Peter A. Koch, chief executive officer of Koch Eye Associates in Warwick, is sold on facilitators. And he should be, considering the $1,500 to $2,000 he’s paid one of these professionals for a day’s work at each of his company’s last three annual planning meetings.
It was worth it, Koch said. “It gives the meeting independence and takes away the bias” that employees bring to the situation. Facilitators “do things a different way than we would.”
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Koch’s observation is one of the major benefits that comes with hiring an outsider to conduct meetings that might otherwise get hairy, according to Richard Brien of Brien and Associates Consulting in East Greenwich.
Facilitators “have no vested interest in any of the internal interest groups” within the hiring company. “They see topics and relationships through fresh eyes and they’re viewed as having no ax to grind,” Brien said, adding that he’s facilitated meetings for some of his own clients and for non-profit groups for which he volunteers, from the Special Olympics to the Girl Scouts.
A facilitator may be required when a company has “a lot of material to cover and boil down in a very short time.” Day-long retreats and meeting with out-of-town parties are a good example, Brien said. In those cases, “you have to be pretty sure you can get from A to B without wasting any time.”
In this part of the country, facilitators tend to charge between $100 and $225 an hour, Brien said. So it’s important to make sure you’re getting your money’s worth.
A good way to do that is to ask colleagues for names of people they’ve used or to contact a consulting company and ask for a recommendation from within or outside. Once you reach the facilitator, discuss a meeting plan and don’t be afraid to ask for references, Brien said. “If they won’t give them, hang up.”
Some facilitators draw up a post-meeting report for the client. It’s a service Koch has found extremely useful.
Our annual meetings are about “what are we doing right and what are we doing wrong,” Koch said. “What we do is we end up taking the report from the facilitator and we break it down by committees in the office. And those committees get things done.”
For example, we may decide that “everyone should have a standardized uniform,” Koch said. Someone is appointed to “contact the uniform companies, choose a style and get the best price, and they take pride in that.”
Using a facilitator can also have drawbacks and pitfalls about which companies thinking of using one should be aware, Brien said.
On one hand, they are objective. “On the flip, objectivity is to say you really don’t know much about the organization,” he said.
Other times, facilitators become “too enamored of the process and don’t pull it all together and come up with some specific priorities and some sense that we worked through this and have come to some conclusions.”
A good facilitator has pacing and balance, Brien said. He or she knows when to “probe something that perhaps wasn’t on the original agenda but now seems pretty interesting, and when to cut the discussion off if that leads down a blind alley.”
That ability to be “fair to all respondents” while “dealing with experts real and imagined” is perhaps the hallmark of a good facilitator, he quipped.
