your work and that you will recommend they also use the behaviors, if they're willing.
Why I Don't Ask Groups to Develop Their Own Ground Rules
On the belief that group members will support what they have developed, some facilitators ask groups to develop their ground rules for the meeting. This creates two potential problems: (1) Groups may develop ground rules that are inconsistent with effective group process or are too abstract to be useful, and (2) the facilitator isn't transparent about the behaviors he or she is using to diagnose and intervene.
I believe that groups often don't have the ability to identify behavioral ground rules that will help them improve their process. Asking them to generate these ground rules often yields nonbehavioral statements, such as “be respectful,” that mean something different to each group member; suggestions like “praise in public, criticize in private,” that are incongruent with the mutual learning approach; and procedural rules like “turn off mobile phones” that, while perhaps necessary, don't focus on how members will interact.
When groups hire us as facilitators, we represent ourselves as experts in group process. Therefore, it's our responsibility to offer a set of research-validated behaviors that contribute to effective group process. Groups don't have to develop their own ground rules to be committed to them; rather, they need to make a free and informed choice to use them.
Putting the Tentative Agreement in Writing
Assuming you have agreed to work together, by the end of the planning meeting or meetings, the planning group and you will have reached tentative agreement about the issues discussed in Exhibit 13.4 above. The next step is to send a memo stating your understanding of the agreements and asking them to contact you if their understanding differs from yours. Exhibit 13.6 provides a sample agreement for basic facilitation. If the planning group is a subgroup of an intact work group or team, I send the memo to all the members of the primary client group, even if they didn't attend the planning meeting. If the planning group is planning an event for a large group, I usually send the memo only to the planning group members. In any case, if I'm sending the memo to people who haven't previously received a copy of the article “Eight Behaviors for Smarter Teams,” I attach it, explaining that I will use it to facilitate and, if the planning group has agreed, that the full group may also use it during the facilitation.
Exhibit 13.6 Sample Basic Facilitation Tentative Agreement
Putting the tentative agreement in writing enables you to make clear that the agreement isn't final until all group members have given their consent. It also enables all group members to read the agreement before the facilitation and raise any questions or concerns they might have.
Stage 3: Reaching Agreement with the Entire Group
Unless you've been planning with the entire primary client group, in the third contracting stage, you reach agreement with the entire group. This step usually occurs at the beginning of the meeting you're facilitating, when the entire group is present for the first time. But before you seek this agreement, there is an important first step.
Meeting Briefly with Planning Representatives
Before the facilitation begins, have a brief conversation with planning representatives to learn if anything has changed that might affect the contract or the facilitation and to address any remaining logistics. For developmental or long-term basic facilitation, the conversation is relevant each time the group is about to meet.
In a developmental facilitation with a group of school administrators and faculty who were trying to resolve a difficult conflict, I asked someone before a meeting if anything was new. I was informed that the executive director—a focal point of the conflict—had announced his resignation, effective at the end of the school year. Given this, I began the session by asking the group how his resignation affected our work together and whether we should change our contract. Similarly, in working with a global transportation company, I learned on CNN at 6:00 AM that my client had just filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Before our meeting was scheduled to begin at 8:00 AM, I asked the VP whether his group would even be available to meet, given the news, and, if so, how we should proceed.
If the client and you haven't already agreed on the details of starting the first meeting, this is the time to do it. This includes agreeing on who will start the meeting, introduce you as the facilitator, introduce other participants, describe the events that led up to the meeting, and the like.
Reaching Agreement with the Full Group
In short-term basic facilitation, this conversation occurs in the beginning of the meeting, after all the clients and you have introduced yourselves, and a planning group representative and you have described the planning process that has led to the current meeting. You review each key element of the tentative agreement and ask whether anyone has any questions or concerns: (1) meeting purpose and objectives, (2) the agenda and time allocation, (3) the process for each agenda item, (4) ground rules, and (5) roles (including your role, the formal leader, and others).
This is a moment of truth. If the planning subgroup and you have addressed the entire group's interests, the full group will quickly agree to the tentative agreement. But if the planning subgroup hasn't adequately represented the range of the full group's interests, you now face recontracting with the full group before the group can begin its work. I have found myself in this situation (actually, I helped create it), and it's not fun, especially if the group is large or has serious concerns about the agreement reached in the subgroup. I know of only one way to avoid this situation: Make sure that you plan with a representative subgroup.
Agreeing on the Ground Rules
If the entire group attended the planning meeting, you can quickly remind it of how you will use the eight mutual learning behaviors to intervene and whether it agreed to use them as the ground rules for the meeting.
If the entire client group didn't attend the planning meeting and the facilitation is a basic one, ask whether participants have read the article you sent them, and if so, what questions or concerns they have about using the ground rules. After responding to their questions and concerns, briefly describe the eight behaviors, including how you would use them and how they might use them. Then ask if people want to use the behaviors during the facilitation.
In my years of facilitating with the mutual learning behaviors, few group members have ever expressed concern about using them. (This may be partly because clients who hire me often know of my work and the behaviors.) If members express concern, you use the mutual learning approach to get curious, understand the members' concerns, identify any incorrect assumptions they may be making about the eight behaviors or what people will expect of them, and jointly design a solution that meets the group's interests.
