Facilitating Communication and Creating Agreements to help a Management Team Become More Effective

Outcomes

Situation
Frances (not her real name), the director of a technical assistance provider to schools, was experiencing challenges managing the internal operations of her organization. In particular, she and her three top managers did not seem to be on the same page. We were asked to design and facilitate a process to help the director and her staff work through some communication issues and create a set of internal organizational agreements to enable them to be a unified team in providing technical assistance to the field.

Approach
We interviewed the Director and her three managers to determine the issues from all perspectives and to establish goals for the project:

Strengthen communication between the three managers and the director
Foster understanding and appreciation of the diverse strengths of the three managers and the director
Establish procedures for project planning and priority setting
Establish delegation processes
Foster the effectiveness of a four-way management team to further the goals of the organization

We had a compressed timetable, so we set up a weekly schedule of two-hour meetings for seven weeks. We systematically worked through each of the goals, stopping to examine and process the impact of their different communication and work styles along the way.

We provided tools to help the four participants understand their own and others strengths, tools to analyze the assumptions they were making about others responses and tools to help them communicate effectively with one another. We consistently checked back with the established goals and adjusted them as necessary as we went along.

Results
At the end of the seven weeks, we had created the following agreements:

Communication Guidelines: establishing the environment for good communication, managing different opinions and giving constructive feedback
Communication Mechanisms: e-mail, staff meetings, response time to messages
Delegation Procedure: to ensure that the Director and her managers agree with how tasks are delegated within the organization
How Priorities are Determined: to ensure that a realistic look at resources is taken before a new project is accepted
Meeting Template: to assist in facilitating effective internal meetings

In a follow-up meeting with the Director one month after the project ended, she reported these changes:

“Communication has improved in leaps and bounds!”
“It helps us to know each others’ strengths so we can utilize them.”
“The meeting template is helping us tremendously; we are using it in our individual meetings, our Management Team meetings and in our full staff meeting. It helps us to stay on track.”
“My managers helped to calm me down after a particularly stressful meeting with the funder, by using the communication tools we had used. I feel more empowered to take a stand in a meeting with the funder knowing that I have the support of my managers.”

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