Accessibility

An internal has a different kind of access to the organization than an external does, and the same goes for the organization's access to the internal.

The Insider Image

There are several potential advantages to being considered an insider. The group may consider you “one of us.” The members are likely to value your insider knowledge of the organization and of them. For these reasons, the group may be comfortable with you from the beginning of a project. If you have modeled your facilitative skills in your other roles, the group may consider you credible, especially if members have observed you directly in those roles. If you are part of an internal staff group that provides facilitation, consulting, or coaching services, this reputation may allow client groups to feel some confidence in you, even if they have not worked with you personally.

At the same time, being “one of us” is a liability if the client sees you as either too close to the problem to be neutral or blind to the client's assumptions and unable to challenge the client's thinking.

Internals tell me they have a difficult time establishing credibility compared with external counterparts, whom they bring in to help with a specific situation. This can be especially true when you raise issues that challenge the culture of the group or organization. One of the most subtle but powerful expectations of group members is that people act consistently with the culture of the organization. Although members may not agree with certain aspects of the culture, at some level they value the culture because it is predictable and meets some of their needs. Consequently, if you identify how group members contribute to the dysfunctional aspects of the culture, people may see you as inappropriately challenging the culture.

Job Security

As an internal, you have the relative security of a regular paycheck and many potential clients available without much marketing effort. In theory, however, the increased security that comes from working for a single organization also brings increased risk whenever that security is threatened. If a significant project experiences major problems, an external may lose a client, but you may lose your job or your influence. Consequently, as an internal, you may be more concerned about your financial security if your interventions involve confronting a group or leader, even if they are consistent with the mutual learning approach.

In practice, I have never met any skilled internal facilitators or consultants who were fired or forced to resign simply because they raised difficult issues with the client (if you are out there, let me know). However, I have worked with internals who decided to leave the organization because they felt they could not help it create significant change.

You and Others Create Your Role

Like any organizational role, your internal role develops through an iterative process in which you and those who work with you share expectations about and attempt to influence how you will do your work. These people include your manager direct reports and peers, your primary client groups, and those that the primary client groups report to. Because each of these people depends on you in some way, each has some stake in and expectation of how you should fill your internal facilitative role.

These individuals may attempt to influence you, either directly or indirectly. Your manager may tell you directly that you can't work with certain groups in the organization. Or she may simply imply through actions that you should evaluate client-group members for purposes of a merit increase. Similarly, someone may tell you directly, “Don't turn down any assignment from a client group high in the organizational hierarchy.” Or the expectation can be vague: “We want you to be available when we need you.”

Of course, you also have expectations about how you should fulfill your internal role, and you convey that to people, directly or indirectly. You may tell client groups that you can't mediate between the group and the manager but that you can help the client group figure out how to raise a difficult issue with the manager. Or you may tell your own manager that the rules of confidentiality in the group prevent you from sharing with him specific comments that members make in their meetings.

Your role develops as the people you work with communicate their expectations to you, and vice versa, about what kind of work you will do and how you will do it. The more similar the expectations are, the less role conflict between you and these people. One reason you may face role conflict is that when you're working with a large number of people, it's likely that some of their expectations for you are incompatible.

To make matters more complex, the expectations that develop for your role are influenced by organizational, interpersonal, and individual factors. This includes the nature of your interpersonal relationships with others and your personality and personal style, such as how you use humor or how formal you are.

Your Other Roles Influence Your Facilitative Role

Finally, your internal facilitative role may be complicated by the fact that you fill at least one other role in the organization. Serving as an internal may be part of your larger role as an HR manager, Lean or Six Sigma manager, or your regular managerial or nonmanagerial position. Any organizational member can also serve in an internal facilitative role, regardless of his or her other organizational roles.

Role conflict can occur when the people you're working with expect you to take on elements of your “nonfacilitative” role. For example, if your nonfacilitative position is higher in the organizational hierarchy than your clients' position, the group members may expect you to convey their message to people above them in the hierarchy. Your manager may expect you to evaluate the group members' performance as part of the performance appraisal process. If you are the HR director, the client group may expect you to make decisions on HR matters. If you are the finance director, the client group may expect you to pass judgment on finance matters.

Role conflict arises because the people you are facilitating usually don't think of you as performing two different roles: your regular role in the organization and your facilitator role. They simply think of you as someone who performs a variety of tasks and who can and should be able to perform all of those tasks or behaviors at any time. The challenge is to help the people you work with learn to think in terms of the different roles you serve in and to explain that while serving as facilitator, it may create problems if you engage in behaviors that are associated with your other role or roles.

Decide Which Facilitative Role Is Appropriate

An easy way to get into difficulty is to serve as a facilitator when that role is inappropriate. Unlike a facilitative consultant, trainer, or leader, a facilitator is content neutral. Content neutral is a relative term; you may wonder as an internal facilitator if you can ever be totally neutral about issues within the organization. However, there are two working criteria for judging neutrality: (1) You believe that personal views about the content of the facilitation do not significantly affect your facilitation, and (2) the client group believes that your personal views about the substance of the facilitation do not significantly affect your facilitation.

