Do You Have Congruent or Conflicting Mindsets?

Perhaps the most important factor in deciding whether to partner is whether you and your partner have congruent mindsets. If your core values and assumptions about your work differ, you may make fundamentally different interventions with a group and will have a difficult time coordinating your work to help the group.

I discovered this in an early cofacilitation, when a colleague and I worked with a city council and the city manager. At one point early in the meeting, there was some disagreement among group members about which issues to address. My colleague called a break and told me that he wanted to see how the manager wanted to proceed, explaining that it was the manager's choice. I saw the situation differently and explained that I considered the group as a whole to have the relevant information; I felt the choice was to be made by the group. My explanation raised more concerns for my cofacilitator, and in the minute that we had to resolve our differences, we reached a compromise to talk with the manager and then raise the issue in the full group. Yet, the solution compromised core values and assumptions for each of us. This turned out to be the first of many differences my cofacilitator and I had during the facilitation, most of which resulted from our contrasting mindsets; we turned our attention away from helping the group and toward working on our own conflict.

If you're working from a mutual learning mindset and your partner isn't, a lot of conflicts can occur. To take a simple example, your partner may enforce a predetermined time frame for discussing agenda items, while you seek to jointly control the process and ask group members if they want to alter the schedule as they proceed. If your partner assumes that how he sees things is correct, he'll consider it unnecessary to test his inferences and may act on relatively high-level inferences without publicly testing them. If your partner values minimizing expression of negative feelings, she may craft interventions designed to bypass group member emotions, whereas you're likely to move toward those feelings, believing that it gets to the root of the issue. In a study of coleaders of therapy groups—a role relationship similar to cofacilitator's—difference in orientation (values and beliefs) was the reason most cited for not wanting to work together again.²

There are times when you may want to work with a partner because you have differing mindsets; the contrast can help both of you learn. Still, it's important to determine whether the differences between you and your potential partner's core values and assumptions are great enough that your learning will come at the expense of helping the group.

Do You Have Complementary or Competing Foci and Styles?

Even if you and your partner have a shared mindset, you may focus on different things in a group. One of you may focus more on helping individual members improve their communication skills; the other may focus more on improving group structure and process. When individual-level and group-level partners work together, they might compensate for each other's blind spots and misplaced interventions, rather than reinforce them, which occurs when cofacilitators have the same orientation.

Partners also have differing styles—the particular way in which they conduct themselves in applying their mindset and focus. Style varies along many dimensions, including the degree of seriousness versus humor, inclination toward confrontation, and the pace of intervention.

Here too, different styles can help the group so long as you and your partner are not incompatible. The two of you can use the difference in pacing or sense of humor as the situation calls for it. However, largely divergent styles may lead group members to feel disjointed by having to continually adjust to two opposed styles.³

Will You Be Overwhelmed or Will the Group Be Overwhelmed?

As a individual working alone, you may sometimes leave a session overwhelmed, feeling that much more was occurring in the group than you could even make sense of, let alone intervene on. In addition, you may wonder whether your perception of the situation was realistic or distorted, even if you tested your inferences with the group. This often happens when there is a high level of overt activity or energy in the group; things are occurring at several levels simultaneously and at a fast pace; a high-conflict situation is one example. But you can also be overwhelmed by a level of activity that isn't observably high, if every interaction seems laden with interpersonal issues in the group. Partnering reduces the chance of being overwhelmed and gives you an opportunity to use your partner for reality checks. Partnering is also useful when a group is large or the plan is to work part of the time in subgroups.

The extra capacity to intervene that you and your partner bring to the group can become a liability if it leads to excessive intervention. As facilitators, we have a need to feel useful, and we usually fulfill that need by intervening. However, at times one partner may have little opportunity for intervening because the partner is already making the necessary intervention. If partners attempt to meet their own needs rather than their clients', they may intervene unnecessarily and slow the group's progress. The problem can be reduced or prevented so long as you and your partner place the group's needs first and divide the labor so that you both have ample opportunity to intervene. Finally, you can reframe the meaning of being useful to include refraining from unnecessary intervention.

Will Your Partnership Generate Learning and Support or Competition and Control?

Partnering enables you to develop your professional skills by learning from and with a person who has a different approach, technique, or style. During breaks and after the work, you can discuss various interventions and why each of you made them. In this way, you can use specific data to reflect on and learn about your partnering.

There is a saying, “How you do anything is how you do everything.” In other words, in different situations, in different parts of our life, fundamentally we operate from the same mindset that generates the same behaviors and results. If you've read this far into the book, that shouldn't surprise you. How you facilitate, consult, or coach is probably based on the same mindset that drives your everyday behavior—and the same is true for your partner.

