Leader or Facilitator? - Eyes Front
One week ago, the team of our summer term played an online game for team building as course required. The game is a mountaineering simulation developed by Harvard University. Five players are randomly assigned as different roles with different individual goals, and form a mountaineering team to challenge the summit. Each one in each round needs to decide his/her action, to stay, to request/provide helps or to move on; and to reach the summit needs at least five rounds. After six rounds, the application will calculate the sum of all members’ points as the game result.
It is a real impressive experience – two members were in Australia, a Malaysian and a Chilean; other three were in Hong Kong, but were not together. We were allowed to communicate by typing. After game entry, I was assigned as the virtual leader. So I organized preparation, mutually sharing each role’s goals, special skills and information, and even making a plan for the highest-points portfolio – some individual goals were conflictive and could not be accomplished together. Unfortunately, perhaps due to the online system and wire speed, one peer and I clicked a wrong button, and we had to stay at the base camp and waste the first round! So how would we do? The plan was void, restarting was unable, apology was meaningless, and continuing in disorder was stupid. The only thing I could do was to recalculate the possible points and let others focus on reality. Finally, four members reached the summit and nobody was recurred. We got about 75% of total score – it was a satisfying result for my peers.
The real collaboration is like this game, not the general electronic games – there are still some constraints, unpredictable incidents and unknown information, without repeat saving and loading, you must try your best under the existing conditions and encourage co-workers to face the future. In this individual blog, I would like to borrow ideas form RAMF model (Lepsinger and DeRosa, 2010), to review my role, contributions, miscues and some issues during the collaboration project.
Relationships
For a team, the leader’s behaviors should reflect other teammates’ expectations, while all members are willing to share the goals and responsibilities. In other words, a leader needs followers and leadership can be understood as interaction between these two roles. But facilitator is not quiet alike, who only needs to take charge of facilitating progress for ensuring goal achievement whether with others’ responses or not. Facilitator needs not formal or informal acceptance from his/her peers although he/she actually plays an essential role, if there is not a leader.
Indeed, our group, Quartet, has never discussed about who was the leader without the instructor’s request. But frankly speaking, I regard myself as a facilitator in my group and the collaboration project, rather than a leader or a follower.
To be a facilitator among others needs both objective and subjective factors. Compare with other ladies of Quartet, I have fewer courses in Semester B and more previous working experience. And we have formed a group in a course of Semester A when I have been the leader and responsible for some important components of the project. Even in MGT6209, I also played the relatively positive role in the first two assignments – because they were busy with other courses at that time. On the other hand, I was paying attention on social innovation and entrepreneurship areas in recent years, and had some ideas which might be suitable for the final project. I was really glad to share them with others and, personally, I hoped these ideas could be accomplished in one day. Due to these complex factors, I became the facilitator naturally.
The relationships among Quartet were trust, open but not critical. We were from a programme and not in a team at first time, so we learnt each other’s characteristics and styles, and could trust in each other’s capabilities and attitudes.
Open means every member could propose opinions, questions, advice and argument before related decision making at any time via a public channel, such as group email, WeChat group or face-to-face conversation. This style not only belongs to Quartet, but many IS groups. Another collaboration style derives from it is acquiescence principle – if the leader or facilitator proposes a plan or resolution which will not be questioned by others in a duration (a few days), it will be seen as an accepted consensus.
Acquiescence may ensure of efficiency and fairness, but also may bring impact on participation – members may keep silence since reckoning on others’ feedback or regarding the progress, but silence may restrict the effectiveness of the outcomes. In my opinion, leader must lead enough critical followers rather than own silent or submissive members. Without critical participation, the relationships among the team would be facilitating influence the interaction style.
Accountability
Admittedly, our group had less critical interaction during the project. That made facilitator more important, but meanwhile, facilitator also would intensify this working style.
As the facilitator, I put my role into play in continual tasks. At the beginning, I contacted with the opponent group, Wings, as early as possible. And then, I proposed the initial ideas for the final project and organized intra-group discussion and did a few changes according to ladies' feedback. After that, our group and Wings used Skype to hold the first inter-group meeting to exchange opinions of ideas and reached the consensuses of communication tools, meeting frequency and so on. The negotiation progress was introduced in the final presentation – we all preferred a project would generate social value as the common expectation and respectively integrated a proposal based on the opponent’s feedback. But Dr. Yu showed two opposing opinions to two groups.
The deadline was close but we were not sure that we could persuade Wings of our idea. In that moment, I thought I had accountability to break the deadlock. I wrote a long email to point out the defects of their assumption based on my experience and knowledge of China’s social organizations; and if Wings could make their proposal more feasible, our group would accept their idea. Few days later, we held a remote meeting with Wings. Although I found that they could not further improve their idea, we got some notions to develop a new collaboration proposal which was integrated with their assumptions of NGO and social value and our business model from an initial idea.
