Corporate Culture: Meeting Facilitation

New managers are often called on to hold meetings. How these meetings are conducted plays a major role in creating the corporate culture. To understand the process, you first need to understand the dynamics of culture.

As a new manager, the concept of culture and how to create it may seem a bit obscure. A positive culture is one where members are encouraged to interact with others and approach tasks in ways that will help them to meet their satisfaction needs. This is the type of culture that most good managers want to create, but few are capable of accomplishing.

Your role in this type of culture is to create the environment that will allow this process to take form naturally. You cannot enforce a positive culture on the members of the organization by legislating the process, but in fact you have to lead the process. This leadership is done through facilitating the interaction process.

As a facilitator, you create the environment and act as moderator. The moderator keeps everybody focused on the subject being discussed. Often this facilitation must be done in a subtle way, because being obvious may make some of the participants self-conscious. This would inhibit their ability to interact with the other members of the group.

It is also important that you know the two forms of negative cultures. Both are called defensive cultures. One is passive, and one is aggressive. In a Passive Defensive culture, members believe they must interact with people in defensive ways that will not threaten their own security. In an Aggressive Defensive culture, members feel that they must approach tasks in forceful ways to protect their status and security. In both of these cultures, the end result is the drawing apart of the individuals from each other. As you can see, this will not allow for substantive problem solving.

You, as the manager, must demonstrate that you value the members of your team by allowing them to set realistic goals and by giving them the guidance necessary to achieve these goals. The results of this process should be that your customers will be well served, and the overall demeanor of the staff is healthy. You also will need to keep an open mind towards the innovations of the team. You must realize that you do not know everything, and that those who do the job most often see what improvements need to be made. Take pride in the council and suggestions of the group and you will achieve great success.

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