Human Resources: Standing in the Fire

“In this wise and stimulating book, Dressler draws on his rich experience to show us how to bring our personal best to facilitating polarized group situations.”

--William Ury, coauthor of Getting to Yes and author of The Power of a Positive No

Any time people get together to wrestle with serious issues, there is a potential for a high-heat meeting, where participants become so polarized, angry, and confused that any meaningful work seems impossible. If you facilitate meetings for a living, you’ve probably found that your well-learned techniques often fail you in volatile and unpredictable situations like this. If you lead meetings as simply one part of your job, you doubtless feel even less able to cope.

In Standing in the Fire, veteran facilitator Larry Dressler offers a guide to making the kind of inventive, split-second decisions these pressure-cooker situations demand. The answer is not yet another technique, but as Dressler has learned the hard way, the leader’s presence. To work with people in high-heat meetings, you have to develop skills that allow you to remain steady, impartial, compassionate, good-humored, and committed to the group.

In meetings, as in the natural world, fire can be creative rather than destructive—but only if handled skillfully. Dressler gives you everything you need to become a masterful fire tender, outlining six “stances,” or mental, emotional, and physical ways of being that will enable you to remain firmly in service to the group. He offers dozens of simple but profound practices for cultivating these capabilities, drawing not just on his own experiences—good and bad, humorous and harrowing—but also on the insights of thirty-five distinguished leaders, process facilitators, trainers, and change agents.

Larry Dressler is also the author of Consensus Through Conversation. For the past 25 years, he designed and facilitated high-stakes meetings in diverse settings, which include corporate boardrooms, industrial disaster sites, and the Amazon rain forest. His clients have included Cisco Systems, Baxter Healthcare, Starbucks, 1% for the Planet, New Belgium Brewing, and the US Federal Protective Services.

Publication date: March 2010, $19.95, paperback, 192 pages, 6” x 9”
ISBN 978-1-57675-970-7, Business/Leadership.
Co-published with the American Society for Training and Development.

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