WORKBOOK
Copyright © 2013 Ron Hopkins, Gunnar Jonatansson
All photographs published under license from iStockphoto®
High Payback Meetings
‘You’re either meeting or you’re working’
Peter Drucker, American Business Scholar
Introduction
Meetings share the top spot for the number one cause of time loss, stress and inefficiency in
companies*.
Put ‘Meetings’ into Amazon Books and you’ll get 68,220 results!
So there are thousands of books and manuals currently available to tell you how to conduct
meetings. One of the early manuals is ‘Roberts Rules of Order’, first published in February
1876, written by Brigadier General Henry Martyn Robert. It is still used to this day as the
benchmark for formal meetings and parliamentary type procedures.
Most companies have produced manuals to help with wasteful meetings. You can even buy
software that tells you how many millions of dollars your company loses each year by having
well paid managers locked into unproductive meetings.
Despite this, meetings remain the number 1 destroyer of time, focus and profit.
In our 20 years of helping managers with all aspects of efficiency and effectiveness, we’ve
seen 7 simple factors that we think unlock the door to running high payback meetings. Two of
which are more important than all the rest combined.
In the current corporate world, if you can learn to run High Payback Meetings and teach
others to do the same, you’ll increase your value to your team and organisation enormously.
You have the opportunity to measurably increase the return on money and time invested in
meetings and save your colleagues from endless frustration.
Let’s see how.
Ron Hopkins, Gunnar Jonatansson, August 2013
* The Microsoft Office Personal Productivity Challenge. 38,000 people in 200 countries. ‘A lack
of team communication and unclear objectives’ was the joint number one distraction.
Your Culture
Meetings are a corporate fact of life. They
are also a habit. They’re a ‘collective’ habit.
When everyone shares the habit by going
along with it, it becomes the culture, the
way things are done. Like any culture, noone sits down one day and ‘designs’ it.
People copy people. The culture, the
ingrained habits, simply evolve over time.
If your company’s meetings culture is
ineffective, you’ll need to find a hard core of
supporters willing to challenge the status
quo. And then you need to be willing to set
the new example, embody it with consistency, and demonstrate it over and over until the
collective habits to do with meetings begin to change.
The steps themselves are simple and the good news is you can begin, gently, with just one
thing at a time.
What’s It Worth?
How do you evaluate the worth of any meeting?
In any organisation of whatever size, there are so many
reasons to meet. Some are useful, but some are downright
destructive of peoples’ time and motivation.
The bigger the organisation, the greater the cost to it of
ineffective meetings.
So just how do you judge what constitutes an effective
meeting? Which meetings are simply a waste of time,
resource and finance?
You can roughly calculate the simple cost of the number of meetings in your organisation with
this formula: Average salary per hour x Average number of attendee´s x average length of
meetings = cost per meeting x number of meetings per month or year.
This doesn’t of course show opportunity cost. What could those people have achieved with the
finance and time they spent in all the unproductive meetings?
When you discover a ‘meetings-culture-gone-wild’ the first thing people do is to try to cut back
on the number of meetings. It’s not a bad ambition. However, it’s not the frequency or length
of the meeting – it’s the relative value that a meeting adds that’s the important factor.
And the aim of this programme is to get REAL VALUE from every meeting. The aim is to
understand what makes an effective meeting in your particular culture and to cease holding
meetings that give little return.
It’s about giving you the tools to get the best possible return on your investment of time,
energy & focus for each & every meeting in your organisation – to set the example and help
create a culture of ‘high payback meetings’.
Let’s take a fast overview of the main principles.
The Basics
!
TEAM DYNAMICS
Clear performance goals
Focus on outputs
Success measures
Tasks
Processes
Relationships
Clear Roles
Process inspection
Change points defined
Trust
Team spirit
Mutual accountability
Meetings are mini team events. They require clear processes, excellent relationships and well
defined tasks.
They have a beginning, a middle and an end and they are supposed to produce an output.
Preferably an output you didn’t already have before you began the meeting.
They require good facilitation to provide the co-operative pooling of peoples’ strengths towards
a finite end product.
A product that one individual, acting alone, could not produce. The principles, the 7 Keys for
meetings are not ‘secrets’.
Most managers know them. Few use them. The instructions for putting them into action will
not just save you and your team the time and money spent in unproductive meetings but the 7
Keys make each meeting a rewarding personal endeavour.
