"Ground Rules for Effective Groups" Teleclass Homepage

Everyone wants to be a facilitator: consultants, managers, even teachers. What is desperately needed is a common, practical reference for understanding facilitation in diverse professional settings. No one has done a better job than Roger Schwarz of synthesizing the major theoretical underpinnings and translating them into clear, usable guidelines for practitioners. Peter Senge
Author of The Fifth Discipline

60-minute teleclass


Should my groups use ground rules? If so, which ones? If not, why not? If my groups use ground rules, how should they use them? What makes for a good ground rule? Shouldn't the group decide it's own ground rules?

I get questions like these all the time.

Most of the time, groups answer these questions for themselves in ways that get them into trouble. I often find that facilitators and consultants contribute to this problem as well!

Have you ever been in a group, for example, that chose "Be Respectful" as a ground rule, only to painfully discover that "Respectful" meant different things to different people? Or perhaps you've been in a group where the facilitator or team members seemed not to use the ground rules that they had agreed to use - and nobody said anything about that?

I've designed this free, 60-minute teleclass to give you an overview of how I think about and use group ground rules. My approach is counterintuitive in some ways, and I've found that it greatly increases a group's effectiveness as well as your credibility and effectiveness as someone trying to help the group.

Here's What You Will Learn

  • Why Use Ground rules at All?
  • The different kinds of ground rules, and which kinds are most useful
  • How to use ground rules to diagnose and intervene in groups; how most ground rules can't serve this purpose, and why that dramatically reduces their effectiveness.
  • The "Go, No-Go" questions associated with using ground rules effectively - the questions that come up when you're building an agreement with a group about ground rules.
  • A quick introduction to the Ground rules for Effective Groups - the set of ground rules I use with my clients.

This is What You Get When You Purchase the Recording:

  • Brief materials to help you get the most out of the session
  • A link to the downloadable recording of this teleclass