Unless you have little interaction with the group you are working with, serving as a facilitative consultant or even a facilitative leader may be more appropriate than acting in the facilitator role. In these two roles, you can offer essentially the same help as a facilitator and at the same time share the views and expertise that the group understands you have.

Discuss Potential Role Conflicts before They Arise

It's easier to discuss expectations of your internal facilitative role with groups before a conflict actually arises than after a conflict has occurred. For example, it's easier to discuss whether you should serve as an intermediary between a client group and its manager before the manager asks you to do so. This requires anticipating the role conflict that is likely to arise. The challenge is to reach agreement with all constituents so that everyone's expectations are compatible. This conversation is best held during the contracting process.

If you also hold nonfacilitator roles in the organization, you may experience pressure to use information you receive in the facilitator role to act in a nonfacilitator role. Consider a situation in which you are an organization development manager who also serves as a facilitator. You are facilitating an organizational task force that reports to your manager. Your manager tells you that she is concerned the task force is not making progress quickly enough. In an effort to address your manager's concern, you act as a mediator and convey the message directly to the group. Or you attempt to speed the group's progress by making content suggestions. Both of these actions are outside the facilitator role.

To remain consistent with the role, you can explain to your manager your interest in having her convey the message directly to the task force. If you're concerned that your manager thinks you are not doing your job effectively, you can test this with her. In doing so, you may learn that she either has an unrealistic expectation for the facilitation process or is unclear about your facilitator role.

Another source of role conflict is being pressured to obtain information in your facilitative role that is relevant to a nonfacilitative role. What should you do if you learn something in your facilitative role that you would act on if you had obtained it in a nonfacilitative role? Consider the example of my colleague who is an internal facilitator and HR director for his organization. While facilitating a quality improvement group, a discussion began about departmental policy on overtime. The facilitator quickly realized that if the members' comments were accurate, the departmental policy was in violation of the organizational policy. Had he heard the discussion when he was acting in his HR role, he would have contacted the department head to discuss the apparent violation. If you were in this situation, should you take different action because you obtained the information in your facilitator role and in the context of a confidentiality agreement?

The situation poses a dilemma because part of the client's trust in you as a facilitator stems from the fact that, theoretically, you have no influence over what happens to the members outside the facilitated group. But if you act on the information in your nonfacilitator role, you've exerted influence. In this example, your influence would benefit the group members, but in another situation, it may disadvantage them. If you don't act on the information and neither does the group, you may be in the position of knowing that some HR policies are being violated but not able to act on that knowledge. On the other hand, if you act on the information in your nonfacilitator role, group members may in the future withhold relevant information, concerned that you will act on it in your other role.

One approach to the dilemma lies in the core value of informed choice. In an organization that acts consistently with this value, members would consider it appropriate for you to act on the information in the nonfacilitator role. This suggests that a client group that espouses the core values would act accordingly.

However you decide to deal with this kind of dilemma, clearly contracting with members about how you treat such knowledge gives them relevant information with which they can then decide whether to share or withhold certain information in their discussion. Anticipating a conflicting issue means contracting about it before it arises.

Seek Agreement to Switch Facilitative Roles

If you serve as a facilitator as part of or in addition to your regular organizational role, at times you may have subject-matter information that, if you shared it, would take you out of your facilitator role. Before you leave the facilitator role, it's important to have agreement from the group.

Consider a group that is discussing how to establish self-managing work teams in its department: Team members are deciding how to plan, divide, and coordinate the work among them. To fully implement the change, the group may need to modify the means by which the performance of team members is assessed. If you're the facilitator for this group and also serve as HR director, you may know how the group can change its performance appraisal system. In this situation, if you have the agreement of the group, it's appropriate to temporarily leave your facilitator role and in your HR director role describe the process by which the client group can modify its performance appraisal system.

You could do this by saying, “You've raised an issue of HR policy that I have relevant information about as the HR director, and I think you might find it useful. I'd like to share this information. Does anyone have any concerns about my temporarily stepping out of the facilitator role to share this information?” After sharing the information, you clearly identify when you return to the facilitator role by simply saying, “I'm back in the facilitator role.”

Discuss Problems in Your Past Client Relationships

If you've been using a unilateral control approach, your current and potential client groups may see you as unilaterally controlling and may not fully trust you. To determine if that's the case, you can begin by testing your inference about whether anything has occurred in the working relationship that prompts them to mistrust you, explaining your reason for asking.

Also, if you're aware of times when you acted inconsistently with the mutual learning approach, you can share the relevant information, explain why you now consider your behavior ineffective, and tell them how you would act differently now. Volunteering the information shows the group that you're aware of your own ineffective behavior and are capable of changing. Sharing the information also demonstrates that you can discuss your own behavior without getting defensive. This makes it easier for potential clients to raise concerns that they might have considered undiscussable with you. Through these discussions, potential clients begin to increase their trust in you.

