Or when keeping your mouth shut is the best action to take

Photo by Ricardo Mancía on Unsplash

I can remember my most memorable facilitation experience like it was yesterday.

It was a 2-day seminar gathering an audience of 23 executive board members and top managers from a clothing brand (high-end, ~4500 employees worldwide) running both manufacturing and retailing activities.

The objective of the seminar had been set by the CEO to redefine the operational model in regards to software application development: the way people collaborated together to produce the IT assets required to make the company grow in a digital era.

It was mainly about how to make the siloed departments (sales, marketing, e-commerce, manufacturing, international developments, IT,…) work together.

I put an agenda together that would eventually lead the assembly to the key principles of operating model design.

The first day was about their individual pains, fears, wishes and desires. The second day was about building a common future for the company. Nothing new, I was in my comfort zone.

The first day was designed to build strong links amongst team members, creating a safe environment to show some vulnerability; in short, to create “trust”.

Photo by Finan Akbar on Unsplash

At the end of day 1, we had an excellent picture of the situation and some paperboards full of sticky notes of what were the main challenges to address. People had progressively removed their corporate mask to end up talking amongst each other as peer humans.

Just before having dinner all together, we were enjoying an early beer with a small bunch of people when one IT manager in his 50s suddenly broke into tears; he told us how the introspective exercises of the day resonated with his personal reflexions. This seasoned manager had spent the 3 months prior to the seminar to ask himself about what value he was bringing to the company. During his lonely thoughts, he felt despair, experiencing severe misery and distress as his certitudes were shaken.

Even if I had prepared carefully the workshop by “taking the pulse” of the company through crafted interviews of a panel of employees, I was not prepared for that sort of overwhelming reaction from any participant. In the heat of the moment, my response was not assured; my first reflex was to intervene and say something helpful to that person, but I finally stepped back to let the other members of the group deal with the situation. And they did great! One experienced manager shared a similar existential experience, and another member showed support by acknowledging publicly some of the most relevant qualities of the depressed manager.

A few months later, I stumbled into the manager during one of the company’s meeting. He confided in me that that moment during the seminar had been the most powerful moment he ever had in his professional life. At that moment, he felt the real support of his peers. He told me he had been able to build a new purpose for his career since then; he found in this dreadful and difficult moment the energy to pick himself up and carry on.