Each and every one of your meetings should achieve a high payback for you and your
company. Something you have the right to expect for consuming people’s valuable time &
talents.
The trick is to get enough agreement to do them step by step and to do them consistently,
time after time.
Overview
The 7 Keys to High Payback Meetings
The 7 Keys Summary
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Clear Outcome
Ownership
A Clear Agenda
Start And End On Time
Everybody Prepared
Appropriate Attendance
Action Plan
Your notes
1. Clear Outcome
The key word is ‘HAVE’
This is THE most important Key.
What do we want from this meeting?
What is the meeting supposed to produce?
People quite rightly get the idea of asking about
the purpose of a meeting, ‘What are we here to
DO?’
But the key word is ‘HAVE’.
Ask :
“If we have a successful meeting, what will we
have that we didn’t have before?”
If your answer is ‘one more meeting’, it will NOT be high payback.
Ask this question before you ask for people’s time.
Ask it before you give your time.
If the answer’s not clear enough, keep asking - or don’t have the meeting.
Do NOT compromise on this point.
2. Ownership
One person needs to own the meeting
This is the next most important key.
It may sound obvious, but when it ’s
everybody’s responsibility, it’s nobody’s
responsibility.
Someone, one person, needs to ‘own’ the
meeting.
The person who chairs the meeting has the
complete responsibility for its success, that is
to say, the degree to which it produces the
outcome named in Key number 1.
If you’re the chairperson, you lead this ‘short-term-team’ called a meeting. It is your
responsibility to get the very best performance from each member.
A great tip for continuously improving meetings is to have the person who takes notes, or
some other designated individual, to fill in a simple, downloadable feedback form that
automatically scores the meeting against the 7 keys. The owner is sent the feedback form the
following day. He or she can then decide what needs improving for the next meeting.
The programme details various other techniques to help you, as facilitator and chair person, to
get everyone to contribute to the meeting’s success.
3. A Clear Agenda
Don’t stray from it.
If you’ve correctly established the meeting’s outcome,
the agenda is the road map to get you there.
Don’t stray from it.
We all have different views and feelings and we all
want to be heard - and as a manager or chairperson
of a meeting - you definitely want to hear what people
think.
But take a physical note of any views that don’t
directly relate to the subject matter, and elegantly
promise the person you’ll take it up in some other
way or at some other meeting, but stick to the
agenda.
Scrap the last question ‘any other business?’, except in
formal sessions where Robert’s Rules of Order require it.
When the agenda is done, the meeting has accomplished its purpose -- and it is over. It’s
perfectly OK to finish ahead of time.
4. Start And End On Time
It takes time to get from one meeting to another
To allow everyone to come late is purely a habit, a
cultural habit.
Break the habit by disagreeing with it and by setting
the example.
Next to Key 1, Key 4 is probably the most vital key in
terms of saving people’s time - and the organisation’s
money.
Do not allow people to accept a meeting scheduled
’09:00 to 10:00’ and then accept another ’10:00 to
11:00’.
It takes time to get from one meeting to another.
It takes time to mentally disengage from one subject and to begin another.
If you chair or schedule meetings, pay close attention to this fact – or you will waste your own
time, others’ time and the company’s money.
5. Everybody Prepared
Allow enough time between meetings to
prepare
How much preparation each individual needs will
depend on the type of meeting and the level of
input expected.
It’s the individual’s responsibility to allow enough
time between meetings to prepare (see Key 4).
One way to save time, unless it is purely a
briefing meeting, is to not waste everyone’s time
‘bringing them up to speed’.
Send each person a short briefing document, allowing plenty of time for them to look at it
before they attend. Be sure to include the action points from the last meeting.
And above all, don’t waste the time of punctual attendees by briefing late comers on what they
missed.
It will be tough at first, but people will get the idea quickly enough.
6. Appropriate Attendance
Each meeting is a team activity
Remember the outcome question in Key 1? “If we have a
successful meeting, what will we have that we didn’t have
before ?”.
If you get Key 1 right, only those people who can contribute
to the outcome should be at your meeting.
You should invite people (and people should accept) solely
on the basis of their ability to help produce the outcome.
This ensures you don’t have people at your meeting who
don’t need to be there.
