There is really no such thing as a group. Groups emerge from collections of individuals who make choices about how and when to participate. All groups and group members have boundaries formed by physical, technical, temporal and social elements (Arrow & McGrath, 1993). These boundaries are the membranes through which information and resources flow in and out of a group. Skilled group leadership and purposeful group development open these membranes within and between people, information and insight.

 

The work of groups is the work of boundary shifting, knowing when to focus in and when to focus out. It is the work of seeking information, processing information, decision-making, planning and implementation. These tasks are also the work of individuals operating within the membrane of the group. The work of group development is the work of helping members to see their parts within the whole and helping group members take responsibility for regulating their personal and collective permeability to ideas, options and actions.

 

To lead groups that work, groups in which there is maximum participation, productivity and satisfaction, requires balancing attention to the task(s) – getting the work done – and to the development of relational skills that allow for authentic, collaborative engagement with tasks and with colleagues. Purposeful process design and delivery is the key to achieving these dual outcomes. By focusing only on the tasks at hand, groups may get that work done but do not expand their capacities for addressing increasingly harder or more complex tasks. 

 

The harnesses of draft horses are fitted with blinders to block peripheral vision and keep the horse’s attention on the road or furrow ahead. Many groups operate with similar blinders missing the importance of the organizing their tasks to increase their efficiency and productivity, developing their process toolkit for supporting thinking and clear communication, or purposely building relationships within the group to develop their capacities for collaboration and strengthening professional community.

 

Skilled group leaders clarify three types of outcomes for a group’s tasks: result outcomes, action outcomes and knowledge outcomes.

 

Results: Achieving result outcomes requires clarifying success criteria for the group’s products, performances, and decisions. These ultimate goals then drive collective work and focus the attention of individual participants. In fact, naming and clarifying the group’s desired results becomes a catalyst for focusing energy and potentially avoiding peripheral issues. Clear result outcomes and indicators produce cohesive energy and productivity for task completion.

 

Actions: Group decision-making leads to a series of potential actions. These actions typically come in one or more of three forms:

• implementation of some new program or practice,

• transfer of knowledge and skills to a new arena

• desisting from continuing some practice or habits.

 

Each of these types of actions requires specific planning and monitoring systems to ensure fidelity to a project’s goals.

 

Knowledge: In order to act, group members need accurate knowledge of the issues that they are exploring. According to cognitive science, professionals draw upon three types of knowledge for successful performance:

 

• declarative knowledge

• procedural knowledge

• conditional knowledge.

 

Declarative knowledge is knowing “what”. This basic information includes technical vocabulary, logistical information and some degree of contextual information. Procedural knowledge is knowing “how”. This level of knowledge includes the skills and processes for implementing some desired action. Typically, process knowledge develops through input from experts, modeling and guided practice with coaching to acquire skillfulness with a new practice. Conditional knowledge is knowing “when and why”. This form of knowledge is the most sophisticated of the three types that professionals apply to decide whether or not and under what conditions one would or should perform the learned actions or implement some strategy. Skilled facilitation is a prime example of conditional knowledge in action, especially when working with challenging topics.

 

Improving groups balance task and process dimensions with equal attention to developing the group as a whole. Three focus areas produce this result:

 

• Congruence with shared norms and values

• Balanced participation

• Productive cognitive conflict

 

Congruence with shared norms and values: Productive groups ensure psychological safety for all group members by behaving congruently with agreed upon norms and filtering choices and decisions through agreed upon values.

 

Balanced participation: Skillful group members encourage and elicit contributions from others, seek and honor diverse perspectives and use task groups within the whole to maximize engagement and productivity.

 

Productive cognitive conflict: Experienced groups anticipate conflict. These conflicts can harm or enrich the group depending on the form that the conflict takes. Mature groups purposely structure their interactions, understanding that productive cognitive conflict is conflict about ideas and proposals not conflict between people (Amason et.al. 1995). Productive cognitive conflict requires group members to embrace norms of thoughtful critical thinking and give up personal ownership of ideas and positions.

 

Productive process design includes attention to the physical, cognitive and emotional needs of the group. Skilled groups and skilled group leaders craft a conversational container within which it is psychologically safe to discover and to learn. In this intentionally designed environment, it is okay not to be certain.

 

The conversational container has three important elements:

 

1.      Strategies for starting the conversation. Groups don’t automatically come to the table and begin work. Most group members are making a physical, emotional and cognitive transition from other activities to the session they are joining. Effective strategies for starting the conversation center group members’ attention on a common point of focus. Such strategies also enhance affective and cognitive resources as foundations for group work and group member learning. 

 

2.      Protocols for structuring the conversation. Purposeful conversations require shape and structure. Groups tend to avoid hard to-talk-about-topics when they lack protocols and processes for structuring their dialogues and or discussions. External structures and protocols maximize efficient use of time and increase by maintaining momentum and psychological safety for individual group members by providing guidelines for interaction.