When I work with a group to resolve a difficult conflict among members, I contract to spend more time discussing the behaviors. A city council that had recently expanded in size and included several factions that were in conflict wanted to resolve things. The council members agreed to spend several hours learning how to use the mutual learning behaviors and then begin the facilitation to resolve the conflicts. During the facilitation, council members used the behaviors, and afterwards they reported that those several hours enabled them to work more productively during the facilitation.
Addressing Members' Concerns
Psychologically, this is a critical time in the facilitation for members who haven't been involved in planning the facilitation. Having seen the tentative agreement in writing, they may wonder whether the objectives and agenda can be changed, whether they can influence the process, and if their interests will be addressed. They may also wonder whether you, as the facilitator, will help them meet their interests.
Sometimes members are eager to get to the content of the facilitation and want to shorten or eliminate this beginning-of-meeting contracting with the full group. They may feel frustrated spending time on what they consider unnecessary issues that everyone agrees on, or they may be worried that if you ask about people's concerns with the tentative agreement, members will raise all kinds of objections and the group will never get to the content of the facilitation.
You can respond to these concerns by pointing out that if the full group has no concerns about the tentative agreement, then the conversation will be very brief. If, however, there are concerns and the group doesn't identify or address them, they're likely to surface either during the meeting or, worse, after the meeting, as members voice their lack of commitment to the process. Spending the extra time in the beginning of the meeting reduces the chance that the group will need to invest even more time later. As the systems thinking phrase advises, “Go slow to go fast.”
Stage 4: Conducting the Facilitation
Stage 4 is the facilitation itself, not a contracting stage by itself. I have included it as a contracting stage because in almost every facilitation I have conducted, the group and I have modified some element of the agreement.
There are a number of questions that often arise during facilitations that lead to modifying some element of the agreement. These include, “Should we start on time if not everyone is present?”; “Should we end early if certain people need to leave early?”; “Should we have the meeting or keep the same topics if certain members are unable to attend?”; “Should we change the order of the agenda?”; “How should we modify the agenda given that we won't have enough time to complete all the topics?”
In addition, if you're facilitating a group for more than one day, you're likely to conduct a plus/delta at the end of each day to learn what worked well and what to do differently for the next session. In a plus/delta, you ask the group two questions: (1) What did we do that worked well today? and (2) What should we do differently next time? These deltas can naturally lead to recontracting.
In general, during this stage of contracting, it's helpful to look for any signs that there may be some element of the agreement that is not working as well as it could for the group.
Stage 5: Completing and Evaluating the Facilitation
In stage 5, you and the client complete and evaluate the facilitation.
Completing the Facilitation
Deciding when a basic facilitation contract has been completed is relatively easy and can usually be determined before the actual facilitation begins. A basic facilitation contract, especially a short-term one, is normally designed around a specific date or set of dates on which you will work with the client. After you have worked with the client on these dates, the contract work has been completed. If you have contracted to help the group until it reaches decisions on some specified issues, the work is complete when the group has made the decisions.
Deciding when a developmental facilitation contract has been completed is more difficult and can rarely be identified before the facilitation begins. The client typically doesn't know enough in advance to specify the level of mutual learning mindset and skill set it wants to achieve. The group can make an informed choice only by practicing mutual learning and assessing its progress. Consequently, as a developmental facilitator, you want to periodically help the group consider how much further it wants to improve its mutual learning mindset and skill set.
At times, the group or you may want to terminate a contract before the other party believes the agreed-upon work has been completed. The client may shift priorities or become dissatisfied with your ability to help, or you may infer that the client isn't sufficiently committed to the facilitation. When you are contracting with a developmental client, ask to meet with the client group one more time if either party decides to prematurely terminate the contract. This meeting helps the client and you understand the reason for terminating the contract and provides each of you feedback about your behavior.
Evaluating the Facilitation
There are two separate but related foci for the evaluation: the actual facilitation and the underlying contract. Evaluating the actual facilitation involves exploring how the group members and you have acted to either enhance or reduce the group's effectiveness. Evaluating the contract involves assessing the extent to which the terms of the contract (which members should be involved, how frequently the group meets with the facilitator, and so on) met the client's and your needs.
As I mentioned in stage 4, evaluating the facilitation or contract can occur at any time during a facilitation. Still, for long-term facilitation, it's useful to set times for evaluating the contract regularly so the client and you can decide how well it is serving the client's needs and make any necessary changes.
To evaluate the facilitation, I contract with the client to spend time at the end of each meeting to conduct a plus/delta.
Summary
In this chapter, I have described the process that a client and you use to agree on whether and how you will work together. The five contracting stages are (1) making initial contact with a primary client group member, (2) planning the facilitation, (3) reaching agreement with the full primary client group, (4) recontracting during facilitation, and (5) completing and evaluating the facilitation.
Many problems that occur during facilitation are caused by ineffective contracting. The contracting process establishes an effective relationship between the client and you and greatly increases the chance that the facilitation will be effective.
In the next chapter, we will explore whether and how to work with a partner, so you can better help the group you are working with.