Message 1 Network facilitator
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Network facilitators play an important role in developing trust and cooperation between organizations, especially small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Their main goals are to support networking and collaboration between SMEs through relationship building, project management, training, and conflict resolution. Effective network facilitators take on roles as moderators, process managers, trainers, and coaches. They help shape communication within a network to enable joint work between organizations and see their role as influencing management styles to focus on participatory leadership and understanding organizations as communities defined by shared goals.
Message 1 Network facilitator
- 1. Message 1The functions and roles of network facilitators Network facilitator Network facilitator usually is a formal network function or one of the roles of a network manager. In the framework of networks a facilita- tor is a person with specific competencies directed to develop trust for co-operation between organisations, in our case mainly SMEs, in a given regional or industrial context despite and beyond their ongo- ing competition. This trust, if constituting a culture of co-operation, can also be called social capital. So, in a first very general view, they may be called developers of social capital. More specifically, network facilitators are those professionals in- volved in supporting and valorising aggregation processes of SMEs by promoting and making easier (i.e. facilitating) networking activities and animation of local expert communities and within this frame- work activities of inter-organisational non formal and informal learn- ing. Consequently, typical facilitators are • consultants supporting groups of companies in co-operative pro- jects, • professionals/managers from sector/employers associations, • professionals/managers from local development agencies, • trainers from local VET systems. In this role as network facilitators they have four different sub-roles referring to both the action and the learning side of their role. They are • moderators with the task of shaping successful communication in the network in general as well as and in its events, meetings, workshops etc.; • experts in process management not only for communication processes but also for projects and other joint network endeav- ours; • trainers of facilitating methods and techniques responsible of systematic reflection with all participants on common learning in such processes as a means of rendering them more effective and efficient and as a central mechanism of creating reflective co- operativity; • finally, coaches, as they pursue a specific way of shaping dis- tended communication avoiding conflict while, at the same time, they are experts of settling conflicts if they arise in such proc- esses. Cf. Message 2: Moderation as a role Cf. Message 11 Basic concepts of project work Cf. Section 4 on Tools of action and learning 26.09.2008, 13:11:38
- 2. 2/2 The problem of such definitions is the fact that network facilitators usually are people who are full-time or part-time managers of net- works with a formal responsibility for the overall success of the net- work. So network facilitating would be just one of the roles they can play. At the same time, network facilitating can be a management style, a specific understanding of being a network manager, a spe- cific interpretation of leadership. Then it is part of the management function. Therefore, Message 8 concentrates on network facilitating in this apprehension. Cf. Message 8: Basic concepts of management and leadership Network facilitating as we have interpreted it in this book would usually influence the way of being a manager as it includes a specific way of understanding the world in general and the management function in particular. As we have explained in Message 4 on percep- tion and communication, action learning as we conceive of it is linked to a constructivist view of the world which holds that people have only access to their own individual view of reality and that any attempt of sharing this view needs communication. Successful lead- ing of and in organisations defined as communities of performance (see Message 9) thus implies a conscious shaping of communication as a necessary prerogative of joint, purposeful action in and of or- ganisations. For this it is necessary to understand organisations es- sentially as purposeful co-operation of people. Cf. Message 4: Basic concepts of perception and communication Cf. Message 9: Communities of practice and self-organisation Cf. Message 7: Basic concepts of organisation and co-operation Cf. Message 15: Learning networks – constructing social capital Building co-operation, striving for trust-based networking, creating social capital in communities of practice by the pursuit of continuous learning and improvement, this is the ongoing task of network facili- tators, within and across organisations.