Appropriate Attendance also implies appropriate
participation. If just one person could produce the outcome
you wouldn’t need the others there. So each meeting is a
team activity. It can sometimes help to assign specific roles
to attendees, such as note taker, time keeper, agenda
monitor, processor of feedback etc. The main thing is that
the people who do come need to be encouraged to
contribute their best.
In the later chapter ‘who’s in your meeting’ we give facilitation notes for getting your more
introverted members involved and for controlling members who tend to dominate the allotted
time, so that you get complete and equal participation.
7. Action Plan
Always end with a clear idea of who does
what by when
Provided you got a good answer to the
question in Key 1, and the appropriate people
attend and contribute, at least one person
should leave your meeting with new actions to
do.
Make sure you circulate agreed action points to
the people who need to know.
They can be circulated instantaneously in an
SMS text message, e-mail or uploaded to a
cloud-shared document.
Do them on scraps of paper if you have to, before you leave the room – but always end with a
clear idea of who does what by when – whether or not minutes are circulated immediately.
And make sure that the question of whether or not the actions were done after the last
meeting becomes the first topic of the next meeting.
The 7 Keys Summary
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Clear Outcome
Ownership
A Clear Agenda
Start And End On Time
Everybody Prepared
Appropriate Attendance
Action Plan
In the next section let’s look at The 7 Keys in detail
1. Clear Outcome
!
+"
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Most people try to announce the purpose of meetings when calling one, although some don’t
even do this but simply give a title such as “Team Meeting” “Weekly Meeting” and so on.
The difference between stating purpose and achieving outcome is not just semantics but a very
important distinction. So let’s consider why the stating of purpose is the first important step
and also how we move from this to actually achieving our desired outcome.
When you state a purpose, for instance ‘To review our marketing strategy’ it describes ‘doing’.
We need to re-educate ourselves to think about ‘having’. This idea completely sharpens our
meeting focus.
We’ve become gently hypnotised by corporate cultures to show up to meetings just because
they’re called. We simply attend. It’s a good start. Step one for almost anything you want to
achieve is ‘be’ there. Step two is ‘do’ something,
however most meetings end on step two and far, far too many will even end on step one.
Step three however is to realise that the result of steps one and two – the result of “being” and
“doing” - produces an outcome.
Let’s examine this further.
It’s good to think in outcomes in almost every context in life – not just meetings.
We need to see ourselves as individual manufacturers in the great corporate scheme,
regardless of what our team or business does.
What do we make, what do each of us produce from our role that feeds into the overall activity
to make the corporate wheels turn?
And just as importantly for our meeting, what will we, by acting together with each other in
this specially assigned unit of time, make or produce?
What will we make that we didn’t have before? By our interaction in meeting, what will we
produce that our team, unit or company would not have had if we had not met?
For example, we’re going to have a meeting “To review our marketing strategy.” This is the
purpose. That’s the “doing” part. Take it a bit further – use the HAVE word. When we’ve
reviewed our marketing strategy, what will we HAVE that we didn’t have before. Your outcome
is what you have when the purpose is achieved and we need to train ourselves to think in
outcomes.
When you establish a clear outcome for your meeting, you’ll know:
•
who should own the meeting (and this is vital for Key number 2)
•
what type of meeting it is (there are about 5 basic types each requiring a slightly
different style of facilitation, timing, procedures and layout)
•
what the agenda should be
•
the degree of preparation
•
who should attend (it’s massively inefficient to have anyone at the meeting who can’t
directly contribute to producing the meeting’s outcome)
!
we need to train ourselves to think in outcomes
How many meetings in the last 6 months would you NOT have called or NOT appeared at or
NOT sat through if you had strictly applied the outcome criteria and asked the magic question
– “what will we HAVE at the end of this meeting that we didn’t have before”?
Just in the final week of editing this material, we’ve been told by several highly paid, highly
qualified people that they frequently undertake a lengthy journey to a unit in another country,
for a monthly meeting where they supply a 20 minute input that could have been given
through a host of different, less expensive, less time consuming media.
And this is from a company that is desperate to cut costs.
It’s important to let everyone know what the expectation is. They can gauge their input, how
much they have to prepare, comment on, whether there’s enough time allocated and so on.
The outcome may need to be broken down into smaller meetings to get a series of outcomes
that result in the final “signed off strategy implementation plan” outcome.
