Bringing Order to the Meeting

Bringing Order to the Meeting As financial services organizations grow in complexity and face increased competition, many companies are responding by creating multi-disciplinary groups to address a host of significant issues such as new product development, acquisition considerations and distribution channel strategies. A group’s duties can include: evaluating new processes; creating new procedures; revisiting and revising plans; discussing corporate strategy alternatives; and determining next steps to move toward assigned goals. Recognizing that groups are needed to accomplish what individuals alone can not, corporate tradition continues to dictate that frequent group meetings are the primary vehicle for task forces to work together to meet their goals, even as alternative forms of communications—e.g., e-mails, pagers, faxes—have proliferated. Therefore, as groups are asked to address a wider number of challenges, the number of group meetings increases exponentially. Many complain, however, that there are far too many unnecessary meetings that do nothing to help people work together creatively and productively. A more productive approach for managing multi-disciplinary group dynamics is group facilitation. The group facilitation process, under the leadership of a trained facilitator, provides the structure, tools and techniques that can help participants efficiently accomplish their objectives. The facilitator’s charge is not only to conduct well-structured, mission-driven meetings, but also to make a significant organizational contribution by providing focus, building team spirit and group solidarity, managing conflicts and ensuring that the group develops conclusions, consensus and cogent next steps. Properly implemented facilitation sessions utilize a specialized style of communication that maximizes group creativity, interaction and commitment. To conduct a productive facilitation session that will achieve objectives, effective facilitators: • Begin the session by having the entire group agree to the session’s mission and goals. • Make sure that everyone is involved and contributes as an integral part of the team effort. • Employ problem solving and implementation tools and techniques to help increase group productivity. • Set a tone that encourages innovative thinking. • Create a forum to identify variance of purpose and provide for amicable conflict resolution. Facilitation sessions empower multi-disciplinary group project members to work together to help the organization adapt to change by planning projects, making decisions, solving problems and guiding their own work. The result is a totally new group dynamic. As marketing projects become more encompassing, an organization’s success is increasingly dependent upon the ability of key representatives from different disciplines across the organization to work together as an effective team. We have helped client organizations abandon unproductive group project meetings in favor of multi-disciplinary project teams that foster communications, involvement and solid decision-making. What we do is help group leaders master the sophisticated tools and techniques of successful group facilitators. Most of these tools are logical processes that enable the group to: • First, generate, manage, organize and evaluate a wide range of relevant concepts, ideas and data. • Then, develop strategies that lead to organizational problem solving and solutions. Corporations welcome the opportunity to break the cycle of unproductive and prolonged project meetings in favor of sessions that focus efforts and get results. Utilizing the effective tools of facilitation, corporations have only to assemble a team that will focus on developing solutions for a specific project, and then disband as soon as it has achieved its objectives. When the next project arises, they will simply select another group of appropriately skilled participants and challenge them with a carefully focused mission. This pragmatic, results-oriented alternative to traditional meetings provides a dynamic new approach for increasing productivity and organizational effectiveness.

Jay Nagdeman

President of Suasion Resources Inc.

Copyright © 2007 Suasion Resources Inc. All rights reserved.



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