That means that whatever personal issues have a negative impact in your “nonfacilitative” life will also show up in your facilitative role if the situation triggers those issues. This includes challenges you have dealing with authority, ambiguity, control, commitment, status, and intimacy. If you have problems with authority, for example, you may inappropriately confront (or avoid) the formal leader of a group. If you have problems with control, you may frequently interrupt while your partner is intervening.

Partnering can bring out these issues, but it can also help you learn from them if you and your partner are willing and able to help each other. If the two of you are willing to share these personal challenges with each other, you can help each other become aware of how these issues affect your work and explore how you might change your behavior as well as the values and assumptions that generate it. For example, through cofacilitating and coteaching facilitation, I have learned how my own seemingly well-intended interventions actually reduce my cofacilitator or coteacher's ability to establish a relationship with the group. Similarly, one of my colleagues has learned how she designs interventions in a way that reduces group members' ability to disagree with her. In helping each other in this way, we are really serving as mutual developmental facilitators.

Of course, the issues that are your food for learning are the same ones that can undermine your ability to partner and learn from the practice. Your unilateral control mindset, mixed with your personal issues, can lead you to view a partnership as competition with your partner instead of as an opportunity for colearning. When this occurs, the group loses as well.

Are Both of You Internal or External, or Not?

An internal is employed in the same organization as the groups he helps. An external works for herself or another organization. If you're an internal you may seek an external partner to help with a large or difficult assignment; if you're an external you may seek an internal partner to build capacity in the organization and to better understand the organization's culture.

Internals and externals each have advantages, which I describe in Chapter 15. This includes access to the client, understanding the organizational culture, and being able to challenge clients.

Here, too, the differences can be a benefit or liability to you and your partner and the group. When there is disagreement, your external partner may think you don't focus enough on process issues, are too deferential to authority, or are inhibited by the culture of your organization. Conversely, you may think your external partner is too idealistic and challenging and doesn't appreciate the culture of the organization and the need for the group to get its work done.

Are the Benefits Worth the Investment?

In addition to the energy that every facilitator, consultant, or coach expends working with a group, partners expend energy coordinating their work with each other. First, you have to spend time talking with your partner to determine whether you're compatible enough to work together. Second, if you decide to partner, you need to plan how to manage your differences. Third, you need to divide the labor between yourselves and develop a way to coordinate your division of labor.

For example, before a session, you and your partner can plan how to divide up the opening remarks and how to hand off the lead role to one another during the session. Less predictable aspects of coordination can be partially planned but must also be partially coordinated at the time of the intervention. As a simple illustration, if you agree to write on a flipchart or whiteboard while your partner intervenes, you both need a way to ensure that what (and when) you write is congruent with your partner's intervention. A much more difficult and frequent problem is to coordinate the interventions each of you makes so that together you help the group make progress rather than take the group in opposing directions. This kind of coordination is difficult because it usually needs to be done in the moment and continuously.

Aside from expending energy dividing and coordinating your labor, partnering can burn up psychological energy. You or your partner may worry that the other will make a significant mistake. Finally, you may expend psychological energy struggling with a tension inherent in collaboration: Each of you must temporarily yield some identity to the collaboration so that together you can become something neither alone can be.⁴

Questions for Deciding Whether to Partner

A good way for you and your potential partner to find out about each other's similarities and differences is to discuss the issues directly. You can use the questions and statements in Figure 14.1 to guide your conversation so you can both decide whether you can work effectively, and to reach agreement about how to work together. Keep in mind that to obtain useful information, you need to discuss these questions at the level of directly observable behavior, describing what each of you would think and say in specific instances.

Intervener-Recorder

In the intervener-recorder arrangement, one partner intervenes while the other takes notes on a computer (projected for the view of the group), whiteboard, flipchart, or some other technology. This division of labor is useful if the group is generating many ideas—as in brainstorming—and doesn't want to be slowed down by the partner's writing each idea before asking for the next one. Still, either the intervener or the recorder has to check that the written statements represent what the members have said.

Coordinating the two roles also requires that you and your partner and members agree on when a member's idea is to be written on the flipchart. This can be as direct as saying, “Let's write down all the potential causes of the delays.” The issue is simple, but it can create problems if not addressed. Writing a member's idea on the flipchart symbolizes that the idea is valuable. A member whose contributions aren't written down and doesn't know why may feel discounted and begin to distrust the intervener and recorder. So if the recorder decides not to write down an idea, a brief explanation is appropriate. For example, the recorder might say, “Dan, I was asking for causes, and your comment looks like a solution. Do you see it differently? [If not] Can you think of any causes?” In this way, the recorder temporarily becomes the intervener.

