An Action Learning Team has met for several full-day sessions over several months working on a problem that is critical and highly visible in the organization. After the most recent full-day meeting, the Team Lead (the organization assigned a Team Lead) shared with the coach that she is feeling very fatigued. Although there was excellent processing and learning at the end of the meeting, the team stormed and got off track quite a bit in the afternoon segment. She likes the AL approach and sees the benefits, but for certain activities, such as brainstorming, wishes there could be someone in a facilitator role.
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Over several sessions, one of the members has disappeared for long periods of time and/or is frequently on his blackberry. During a standard intervention (what are we doing well /what could we be doing better), he was vocal in stating that he wasn’t convinced about the AL approach. He said “We’re all professionals here and are used to solving problems. I’m aware of the deadline for our presentation and we could make more progress without this approach if we could just all freely state our thoughts.” Others in the group stated that they felt the approach was helping the team and that the organization had failed to solve this problem three times in the past. Other team members also thought the team could do better coming to consensus more quickly and they agreed on an approach to experiment with. However, the “disgruntled” team member’s behavior continues. After a recent session, just as she is leaving the room, the coach overhears a few members who have remained behind talking about how upset they are with this team member’s behavior.