 

3.      Tools for sustaining thinking in the conversation: Participants make moment-to-moment decisions about whether or not a given instance is psychologically safe enough to risk offering a response, insight, or question. The group leader’s nonverbal and verbal communication skills are an important and modifiable factor in these participant decisions. The nonverbal and verbal skills of participants also influence one another. In addition, building specific cognitive processes into strategies and protocols helps to focus group members’ energy in productive thoughtful ways.

 

 

 

Safety and comfort is not always the same thing in a collaborative setting. Comfort with other people’s discomfort is an important group leader and group member resource. It is not the leader’s responsibility to make everyone feel at ease at all times. If groups are talking about the right things, individuals and entire group may be unsettled at points in the conversation. The leader’s responsibility is to protect the integrity of the process being used and provided safety and security for group members by helping them to trust that process. Group leaders do so by presenting the ‘what’, ‘why’, and ‘how’ of strategies and protocols. These three factors offer group members structure, rationale and procedures for purposeful task engagement, especially when trust in each other may be low.

 

 

 

Leaders and group members negotiate a psychological contract during each session in which they interact. During this ‘negotiation’ group members determine whether or not a leader will be given permission to fully organize and orchestrate their activities. Permission to lead is not a blanket contract. The emotional state of the group, the time of day and the topics at hand just some of the variables that might influence a group’s decisions. Group member engagement, cooperation and willingness to take emotional and cognitive risks are the major manifestations of how strongly the contract has been forged for that session. 

Group leaders need two types of permission. The first is permission to direct the processes that the group will engage in to manage that meeting’s content and topics. The second type is permission to place issues before the group. These issues might be guiding questions, problem statements, action plans, or data for analysis (Grinder, 1997).

 

 

 

Several factors influence group member responses. These include, who the group leaders is to the group in terms of role or power relationships and group member perceptions of the leader’s investment in specific outcomes for the session. If the group is the formal supervisor of any of the group members, prior experiences with being open and honest about uncertainties will strongly influence how individuals participate in collaborative inquiry and in data-driven dialogue. If it was safe to be uncertain in earlier situations with that supervisor then it may be safe again in this new setting. If the group leader has specific content area responsibilities and has been promoting a specific program of action, it may be difficult for a group to engage in collaborative analysis and problem finding if the data hints at low performance or lack of successful implementation.

 

Two key strategies that increase a groups’ willingness to give permission to their leader to lead are role clarification and role negotiation.

 

Role Clarification: Experienced group facilitators open sessions by clarifying their role and responsibilities. They name their intentions to frame and orchestrate the processes that will guide the group and they name their intention to stay neutral about the content and not evaluate contributions (Doyle & Straus, 1976).

 

Role Negotiation: One approach to empowering a working group, whether it is at a novice level of performance as a group or at a more expert level, is to negotiate your stance as the group leader. Stances may vary from ‘hard’ facilitation to ‘soft’ facilitation. An effective way to do this is to offer a physical continuum organized by metaphors, then asking group members to point to the spot on the continuum that they personally judge will be most effective for that session. Some metaphors that we have used include offering facilitation stances that range from Rambo to Mr. Rogers; from Xena Warrior Princess to Mary Poppins; or from a Lion to a Lamb. By presenting choice, it helps the group to gain or regain the power to control its own direction and purposes. This is especially true if individual group members are dominating the group’s time and energies. Such a group will tend to select harder forms of facilitation and give the group leader permission to intervene with problematic situations.

Successful groups don’t just happen. They are the result of planning, problem-solving and reflection-on-action on the part of both group members and group leaders. Successful group leaders see the group as it might be, not as it is. This requires a developmental lens for group development and a willingness to invest in thoughtful capacity building and not just immediate task accomplishment. A similar developmental lens is important for group leaders to embrace for themselves as well. We all need to learn to project ourselves and our skills as group leaders into the future and operate in the moment with that bigger picture in mind. The leaders own willingness to grow and develop as a group leader conveys an important message about the purposes and values of professional collaboration and the purposes and values of professional learning.

 

References:

 

Amason, A.C., Thompson, K.R., Hochwarter, W.A., & Harrison, A.W. (1995, Autumn) Conflict: An important dimension in successful management teams. Organizational Development, 24 (2), 20-35.

Arrow, H. & McGrath, J.E. (1993). Membership matters: How member change and continuity affect small group structure, process, and performance. Small Group Research, 24, 334-361.

 

Doyle, M. & Straus. D. (1976). How to make meetings work!. New York: Berkley Books.

 

Grinder, M. (1995) The science of nonverbal communications. Battleground, WA:

 

 Michael Grinder and Associates.