So getting a crystal clear outcome up front is worth the effort. And sometimes – it IS an
effort. Thinking in outcomes doesn’t always come naturally. In some languages it doesn’t
even translate very well but folklore in just about every country and culture has a moral lesson
about being careful to select the right outcome.
There’s the classic joke about the tramp who wakes up one day in the gutter to see a puff of
smoke revealing a giant of a genie standing over him.
The genie says, “I appear once every 3,000 years on this spot. I can give you anything you
want. You just have to tell me. But you only get one wish’.
‘If you’re so all powerful’ says the tramp, ‘you should be able to see exactly what I want. I’m
derelict. It’s obvious even to a fool. What I want is more money!!’
With a massive thunder clap, the genie shouts ‘Your wish is my command!’ He throws the
tramp a penny and promptly vanishes.
Most people in the corporate world have heard of ‘SMART’ goals. (There is no absolute
meaning for the mnemonic but we’ll take it as - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant,
Timely).
The tramp would have been better off using a “SMART” answer. He should have stated a CLEAR
OUTCOME.
‘I want a personal income of $250,000 per year for the rest of my life, starting today’ – or at
least something a little more specific than ‘more money’ which he got – in the form of one
penny.
When you take the time to think about the outcome of the meeting in ‘SMART’ terms, you may
well decide that a meeting is NOT the best way to get that outcome.
If that happens, you will have saved a lot of people time and you will have saved your
company a lot of money.
Reducing the number of meetings is a major way to save managers time and the organisation
money.
But the idea is not to simply stop meetings. The idea is that every meeting you do hold gives
the best return on the investment of time and energy expended – a ‘high payback meeting’.
Reasons for Meeting
•
One person can’t do it.
Firstly you should be meeting because one person acting alone cannot produce the outcome
you want. If one person CAN, you don’t need the meeting.
•
Real-time
When you hold a meeting you have an opportunity to reach decisions, solve problems and to
utilise divergent views in the swiftest way. Real-time Interaction, with everyone present is
much faster than a succession of e-mails and phone calls to get agreement for a decision.
•
Rich data exchange
When people are present and can see, hear and ‘sense’ each other there is greater
understanding and less opportunity for the misunderstandings that can occur from the written
word, particularly e-mails. The telephone can be better than the written word for this sort of
meeting but it’s not as good as being in people’s company, face to face.
Professor Albert Mehrabian gives the values below in assessing the impact of any
communication:
• 55% facial & body language
• 38% voice tone
• 7% content
Simply put, you can tell a lot more about someone’s views, support, willingness - or lack
thereof - by listening and looking at HOW things are said rather than just at WHAT is being
said.
We all rely on body language for truly important communications. We’ll consider this more in
the Facilitation section.
•
Bonding
There’s also the idea of bonding. People are more inclined to respond favourably to you in any
organisational transaction if they know you, have met you and get on with you.
If your meeting is basically to create rapport between team members who need to get to know
each other better – that’s fine -just make sure you understand that this is the desired
outcome, or part of it.
If you’ve got a valid reason for meeting, a clear outcome is THE most important key.
When you correctly identify the outcome - the end result that the meeting is there to produce it enables all other factors to fall into place.
Don’t skip it. Don’t call a meeting without figuring out what the outcome should be and also
announcing it in plenty of time before the meeting convenes.
Don’t give your time and effort without knowing what the outcome is, if you have the choice.
And if you do have to show up to a meeting that doesn’t state the outcome, constructively
offer to identify and articulate it before getting into the rest of the meeting. It truly is worth
the effort to get this one right.
Your Notes
2. Ownership
Don’t follow the crowd. Lead
Now that you’ve correctly named the outcome you want from your meeting and everyone who
attends is informed of it. Now you need one person who’s responsible for getting the people in
the meeting to achieve that outcome and be responsible for its success or failure.
This is the next most important key.
Ideally, you’ll view your meeting as a kind of ‘mini-team’ event --- so EVERYONE present pulls
together to get the outcome - but all teams need leaders.
To OWN the meeting means simply that one person takes responsibility for the result the
meeting obtains and for the smooth execution of its processes. It’s as well to make this point
clear, particularly in cases where one person out of a team that may be working together – like
a PA for instance - is asked to call a meeting. It is important to clarify who takes actual
ownership of the meeting, either by calling the meeting directly or assigning ownership to
someone else.
