Leadership & Management:
The Power of Leadership and Effective Meeting Management
This article was originally posted on Power Magazine on July 1, 2021. The full article can be viewed here: Fostering a Speak-Up Culture with Facilitative Leadership.
By Aaron Larson
Facilitative Leadership
One management style that encourages collaboration within a work group is called “Facilitative Leadership.” Ed Halpin, owner and CEO of Halpin Leadership Industries Inc., a leadership consulting company, explained the concept behind the technique. “Facilitative leadership is the definable, repeatable, teachable behaviors that lubricate the wheels of collaboration, and teach people how to co-labor and work together,” he told POWER.
Halpin doesn’t just speak from a theoretical perspective; he has nearly 40 years of experience in the nuclear power industry including at the South Texas Project (STP), a dual-unit nuclear facility located about 90 miles southwest of Houston. “I worked in South Texas for 25 years. We were shut down in 1993 by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission because we did not have a good safety culture and we did not know how to collaborate,” Halpin said.
Facilitative leadership helped to get STP headed back in the right direction. “It is this toolset that we introduced that allowed us to turn that culture around and then operate with excellence for several years,” said Halpin.
—Aaron Larson is POWER’s executive editor.