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Team and Group Facilitation
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 This
is a highly varied aspect of LKB business as often the request is
situated somewhere between teaching a few appropriate techniques
to a team so that its members communicate more effectively together
and mediating a potentially challenging meeting for a group within
the same company. My services are often most useful in an international
context. At times the assignment looks like a team building exercise
and indeed, in many ways, it IS always just that and at other times
it is simply being the outside eye, ear and voice that comments
on what is happening and invites participants to notice what they
would like to do about it.
I very often work with a fellow coach/facilitator to assure the
double roles of lead ”and “observer support. I work
exclusively with Team Management Systems profiling tool when a team
needs to answer the question who we are and where is our strength
?This tool helps members of a team understand the added value and
potential difficulty of working with diverse energies. You can consult
the tool on line at www.agence-tm.com/queslist.htm
Thales Air Systems 2007 – Worldwide Sales & Marketing
Meeting in Deauville The sales team had been hugely successful
and the company really wanted to reward them for their outstanding
contribution over the previous two years. My role was to interview
the top ten sales people on stage in front of their colleagues from
all over the world. I met them individually on the morning of the
opening of the event to get a feel for who they were and to develop
some sort of trust between them and me before the “show”.
On stage they all revealed themselves to be sensitive human beings
willing to share some deeper parts of themselves with the audience
who remained enthralled for the better part of two hours. The Thales
communication team brilliantly orchestrated the event with music
to welcome each “guest” on stage followed by a personalized
video showing each person’s country of origin and operating
market. Effective stage lighting gave an overall impression of an
intimate TV program. My skill was in balancing a journalistic and
coaching approach for each interview. When the sales director came
up to me afterwards to thank me, he said, with tears in his eyes,
“I feel as if I have met these people for the first time today
and yet I have known them for some time”.
Sanofi Pasteur 2008 – GSMA worldwide meeting in Cannes
The team leader had recently joined the company and her
goal was to bring together disparate sections of the company to
blend them into one team. It was a three day meeting in a beautiful
venue. It was an ambitious attempt to appease people who were dealing
with a lot of change in their company – some were downright
hostile to any reorganization. There was a need to inform and update
people about the changes. My co-facilitator, Alain Geoffroy, and
I worked closely again with my client and her HR specialist to design
a process that would honor the past, take stock of where everyone
currently stood in relationship to the announced changes and move
the whole team towards planning a coherent future together. At the
beginning of the three day meeting the majority of the 50 people
present paid lip service to their capacity to adapt to change but
it very quickly emerged that, although they intellectually adhered
to the changes, emotionally they were way off being on board. A
few people resolutely remained attached to their hostility over
the 3 days but the vast majority of people “moved” towards
the next steps. The processes that contributed to opening people
up to speaking their truths without danger of repercussion were:
 “The
Power of Six” – please see the excerpt on this website
from Philip Harland’s book that recounts this process as a
case study.
Walking
the Golden Path – a personal journey through the company that
allows each person to recount highlights from his personal and professional
career.
World Café
– a bottom up, iterative conversation that encourages the
emergence of collective wisdom.
Three Pillars
– a spatial exercise that facilitates awareness around the
degree of trust, structure and knowledge present in the current
system. From this an action plan was built to bridge the gaps.
VALEO Lighting Branch 2009 - A one day meeting
at Roland Garros for the branch’s research engineers.
The purpose of the one day meeting was to facilitate creative thinking
around a new LED product for car headlamps. The challenge was to
create the conditions that would encourage sharing amongst people
for whom financial reward normally came to he who lodged his idea
first. I worked closely with the communication director and her
boss to build the process for the day. Ironically the idea of taking
everyone to a site of champions reinforced the idea of individual
success but thankfully did not prevent the excellence of the team
work that emerged that day. My job was to provide a process that
would facilitate the breakdown of any existing barriers to communication
amongst people of different ages, experience and hierarchy. I had
the morning to facilitate as many interactions as possible while
loosening minds used to a habitual way of functioning. This entailed
having people moving in space and talking to many different people
on a variety of connected subjects. The afternoon was dedicated
to group work with the goal of producing a draft of a new product
to be presented to an “assessment committee” at the
end of the day. By the end of the afternoon my client had 5 viable
blueprints in his hands for a new Peopled product.
VERALLIA (Saint Gobain) 2010 at a prestigious hotel in
Paris – A 1.5 day convention to launch the new brand name:
VERALLIA
The company was bringing together its managers from around the world
for the first time ever to celebrate the launch of its new brand
name, VERALLIA. It was the occasion for most people to “discover”
and embrace their future under the same trademark. My role was multi-purpose.
I facilitated a creativity session for the CEO and his executive
team prior to the convention to help focus the team on a tag name
for the company’s glassware branch. I had the crazy role of
leading an icebreaker quiz at the dinner the night before the convention.
The preparation by the communication team was excellent which meant
I could call upon all my skills of improvisation to make the exercise
fun and inclusive of all 250 present. My true skill as a facilitator
was put to good use the following day when I and my co-facilitator,
Alain Geoffroy lead a World Café process to create bottom
up conversations around the future of the new company. My client
was in his element the whole day and received a standing ovation
at the climax of the day. He said it had never happened to him before.
I sincerely don’t know to what extent my work contributed
to his success and I suspect that his communication director had
a significant role to play in it but he clearly earned the respect
of his managers worldwide and they were not afraid to demonstrate
it.
My role as a team coach may play a useful role in the future.
VERALLIA – 2011 – one year down the line
Sixteen senior managers making up the executive committee came together
again for a three day meeting in Paris to assess the first year
under its new brand name and to prepare the way forward for an eventual
sale of the company. My role was to run a creativity workshop with
a view to settling on a tagline for the brand. We swung wide of
the subject creating family units with mottos and coats of arms
out of bottles and jars produced by the company. Two iterative processes
allowed everyone to assemble a maximum number of ideas and the result,
a few weeks later, was “FOREVER GLASS”. It has been
very exciting facilitating, contributing to and participating in
the birth of a brand.
Robert-Debré Hospital 2011 – 4 facilitated
half day meetings of the core admin team with a view to increasing
the efficiency of team meetings.The ground work of creating
effective relationships amongst “team” members had already
been achieved so my role has been more about coaching the “team”
to a more satisfying use of the time dedicated to its weekly meeting.
It has, up to date, been a question of observation, questioning
and the use of one or two processes to facilitate the emergence
of clearer and more detailed wants, needs and expectations with
a view to creating shared goals with performance measurements.
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