Usually, managers call meetings and when we say managers we include project managers,
team leaders and anyone empowered to call a meeting.
People often don’t realise how much responsibility they carry when they call a meeting.
When you think about it, in most companies an employee at almost any grade needs
permission to raise a purchase order against budget for things that can cost as little as a
desktop printer.
No-one is ever asked to raise a P.O. against the cost of several well-paid managers’ time or
even to make a case for the cost/benefit of the resources used before calling the meeting. And
the hourly cost of a collection of managers and specialists is probably a hundred times the cost
of a printer.
So making sure every meeting has one person to take ownership is no small step.
In fact in one of our sessions for a large company we were actually asked to remove this Key
from the line-up because their senior managers were so busy that they often couldn’t attend a
meeting that they themselves called!
If you truly want to improve your meetings culture – insist that every meeting in your
organisation is owned.
And if you happen to be a well meaning corporate revolutionary who at this point in time has
no authority or at least not enough influence to change the company’s meeting habits, just
gently run all your meetings with the 7 Keys in place and quietly take responsibility for your
own meetings.
The difference will be very obvious to everyone who attends and you’ll eventually set a trend
towards improvement.
Meetings themselves are just a generality, they’re a vague entity without feelings, identity or
responsibility. So it’s easy to complain about them.
But that’s a bit like complaining about your telephone because of an upsetting phone call.
Meetings can’t hear you, they can’t take feedback and they can’t correct themselves.
MANAGERS call the meetings and run the meetings.
Luckily managers can hear, can take feedback and can correct themselves.
Nobody likes to be criticised and most people want to do, and be seen to be doing a good job.
Culturally, we well understand it’s far more difficult to direct the complaint to an actual person
- the person who chaired the meeting.
But this is not about complaining – it’s about helping managers to be more selective in calling
meetings and to help improve the running of the ones they DO call.
If you ARE in a position to influence things so that every meeting has an owner – you can also
help by making sure every owner gets feedback on their performance for each meeting.
There’s a feedback form supplied with the course. The form is really, really simple and it scores
each Key.
•
•
•
•
•
Was an outcome established before you all met?
Did someone chair and own the meeting?
Did it start and end on time?
Did you have the right people there?
Was there an agenda? And so on.
You can give each Key marks out of 5 where 1 is poor, 5 is great. Someone is elected at the
start of the meeting to quickly fill in the form at the end of the meeting. It takes a couple of
minutes.
Be sure it’s done in a spirit of help and with the goal of continuous improvement and that the
feedback form is given to the owner the next day.
He or she can then decide what needs improving for the next meeting.
If one single person doesn’t want to do it – you can at least take 2 minutes at the end of the
meeting to get consensus from your attendees as to how they themselves would score it.
This Key is the second most important of the 7 Keys - and if you want to change your meetings
culture and practices for the better and beyond – insist that every meeting in your organisation
is owned and that every meeting owner gets feedback on their performance for each meeting.
If you and your company truly, honestly want to change the value and payback from
meetings, somebody will take this tough step.
Ownership and Leaders
These days most companies accept that leaders exist at all levels of the organisation.
The owner/leader pays attention, for the duration of the meeting, to the corner stones of team
activity:
•
•
•
Task
Process
Relationships
There are lots of definitions and theories on leadership and John C Maxwell in his “21
Irrefutable Laws of Leadership” says "leadership is influence - nothing more, nothing less."
Regardless of rank in the organisation, the owner of the meeting becomes a leader for that
period of time. The owner/leader influences this ‘mini-team’ assembled for the duration of the
meeting to produce the best outcome they can for the time they are together.
Later chapters help with defining the different types of meeting. Each has a different emphasis
on the aspect of Task, Processes and Relationships.
We also include a brief insight into managing the communications of the different personality
types in teams and meetings to establish constructive relationships.
Whatever else - don’t be a bystander. What psychologists call the ‘bystander effect’ is, broadly,
that if you’re in a crowd or gathering, you’ll take other peoples’ behaviour as a cue for what
you should do. The early studies were inspired by seeing the failure of people in groups to
come to the aid of someone in trouble.* If everyone’s behaviour is ‘doing nothing’ - that’s what
you’ll tend to do. The bigger the group, the more ‘social proof’ there is that doing nothing is
right, and the more everyone assumes someone else will deal with it. Don’t follow the crowd.
