Team Facilitation Skills Training

For a Continual Improvement (CI) Business Culture

Continual Improvement (CI) is much more likely to happen naturally in a business when managers and supervisors adopt skills to lead a transformation to the new business culture — where everyone automatically works to improve the business as part of their everyday routine.  Executives, Managers and Supervisors don't need to do all of the training and facilitation.  But, when they are actively involved the training and project team-work has a much more significant impact.

Common Issues

Perhaps unfulfilled hopes of the “information age” are causing companies to reevaluate the results from earlier CI initiatives.  They were supposed to deliver higher quality products and services, and more efficient business processes.  But, instead they left a program-of-the-month image and even more skepticism about such efforts.

More than ever, executives and managers are asking…

“How can we make Continual Improvement (CI) natural in our business?”
“How can we increase our Employees' Involvement (EI) in improving our business?”
“How can my work group be more effective and efficient?”
“How can our managers lead our CI/EI efforts?”
“Why have our previous CI/EI efforts fallen short of expectations?”

A Leverage Point

The management team can provide compelling, powerful leadership for CI by adopting methodical team facilitation skills.  In fact, it’s a key form of “walking the talk” that provides leverage for the overall CI culture transition.  Employees naturally adopt collaborative behaviors for CI when they see their bosses and project leaders using them. 

Project Team Facilitation = A Key Management Skill

One general manager described a main reason for training top managers as well as project leaders in team facilitation methods when he said, “We managers must visibly lead the culture change to CI.  If not, our words will be hollow and unconvincing.  So we need to adopt the facilitation skills needed to lead improvement projects and set an example for involvement in team-based CI efforts.” 

His staff admitted that it may be difficult to schedule upper level managers for blocks of time dedicated to facilitating a project team.  But they were convinced that they could not master the skills for everyday practice unless they had significant experience in real project situations.  So they committed themselves to finding meaningful ways to practice.  Co-facilitation provided valuable opportunities to perfect their skills while also promoting manager-employee involvement in CI efforts. 

Practical Methods, Not “Team Motivation” Exercises

Training for business Team Facilitation skills is not about motivation.  It’s about providing the practical “nuts and bolts” that groups need to become effective improvement project teams, in two areas:

         •  Improvement Project Methods — Including generic business process improvement methods, process re-engineering, six sigma methods, lean flow manufacturing, etc.

         •  Practical Team Development Methods — Including methods to transition from a group of people to a committed, effective team (goal setting, tracking measures, team working norms, roles and responsibilities, effective meeting methods, working styles balancing, conflict resolution methods, etc.).

The second item (Team Development) may be the more important one.  Most of the improvement methodologies (six sigma, etc.) give it only cursory attention.  But experience has proven that it’s critical to project team effectiveness and can cut weeks off a project time line while improving the project results.  Indeed, careful attention to the team development issues can ensure truly high performance — for either project teams or work teams. 

Experienced facilitators often get interesting reactions from meeting participants:

         •  “How did you do that?  That’s the first productive meeting we’ve ever had here.” 

         •  Joe: “That’s the first time we’ve been able to have a productive discussion without being run over by Bob.”  Bob: “That’s the first time we’ve been able to have a productive discussion without me having to carry the meeting.” 

It’s part personal talent, but mostly experienced skill with proven facilitation methods.

The message is clear, that a key to productive organizations is in the methods they use to facilitate people working together to solve problems and continually improve their operations (Team-Based Continual Improvement).  Technologies can be easily copied, but people-based differences are much harder to steal, so they can become powerful long term competitive advantages.  And companies can pave the way to that by empowering managers with team facilitation skills to develop those people-based strengths and set an example for their subordinates to do the same. 

CI Facilitator Skills Training

The scope of facilitator training can vary considerably, depending on the type of situations expected and the availability of other support specialists for the less-frequently used techniques.  Very broad facilitator training can include:

         •  Potential Subjects, Methods, Tools, Techniques, etc.

         -  Improvement Methodologies

        ..  General purpose improvement methodology

        ..  Kaizen ImpAct™ (one week, blitz project)

        ..  Critical, cross-functional business process redesign

        ..  Six sigma, in-depth process improvement and statistical control

        ..  Lean manufacturing and accounting

        ..  ValueLink™ for focused ERP support of main line operations

    -  Project Work Tools and Techniques

        ..  Structured brainstorming, for innovation or input to analysis

        ..  Affinity diagramming, for organizing information

        ..  Nominal group technique, for fast prioritization

        ..  Control charts, for analysis

        ..  Force field analysis

        ..  Cause and effect diagramming, for analysis

        ..  Process flow charting, for analysis

        ..  Gantt charting, for project scheduling and management

        ..  25 other techniques

         -  Team Development Methods

        ..  Personal relations versus task functions

        ..  Stages of team development, how to facilitate

        ..  Gatekeeping

        ..  Giving and receiving feedback

        ..  Win/Win

        ..  Understanding team behaviors

        ..  Conflict management and resolution

        ..  Decision-making approaches and guidelines

        ..  Earning trust

        ..  Team roles, responsibilities and working norms

        ..  Effective training methods (vs. education or teaching)

        ..  Effective meeting and presentation methods

         •  Practical Training Methods

         -  Four step initial training process

        ..  Educational discussion

        ..  Demonstrations

        ..  Hands-on practice

        ..  Follow-up coaching

         -  Co-facilitation with an experienced partner

        ..  Take the more mechanical modules at first

        ..  Add the more interactive modules as confidence builds

         -  Expert observation and coaching to fine-tune skills

Doing It Right the First Time = Productivity

Recalling an often-heard saying in business:

“It seems that there’s never time to do it right the first time,

but always time to do it over.”

That’s especially true when considering facilitation skills training.  As managers we often focus on the technical aspects of business, taking for granted the inter-personal processes needed to accomplish them. 

But leading companies have found that team facilitation skills are too important to take for granted.  In fact they’re critical to achieving a rate of innovation and continual improvement that puts the company permanently ahead of the competitors.  So they can’t be left to chance, particularly in America where our cultural bias for action often ignores the power of methodical processes for cooperative efforts. 

If we don’t take the time to develop our team facilitation skills, then we can expect a wide range of performance from our business teams — from accidentally excellent, to disappointingly mediocre, to morale-racking failure and rework. 

Team facilitation training for project leaders and management personnel can ensure consistently high performance — including continual improvement — from all the teams in your business.

Good Luck!
The CUMBERLAND Group