Leadership Academy: Part 2

At the end of day 4 of the Leadership Academy, I find myself thoughtful, tired, challenged and inspired.  We looked at effective team development yesterday and strategic planning and I find myself trying to sort this all out.


As for what I have learned, as program or service leaders, we read and actively discussed how clearly defined role in meetings or work groups are essential.  We watched a segment of the movie "12 Angry Men" and made observations of how the jury, which became dysfunctional, was made functional again through the facilitation by one juror who forced the group to discuss and put aside agendas and personal feelings.  Next, members of the group performed a role play of a department meeting regarding student issues, the audience unaware that each had been assigned a dysfunctional role.  Two of the role players dominated the discussion.  A couple were interrupted or ignored.  The facilitator did a good job at reining the meeting in towards its goals, despite the difficult roles.  Lastly, we had to solve a murder mystery in small groups, given a story and a suspects profiles data sheet.  The trick was that the several of the story handouts had slightly different information, which we discovered halfway through the exercise.  Certainly, we could see how teams work and how they fall apart, and not just imagine it.  


This group approach to learning about effective groups was quite effective.  For one, the exercises often disarmed us of our personal intents as we were focused on the exercise and it caught us by surprise.  It shocked us into challenging our assumptions about our own practices in how we work in groups as individuals.  At the end of the day, I told a fellow camp member that I had never worked with such a cooperative group at a professional development event ever:  we all have some experience, we all have done some thinking about leadership and we are so willing to share and listen.  We were teams, however functional or dysfunctional, much like the ones we were talking about, as if were part of our own social experiment.

So, today, I was eager to continue and learn about strategic planning.  We were given a brief outline of the steps.  Then, we were given a case study of a fictional post-secondary institution.  In the case study, we read the college's strategic plan with its goals and we read the department's issues.  From this, we were asked to create a mission statement and conduct a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis for a training department strategic plan.  And our team of eight was sent off to another room and given 60 minutes to complete.  Given the group we have at the academy, this task should be reasonable given the information and the leadership work we had done so far.


So we assigned roles.  Actually, four people were quick to volunteer.  One person volunteered to be timekeeper.  Then, another person quickly claimed the role of recorder.  And then, I volunteered to be facilitator, because this strategic planning reminded me so much of work in Academic Foundations at Bow Valley College.  I see these types of meetings to be a challenge to facilitate and I consider it a personal growth area.


The timekeeper announced we should read for the next five minutes.  And so we did.  When asked how to proceed, I offered that we consider goals and initiatives from the college plan and the issues on the fictional department information page before writing the values.  Someone rejected the idea in favour of moving onto the values assessment and we could refer back to the plan as we went.  We all acquiesced as the timekeeper mentioned we had used up our time for the first activity already.  

We then moved onto values and their associated behaviours.  At this point, three people started blurting out values.  The recorder was writing them down in her own words trying to catch them all.  I tried to remind the group that the values had to come from the case study and not from their own organization or life experiences; however, we proceeded.  Voices were being slightly animated.  Their was violin music playing overhead that seemed to be reaching a crescendo. 

Next, we tried to list behaviours to match these values.  The three people who listed most of the values then started listing behaviours that sounded more like values.  I tried to gently make that point but the list proceeded.  I tried to invite others to offer behaviours but they were ignored or their ideas were not recorded.  The timekeeper reminded us that we only had 20 minutes to complete the mission statement.  In haste, the vocal group, of which I include myself, were offering suggestions about the phrasing of the statement.  As we were discussing the statement, the recorder was making a chart as we could not reach consensus.  Time ran out and we returned to the central room having not accomplished much in terms of a strategic plan.


I felt challenged as a facilitator and a group member.  We were not certain about the exercise.  Our roles blurred.  A couple of people dominated quite actively.  A couple said nothing.  And a couple others were engaged only when invited.  We had disengaged and maybe even took this "exercise" a little too seriously as if we had something to prove.  I talked with another couple of the group members over lunch about what happened.  We all felt a little diminished.  All of the eight people in our group were smart, capable and nice people, and yet this had been so hard. We had all discussed and observed effective and dysfunctional team, yet when we became a team with a specific challenge and a deadline, we fell apart.  There were no troublemakers or turkeys in this group.  


Somebody not from our group said her group had a similar experience.  She brought up that people had forgotten that this was an exercise.   She was right.  At times we act as if world peace is on the line.  One gentleman from the group who did not say too much during the exercise found the task too complicated within the time allowed.  He disengaged himself shortly after we started listing values as he could see that there was not going to be any real progress. I went back to my room and thought some more.  We did not succeed because we did not have  firm team roles.  We did not have a team procedure to ensure consensus or to resolve conflict. We could not prepare or reflect.  The small team of eight was not well-matched in terms of behaviour style and planning expertise.  I did not even know what SWOT stood for moments before we began the exercise.  We could not succeed and that was probably the central point of the exercise.


I now see how groups at work go awry.  Even if you have good and capable people in the room, meetings can easily go awry.  So much goes into facilitating an effective meeting.  


Tomorrow, we will debrief with our team of eight on how things went.  And the debrief will be brief.  I will apologize for my poor facilitation and for stepping on any toes.  Then, I will ask if we can start fresh when we compete part 2 of the case study.