Group Facilitation

Are your management teams performing well?

When you bring people together for meetings or workshops, is the time spent as productive as it could be?

Are you really good at collaborating, knowledge sharing, creating and innovating?

So much of organisational life is spent working in groups – whether management teams, project teams, meetings, workshops, task forces, and the like – yet so often these significant investments in time and organisational energy fail to deliver real value. There are ways to help groups and teams perform and accelerate productivity. Sometimes it is about helping teams gain insights into behavioural patterns and then working to address dysfunctions. At other times, external facilitation enables work to be framed in ways that creates productive, creative, innovative workspaces. Increasingly, technology is playing a role in creating collaborative workspaces and yet many organisations do not know how best to use this technology from a human perspective.

We are expert facilitators and have worked with just about every group and team situation you can envisaged – with great teams who want to get better to truly dysfunctional teams; with small and large groups and in virtual settings. We are passionate about teams and groups and know that good external facilitation can make a fundamental difference in shifting productivity, creativity, collaboration and performance.

So how can we help?

Typical issues we address are:

  • improving the performance and effectiveness of executive or management teams
  • getting high value out of meetings, group events and conferences
  • getting an early return on investments in developing new skills capability through using action centred learning
  • creating higher levels of collaboration and knowledge sharing across the organisation
  • releasing the creativity of groups
  • making better use of web 2.0 so that groups and teams can work effectively remotely
  • helping new teams perform quickly (including helping merging teams)
  • helping teams gain insights into preferences, communication and influencing through working with tools such as MBTI, FIRO B

 Below are some examples of our work. More generic themes for our work with groups are:

Group facilitation: Enabling groups to work productively and effectively.

Action Centred Learning: Developing people through working on a current business issue. Typically done in cross functional teams with an emphasis on learning as well as doing.

Conference / Large Group facilitation: Taking death by powerpoint out of large group meetings and conferences so that greater value is derived from bringing large numbers of people together in one place.

Team development: Running team development events focused on shifting team performance. These are interactive, fun and focused on the real issues faced by each team.

Virtual facilitation: Using the potential of web 2.0 and other social networking technology to enable groups to collaborate, create and learn more effectively together.
 

Related case studies

Creating a high performing Executive team
FTSE 100 Utility

Our goal was to help a good executive team become great. This team were doing well. There were no major problems. But the team wanted to raise its performance. After a team diagnostic we identified 3 areas to work on: how the team led into the business; the extent to which the team gave feedback to one another and deepening levels of trust between team members. We worked with the team on these issues and the team now works even better.

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Shifting the performance of a dysfunctional team
Global Technology Business

Our goal was to help a management team understand why it was not performing and take actions to improve the working of the team. This team was not doing well. Through our team diagnostic we identified those areas that need to be addressed first. Over a number of sessions we were able to shift levels of trust, build commitment to a common set of goals, address shortfalls in meeting processes and help the team to set clear behavioural norms.

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Acclerating the merger of three teams
Global Energy Business

This senior management team was formed through the merging of three businesses. Our goal was to help the team work through issues of cultural integration and develop a greater appreciation of team strengths. We developed a creative team exercise for the group to explore how cultures develop and what happens when different cultures merge. The session was high energy, creative, involved some theoretical input but enabled team members to gain insights through doing.

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