A Better Way

A facilitator’s response to difficult behavior must be depersonalized. The depersonalizing process begins by making a change in how difficult participants are considered. Rather than label them difficult participants, call it disruptive behavior. In this way, you are labeling behavior—not people—which is a good place to start depersonalizing the event. Also, the term disruptive is both less personal and more accurate in describing the effects of that behavior.

In dealing with disruptive behavior, your job is to set aside your personal agendas and concentrate on fulfilling your professional agenda, which is, without fail, to make the learning happen. This agenda is true no matter what the situation, but it is particularly important when in the presence of disruptive behavior. Your actions must focus always on helping the learning to occur. Figure 7–1 illustrates what must happen in a facilitator’s thought processes when disruptive behavior occurs.

Figure 7–1: Recognizing and responding to disruptive learner behavior: understanding the thought process.

Think About This

Right now, go back to the title of this chapter, cross it out, and change it to “Facilitating Disruptive Behavior.”

Noted

When a facilitator’s expertise is challenged by a learner, the wrong answer is “Well, I have a Ph.D. in this area,” or “Well, you know I have 20 years’ experience in this line of work.” These responses don’t hold water with learners in terms of establishing credibility! As adult learners, they are already challenging your credibility by saying that your information is not in sync with their experiences and background. The only way to handle this situation is to facilitate discussion regarding what their experiences are and how your information fits them.

Basic Rule 34

The facilitator’s behavior must make learning happen.

Noted

To enhance and make learning happen, the facilitator does not embarrass the learner who is behaving in a disruptive manner. Creating embarrassment or discomfort for that learner goes beyond extinguishing the person’s behavior and makes it personal. Not only is that learner’s experience ruined, but the learning is disrupted for the other learners as well. If the behavior is so disruptive that it must be dealt with individually, take it outside the learning environment and talk with the learner privately.

Believe it or not (and, frankly, like it or not), acting on the professional agenda of making learning happen often means helping the participant in question meet his or her personal agenda—momentarily and temporarily. If you have successfully depersonalized the situation, those things won’t matter nearly as much as your desire to continue the learning.

When a facilitator acts on a personal agenda, it gets in the way of the learning for everyone—not just for the disruptive participant. So the effective facilitator chooses not to acknowledge or act on personal agendas. Is this easy to do? Not always. It means focusing your efforts on the learning process and letting go of personal needs that might crop up in response to the disruptive behavior. It means doing whatever it takes to support and continue the learning process—even if it means giving in to a specific participant and letting him or her have what he or she wants even when you personally don’t want to do so.

More often than not, once you meet that person’s agenda, the agenda goes away, and the disruptive behavior is extinguished. So, in the example here, the participant’s agenda is “wanting to be acknowledged for his expertise.” If your only agenda is “make the learning happen,” you can see that by allowing a few minutes for this person to pontificate, his agenda is fulfilled, the disruptive behavior stops, the group has probably learned something new from this participant’s expertise, and everyone can get on with the learning. What you will have done in this case is chosen a facilitator behavior that focuses on the learning, not on yourself.

Does learner disruptive behavior extinguish itself once you have met the learner’s agenda every time? No. Sometimes allowing a learner to take the spotlight and pontificate (as in the example) can result in that person’s behavior becoming even more disruptive by wanting to be the expert in many discussion points. He or she can then tend to monopolize the class discussion. If this happens, a new disruptive behavior is recognized and must be managed.

Think About This

What do you do if the learner has done something extremely inappropriate, such as making a racist remark? Does the rule about not embarrassing learners apply in this situation as well? Obviously, the behavior must be extinguished—and quickly. And, if you deal with the learner privately (so as not to embarrass him or her), you run the risk of the other learners’ not knowing that you handled the situation and thus assuming that you think the behavior was acceptable. Try first behaving as if the learner is unaware of the impact of the remark (“We know you didn’t mean that the way it sounded”), thereby giving the learner the opportunity to recant the remark. If he or she does not recant, then you must immediately say something that lets the offending learner and the other learners know that the remark is unacceptable: “As you know, this organization does not share that view, and we can’t give the impression that it’s OK to say that.”

Does this approach mean that your personal agendas go away, that your personal need for credibility as a facilitator isn’t important, that your opinion that a participant truly is difficult isn’t valid? No, your agendas and opinions are just as valid as anyone else’s; you just can’t act on them in the learning moment. The moment you act on a personal agenda, the course becomes about you, not about the learning, and not about the participants. As one consultant says, “You can have your personal agenda after 6:00,” meaning that facilitators must vent and express personal agendas outside of the learning environment and only with trusted colleagues.