Primary-Secondary

In the primary-secondary arrangement, one partner takes the primary role for all interventions, while the other plays backup, intervening only when necessary. This works well if the group process is easy enough for one partner to manage or if the partners are concerned about intervening too much. It also gives the secondary partner a chance to rest.

The coordination challenge here is that the secondary may intervene on some behavior that the primary intentionally avoids. For example, as the primary partner, you may avoid clarifying an off-track disagreement among members and instead try to get the group on track. If the secondary partner jumps in and clarifies the disagreement, the clarification would continue to take the group off track. This challenge occurs because the secondary partner is actively looking for opportunities that the primary partner missed. To reduce this problem, you and your partner can discuss each other's intervention orientation well enough so that you have a shared understanding about the conditions under which you would choose not to intervene.

Online-Offline

In the online-offline division of labor, one partner intervenes (online), while the other silently works on some task associated with the work. The task could be how to describe a complex group pattern, how to spend the remaining time if the group has fallen behind schedule, or simply setting up an activity. This arrangement is useful when you and your partner need to solve a problem that is difficult to attend to while observing and intervening and that is either not appropriate to raise with the group or not a good use of the group's time.

Task-Relationship

In this arrangement, both partners actively observe and intervene, but one focuses on what is referred to as task process while the other concentrates on relationship (or interpersonal) process.⁵ If, for example, a group is setting performance goals, the task-process partner focuses on the content by helping the group keep on track, think logically about what goals are needed, and establish clear goals. In contrast, the relationship-process partner pays more attention to the group's social and emotional interactions by silently asking herself, What do members' words, style, and nature of discussion say about how they are feeling about the task, each other, and the two of us? ⁶ You can think of the task-relationship division of labor as paying attention to effects that the group behavior is having on its performance and working relationship results, respectively.

Task-relationship is often a natural way for partners to divide the labor. Research shows that some people are predominantly task-oriented and others relationship-oriented.⁷ Task and relationship orientations are relative. Whether you are more task- or relationship-oriented depends how task- or relationship-oriented your partner is. This approach often lets partners take advantage of their strengths. It works well when the group generates many task and relationship issues simultaneously.

Because a group, especially in basic facilitation, generally views task intervention as more appropriate than relationship intervention, the relationship partner often needs to clearly show how the relationship issue affects the group's ability to perform effectively.

Intervention-Reaction

In the fifth division of labor, one partner concentrates on intervening with one or a few members, while the other pays attention to the rest of the group. The division is useful should one member be the subject of much intervention and other members are reacting strongly to the member's comments (or to the intervention). The coordination challenge here involves knowing whether, and when, to shift the focus of the intervention from one member to the others' reactions. Should the second partner immediately point out the reactions or wait until the first partner completes the intervention?

No Explicit Division of Labor

Having no explicit division of labor doesn't mean there is no division of labor. It means that you and your partner pay attention to what appears to need attention, without first talking with the other. Using this approach, you can instantly switch roles to adjust to the group's needs and the needs of the partner. You can also respond quickly and potentially make the best use of your partner skills.

As the least structured way to divide the labor, it is also the most difficult to coordinate. You and your partner risk intervening on the same issues while ignoring others, failing to capture members' ideas on the flipchart, and both going offline at the same time, thus temporarily abandoning the group. The approach works if you and your partner have worked together long enough and in enough situations to anticipate each other's moves and adjust automatically, just as improv actors respond to each other's lines. I have this relationship with a couple of my colleagues. We are so in sync and so familiar with each other's facilitation that often all we need to do to coordinate our interventions is to give each other a knowing glance.

I have described six different ways of dividing the labor between you and your partner. It's not necessarily desirable to use only one division of labor throughout an entire session or work. If you and your partner are working effectively together, you can shift among these divisions of labor to meet the changing needs of the group.

Skill with Potential Interventions

Here you choose your roles so that whoever is more skilled at interventions has primary responsibility for intervening. Even if it's not possible to predict the kinds of interventions you will have to make, you may quickly be able to identify a pattern in the kinds of interventions that you and your cofacilitator are making in a given session. Knowing this pattern, you and your partner can decide who is better suited to take the lead on these kinds of interventions.

Knowledge of Content Problems

Partners vary in their knowledge about the content problems their clients face. For example, I used to cofacilitate with a colleague who knows a lot about finance. When we cofacilitated a group that was discussing financial issues, he usually took the first role in the intervener-recorder, task-relationship, intervention-reaction, or primary-secondary divisions of labor. He could keep up when the discussion became so technical that I would have to slow the group's pace by frequently asking for definition of terms. (Here I am assuming that members agree on the definitions and would be clarifying them only for me.) Still, if a partner's knowledge about and interest in an issue tempts the partner to stray into the content of the discussion, the less knowledgeable partner may choose the active intervention role.

