Not to Facilitate

Speaker A You told us early on how you spent so many years not teaching.

Speaker B Yeah.

Speaker A And it sounds like what you're doing at these talks is very much in that same mode of not not teaching. And what I experienced is behavioral training and OD, or NTL. It's learning how to ask questions, you said decently before, but it's also to invite people to explore something without bringing up all the resistance. And it sounds like you've learned a way to get them to explore and keeping their anxieties at bay.

Speaker C You don't have to do anything, but.

Speaker A If you did, what would you've learned? A very artful way of asking a question. As a facilitator, as another human being, as someone not trying to tell, but very much facilitating to me, which is the core of the training and organization development, or behavioral skills or facilitation skills.

Speaker B I would never facilitate a meeting, say more. Well, I'm always interested if facilitators, what's that for you?

Speaker D What's that for you?

Speaker A What do you think about facilitators? Like what?

Speaker B One of the things that frequently comes up is we want to do team building. Where you facilitate it? No, I wouldn't even think about it. That's the manager's job, is to facilitate the meeting. If your manager wants to talk with me, or if you the manager wants to talk with me about how to facilitate the meeting, I'll talk with you in advance, but I won't show up.

Speaker A And in a nutshell then, or in this sound bite thing, when you think about what you might have done as a member of the OD network or an NTL consultant and what you would do today, it sounded like you were just describing the difference. An OD guy would go facilitate and could you just put that all together?

Speaker B Well, I facilitated meetings, team building for ten years, probably 150. It was a crapshoot. And I finally, after 150 effort and realized that it was just chance, I said, I must be missing something. So I decided not to facilitate anymore. I would talk with a manager. Is this after Elliot? No, this was before Elliot. Elliot just provided me a way, an alternative to doing what I had been doing for ten years. And it was like throwing a life route to a drowning person. His work provided a way for me to make a living, but I wouldn't facilitate a meeting. I haven't facilitated one in 25 years. But until I read a general theory of bureaucracy, I didn't have a real alternative for dealing with. Because when you facilitate a meeting, you become the manager of the and are doing what the manager ought to do. Friend of mine over here at George Washington that did Sandy King's dissertation, elliot Eric Winslow, he wrote a wonderful little article one time, called it the Pro shop. And the theme of that article was most consultants, OD consultants in particular, work as if they're golf pros and they teach the fundamentals of the game, and the player gets better and better and better. But every time the ball goes in the trap or in a difficult line, the pro says to the player, step aside. Let me hit it for you. It's a pro shot. So the student steps aside, the pro hits the ball 180 yards out of a sand trap, and the score goes down. And then the pro leaves.

Speaker D And.

Speaker B His game falls apart. I think what Elliot's work is doing is providing a way that a manager can design an organization using the authority you're talking about an accountability hierarchy using the authority of his office to design an organization that allows him to hit the best shots he can or she. And the other thing I liked most not most, but was enthralled by Elliot's work is it never stayed the same. The language changed. He would switch positions. He starts with cognitive power and ends with complexity of mental and that's the last one complexity of mental process, all of these things. And he didn't let it bother him. He kept if you don't know the answer, make it. There were better terms, better language, better efforts. And what his work does is provide managers with ways to manage that are at the pro level.

Speaker A Jerry, you're a behavioralist and help to understand and help people, I guess, alter.

Speaker B Their behaviors and ways.

Speaker A And Elliot had these things called effective managerial leadership practices. And we would ask him about training for those. He said, you don't train people in them.

Speaker C You just hold people accountable for them. And yet when you hear, he says, hold your managers accountable for holding two way dialogue, holding effective team meetings and two way dialogue with every subordinate. And in these team meetings, well, my.

Speaker A Understanding of OD was that's what we learned to do.

Speaker C It took me five years to learn how to do that.

Speaker A Elliot says, no, someone just should have.

Speaker C Held me accountable for doing so. Could you say something about how? Well, first of all, in a lot of the consultations, most of the consultants report they never get to installing managerial practices. And Elliot said, you have to have them to keep the structures in place. So any structure that's put in place could deteriorate if the managers don't behave that way. And yet none of the consultants seem to succeed or managers in putting these practices in place.

Speaker B Managers can easily succeed and frequently do. It's the consultants that don't, because if they do, they've become the manager. And I'm not surprised that consultants don't succeed. I'm relieved that they don't succeed in putting them in place, because if they do, they have become the manager.

Speaker A Well, the consultants should help the managers put these practices in place or make sure the managers get them in place.

Speaker B Or make sure they should. Well, let me press you, though. What you're saying is the consultant should hold their manager accountable exactly. For putting them in place.

Speaker A I don't mean that.

Speaker B But you do mean that.

Speaker C What I mean is for the project.

Speaker A To be successful, the practices have to be in place and the consultant is responsible for giving us professional advice on how to do that and supporting any efforts they want to make to do that. Often the consultant is ineffective in explaining.

Speaker C Why they're important and the managers often.

Speaker A Choose not to put them in place because they have to actually change the.

Speaker C Behaviors which they don't want to do.

Speaker B I would agree that consultants are frequently ineffective in explaining they are.

Speaker D When you're in a consultant, does that happen?

Speaker B Are you out of your mind? Are you out of your brain? That's another one that I can no longer say. I can't use the words mine since Elliot threw it out in his last book. But of course I screw up. How do you think I Jesus Christ.

Speaker D I'm kidding.

Speaker A That's lovely.

Speaker B I figured one is that at my.

Speaker E Best.

Speaker B I get fired once out of every eight times I work with an organization. At my best.

Speaker D At your best. Okay.

Speaker B And second, I've never been fired for being incompetent.

Speaker A Okay?

Speaker B I've only been fired for being competent.

Speaker D Great. I think we've covered a lot here.

Speaker B We've covered a lot.

Speaker D I think it's been great.

Speaker E Funny, the world.