(Quartet's Gmail)
A collaborating story was about Apple and Google. In 2008, Steve Jobs has phoned a Google VP at a weekend morning, just because he found a letter of Google’s logo (the second "o") had an uncomfortable color displayed on iPhone screen. This case brought a strong impression on me. In addition to time sensibility, I think, both leader and facilitator should notice the effectiveness of collaboration, namely understanding the expected value for both the two parties and the real target group. What difference is, leader has accountability of clarifying others’ accountability, and motivating, monitoring and providing feedback to them; but without others’ defined authority, facilitator may have not this "power".
Process
This difference also was reflected on the decision making process.
For a project team, meeting is the commonest decision making mean, and the meeting process would influence the quality of the meeting outcomes obviously. When discussing, various viewpoints from different participants would be better than debate among very few people. Especially for a collaboration project, the more voices people say out, the more coherent and feasible idea would be sought out. However, the meeting process not only happens at the meeting time, but includes meeting preparation and summary. As a facilitator, I could suggest the meeting topic and content, coordinate the time, remind each participant to think about the issue in advance, and design the template for summarizing, but I could not ensure that all peers take a same deep thinking for the coming meeting.
In such as a case, meeting type would adjust of itself. More precisely, when two ideas from two groups were hard to be integrated into one plan or an idea had apparent flaw but was difficult to be improved, discussion was needed but not a brainstorming style. In fact, we tried to make a brainstorming happen, but with different depth of preparation and understanding of each participant, “brainstorming” could not be a normalcy. Instead, the discussion process would become to persuading between a people with others, from start or after a very short time. Despite it seemed this persuading discussion had less critical participation, but it was relatively efficient and effective. What’s more, listening also was a kind of participation while new points building on the persuading reasons were encouraged.
Motivation
The difference between leader and facilitator can be shortened by motivation. For a student group, we could not take the financial or material approaches as the motivation strategy. Meanwhile, relying on the motivation from class is unpractical. I venture to disagree with the vote scheme. On one hand, our group, who from another programme, was hard to obtain recognition with other peers at the morning class. On the other hand, sixteen groups might be so many that might make audiences confused and tired when presentation. Thus the class voting would depend more on relationships or careless than rigorous evaluation.
Nevertheless I had to admit that I ignored other team motivation strategies. For example, I could make the tasks of the collaboration progress more interdependent and let all teammates cooperate together. That would avoid negative effects brought by acquiescence. Aiming at the outcomes of the interdependent task, teammates would give positive feedback and recognition with each other. By the harmonious atmosphere, critical participation and shared accountability would be more possible to occur among the team.
Purpose
Compare with motivation, in this case, purpose may be a hindering factor for lessening the difference between leader and facilitator. That is to say, leader can coordinate with followers’ individual purposes to shape a common and clear purpose, but facilitator may not .
A real scenario happened at the last class of a course of IS department, and it was so typical that perhaps has happened many times at somewhere. A project group had a dispute, before presentation, because a member has not made the slides and prepared presentation in accordance with his group leader’s decision. The reason was that the leader desired high grade (at least A-) and knew how to get a satisfied grade, so she planned to handle the project by a relatively standardized way; a member, who had deeper understanding of this course, wanted to seek outcomes with more academic value – of course, if he could not explain clearly or the assignment could not win the instructor’s acceptance, their shared grade might not reach the leader’s expectation. Shouldn’t students get higher grade for better employment? But shouldn’t we in university pursue the higher academic value? They were both right and both had right to chase their mission. So what is wrong? Is the existing education system or the course design favorable for the student groups forming their common purpose? I do not think so. For a real organization, this situation can be understood as how it will tolerate the risks generated by innovation. The organization’s attitude depends on its mission and strategy. Unfortunately, the student project group just is a kind of temporary combination.
In this course, the hinder was more apparent due to the assumptive collaboration project. “Virtual” made us miss several means to measure our own expected value. For me, I would like to accomplish the idea in the future, even if taking parts of the final project that also would be meaningful. Meanwhile, other peers might want the instructor or classmates’ recognition or attention, or just hope to pass the course. Any individual purpose was beyond reproach; but for the concerned people, whose expectation was more challengeable, they had to strive for their expected outcomes by facilitating others.
Conclusion
In the view of result, leader and facilitator play a similar role; and when we scan the relationships among a group, leadership is quite different with facilitating. Considering leadership may need more complex conditions to shape common purpose, share accountability and keep critical participation, facilitating may be the more general status – in this situation, the people, who want to challenge the “summit”, have no option but to fulfill all own accountability, adopt the most appropriate process, focus on the future, facilitate the progress and try best.
Our collaboration style and the final project actually have the areas we can improve. But more importantly, we collaboratively made some positive outcomes - the project was completed in time and got some recognition from Dr. Yu; for each peers, I believe it is a rememberable experience and would bring acquisition for individual development; what’s more, the business model is used by Kina, Sophia and me for launching a local social initiative in reality.
As ending of my individual blog, I would like to thank all teammates from Quartet and Wings as well as Dr. Yu.
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