Use the Contracting Process

Using the contracting process is a direct way of shaping your facilitative role and mitigating the potential problems I have discussed. As an internal, you may want to (or be pressured to) cut short the contracting process. You might assume that you're familiar enough with the members of a client group or that the client group seems to agree on what it needs to accomplish. Or you may feel pressured by a client group saying it doesn't have time for the planning meeting. Unfortunately, cutting short the contracting process almost always creates problems later in the process; the client doesn't adequately understand your role, or you and the client are unaware that you disagree on some aspect of the facilitation or consulting process.

When talking with internal clients about the need for planning a meeting time, you can explain that it will increase the group's ability to use the facilitation or consulting time effectively and efficiently. If the client insists that the planning meeting time is unnecessary because the group agrees on the objectives and other issues, you can ask why she considers it unnecessary and explain that if the client's assumptions are correct, then the meeting will certainly be brief. Still, if the client doesn't agree to the planning meeting, you have to decide whether the risk of carrying out a (presumably not very effective) facilitation or consultation is greater than the risk of not agreeing to do it at all.

Honor the Mutual Learning Approach, Tailor the Techniques

The mindset, behaviors, and principles of the mutual learning approach are its core. The methods and techniques are a way of operationalizing the mindset, behaviors, and principles. As an internal, you may find that some of the methods or techniques in this book don't seem to fit and that your organization will not change to adapt to them.

The methods and techniques that I describe throughout this book are not the only ones consistent with mutual learning; they are ones that I have used with good results. Using the mutual learning approach entails adapting and discovering techniques and methods that fit your organization and that are still congruent with the mindset, behaviors, and principles.

Contract with Your Manager First

One of the most important people to contract—and contract first—with is your manager. If your manager understands your internal facilitative role and the importance of your contracting directly with the groups you work with, you reduce potential misunderstandings between the group, your manager, and you. Here are a series of questions that you and your manager can discuss and reach agreements on.

Educate Others about Your Facilitative Role

Role conflict often occurs simply because people who work with a facilitator don't know what a facilitator is or does. In fact, many people equate facilitators with mediators or arbitrators. You can avoid or reduce these conflicts by creating opportunities to educate others about the facilitator's role—or any other facilitative role. Once someone understands your facilitative role, he may no longer consider you remiss upon hearing that you allowed a client group to make a “poor” decision. Educating others also generates future clients, as employees understand how a facilitator or coach can help them. But education is a process, not an event; it means constantly finding ways to help others understand the role and its benefits.

Become an Informal Change Agent

By becoming an informal change agent, you can attempt to influence the contextual factors that make it difficult to effectively fulfill your facilitative role. In some cases, the organizational factors that hinder you from fulfilling your facilitative role are the same ones that contribute to a client group's problems and lead it to ask you for help.

As the Team Effectiveness Model indicates, one contextual factor is organizational culture. Culture has a strong and pervasive influence on the behavior of members; it's very difficult to change. However, beginning to influence a group or organizational culture can lead to significant change—in your facilitative role as well. Of course, it's essential to use the mutual learning core values and assumptions in your role of informal change agent.

Model the Way

Gandhi has been attributed with the quote, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” It turns out he didn't say exactly that, but he did say, “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change toward him.…We need not wait to see what others do.”³ At the heart of being a change agent is modeling the way. As an internal, you ask others in your organization to follow the mutual learning core values, assumptions, and behaviors—to suspend their normal behavior and to take a risk with new behavior, expecting that these risks generate more effective behavior that leads to higher-quality decisions, greater learning, and better relationships.

If you've modeled this mindset and behavior in your own nonfacilitative roles, then clients see you as credible, especially if they have observed your behavior directly. If you haven't, clients may reasonably ask how you can advocate that they use the mutual learning approach when you haven't.

Modeling the way is essential. People look to a facilitator to see what is possible. Group members know how to act in accordance with the status quo. What isn't clear to them is how they can change their thinking and behavior to help create the kind of work relationships they say they want and need. When you model this behavior in your nonfacilitator role(s), you become a facilitative leader, creating the kind of relationship that others seek.

If you're concerned that modeling the mutual learning approach as a facilitative leader is a risk, your feeling is natural. Many of my clients and colleagues who are internal facilitators are initially worried that if they use the approach—particularly with people who have more power than them—those people will see their behavior as inappropriate or challenging. The risk may exist. However, in general, my clients and colleagues have found that they can reduce the risk by being explicit about their intentions, stating their concerns about how others might interpret their behavior, and asking whether others do see their behavior as ineffective. It's easy to overlook the risks of not using the facilitative skills—the risks of not testing an inference, withholding relevant information, and not asking genuine questions. Using the mutual learning approach doesn't require that you get rid of your concerns, or even make believe they don't exist; it requires only that you move forward with your concerns, making them part of the conversation when it's relevant.