Internal-External Differences

Similarly, the internal partner can often intervene easily in a highly technical discussion. By contrast, if you and your partner want to confront the group—especially about members' core values and beliefs—without raising the issue of the internal partner's credibility or seeming disloyal, the external partner may actively intervene. But in a developmental group, having the internal partner confront the group about its assumptions is powerful precisely because it can raise the issue of credibility and disloyalty. Done well, you and your partner can use members' reactions to the internal partner to discuss why members who challenge the assumption of the organization are seen as disloyal.

Pace

You and your partner can switch roles for each to take on the less active role when one gets tired. You can also take advantage of your different paces by matching the needs of the group. For example, the faster-paced partner can actively intervene when the group is behind schedule and nearing the end of the session. The slower-paced partner can actively intervene when members are struggling to understand each other.

Training and Development

At times, a partner may choose to play a role to help the group develop particular skills. Obviously, the person who is best suited to teach this topic is likely to take on that role.

Agree on the Zone of Deference

An important part of intervening is knowing when not to. Organizational theorist Chester Barnard used the phrase “zone of indifference” to refer to the range within which employees obey orders without considering the merits of the order.⁹ I use the phrase zone of deference to describe the area in which one cofacilitator lets the other's interventions stand, although the former would intervene differently. Without an agreed-on zone of deference, you and your partner may constantly correct each other's interventions, confusing the group in your attempt to make things clear. Or, to avoid being seen as nitpicking or overbearing, the two of you may fail to modify any of each other's interventions, which deprives the group of the benefits of partnering.

There are a number of questions you can ask yourself to decide whether your partner's intervention is in or out of the zone of deference. If your answer to any of the following questions is “yes,” then it's in the group's best interest for you to intervene on your partner's intervention—or for your partner to do the same for you.

Agree on When You Will Support Each Other's Interventions

In contrast to the zone of deference, in which one partner makes an intervention that the other partner might not, supporting an intervention occurs when you or your partner emphasizes the other's intervention. Here conflicts can occur when the partner who makes the initial intervention expects support, while the other, believing the first doesn't need it, fails to provide it. In the reverse situation, a partner offers support when the initial partner thinks it is unnecessary. Again, to avoid this discrepancy in expectations, you and your partner can discuss when and how to support each other's interventions and how each one can ask for support.

Don't Rescue Each Other

Sometimes you or your partner may get into conflict with the client group. For example, your partner might intervene in a way that divides the group and causes part of the group to express concern about his role. Or a group may draw him into its own conflict, without him recognizing it.

What should you do when he is in conflict with the group? A natural reaction is to intervene and protect or rescue him from the conflict with the group. This saves your partner and relieves your concern about becoming a victim of his conflict with the group.¹¹ Unfortunately, this discounts your partner and can reinforce the group's belief that he is ineffective. Group members may reason that if he can't extricate himself from the conflict without your help, the group's negative assessment of his ability to deal with conflict must be accurate.

A more effective response—one that avoids reinforcing the group's negative views—is to wait for your partner to ask for help. Waiting increases the chance that he will manage the conflict with the group and may simultaneously enhance the group's image of him. Allowing him to choose when to receive help increases the partner's free choice and reduces his image as helpless.

In some cases, a conflict between one partner and the group becomes known to the other partner first. Suppose a leader in a senior executive retreat approaches you during a break and says, “Listen, your cofacilitator Tina is a nice person, but she's stirring up issues the group doesn't need to deal with, and people are getting upset with her. Don't tell her I said anything, but just steer the conversation back when she starts challenging the group, okay?” To avoid rescuing Tina, colluding with the client, or acting as an intermediary, you can explain that unless Tina talks directly with those who are concerned, she will not have the relevant information to make an informed choice about whether or how to change her behavior. This is true whether or not you believe Tina is acting ineffectively. Ideally, the conversation with Tina occurs with the entire group, because it involves all members. Once the conversation is raised with the entire group, Tina can ask you for help.

Openly Coordinate with Your Partner

Because intervention is based on diagnosis, to coordinate your work, you and your partner need some way to discuss with each other what is happening in the group. Aside from telepathy, I know of only two ways for partners to coordinate their work in front of the group: They can either talk openly or try to hide their discussion by using some secret language.

It turns out that facilitators openly coordinating in front of their client group has a long history that began with an event that helped found the field of facilitation.