Lead.
Start to revolutionise your payback from meetings by instigating meeting ownership.
* if you are interested in this phenomenon, see studies under ‘Genovese Effect’ (e.g., Darley
Latané)
Your Notes
3.
A Clear agenda
The most important item on the agenda is to stick to the agenda
If you isolate and name the correct outcome in Key 1, the best type of meeting to obtain it
should become obvious.
The agenda should then follow on easily from that.
Each type of meeting has its own process.
The most common types of meeting are likely to be.
•
Decision Making
•
Problem Solving
•
Task Assignment
•
Relationship Building
•
Briefing or Update
Things like - Brainstorming, Creating Strategy, Planning, Agreeing Budget, Untangling Stalled
Projects, Emergency Resolutions - all fall under one of these five..
Under ‘Facilitating Meetings’ we give detailed tips on how to run each of the above but there is
one useful thing to know now in relation to the timing of agenda items. It’s called ‘The
Meetings Bell Curve’.
Your Notes
Meetings Bell curve
!
Focus
Attention
Alertness
Attendance
HARD ITEMS
Easy Items
In The
Middle Third
Easiest Items
Assuming you’re now successfully getting people to arrive on time, they’ll still take a while to
‘settle in’ to their new surroundings and to focus.
The Meetings Bell Curve suggests that the prime part of the meeting, where most individuals
are settled and best able to focus, is the middle third of the meeting. That’s where you place
the tougher items of the agenda.
The less vital, less sensitive items on the agenda are placed in the first third and the last third
of the meeting. The delineation of ‘thirds’ is used loosely and doesn’t have to be exactly one
third. Settling in might take only a few minutes out of an hour’s meeting and the wind-down a
similar time. The basic principle is that you ease into and ease out of the meeting with the less
vital items and use the central period for key points of focus.
In longer meetings you can, of course, allow a few minutes of time during the meeting for
reflection and short breaks.
Despite our natural tendency to be polite, resist the temptation to interrupt the agenda to
summarise events for late comers. Somebody else can volunteer to bring them up to speed
after the meeting.
The most important item on the agenda is to stick to the agenda. If you find you cannot, under
exceptional circumstances, stop the meeting.
As for distractions, when off-agenda ideas pop up, thoroughly acknowledge the person who
brought them up and just announce that you’ll place the issues in a ‘bring forward’ file for a
new meeting where the topics can be taken up as part of the new outcome and new agenda.
When you’ve covered the agenda items, except in all but the most formal of meetings, don’t
ask the question ‘is there any other business’ at the end. When you’ve addressed each agenda
item – the meeting is done.
If you achieve the outcome of the meeting before the end - and before you’ve covered all of
the agenda items - end the meeting.
If the objective has been achieved, the meeting is done and over.
4. Start And End On Time
reduce the time that managers spend in meetings by 80%
This is probably the simplest of the 7 Keys but often the hardest to execute.
A Wall Street Journal article once claimed that if you start on time and stick to a detailed
agenda you could reduce the time managers spend in meetings by 80%.
We’ve come across some companies that simply close the doors and refuse to let anyone in
after the meeting has started. It may be too much of a culture shock for you to take such a
drastic step. But bit by bit, if you set a good enough example yourself and if you do so
consistently, you’ll eventually create a change.
If administrators or PAs are primarily responsible for scheduling meetings, make sure they’re
briefed to never accept meetings that follow on from each other without breaks in between.
We’ve mentioned the classic calendar error ‘1st meeting 09:00 to 10:00. 2nd meeting 10:00 to
11:00’. Don’t let it happen. Allow time between meetings for travel, mental disengagement and
preparation for the next meeting.
It’s perfectly OK to finish before the allotted time - but never to run over.
Remember, it’s the meeting owner’s responsibility to start and end the meeting on time.
Do what you have to do to make this the norm in your team or company and save your
managers 80% of the time they spend in meetings.
Your Notes
5. Everybody Prepared
People won’t want to look bad in a high performance environment
As the earlier Keys begin to become a routine, this Key usually falls into place.
If you have:
•
•
•
•
•
•
announced the outcome of the meeting
sent out the agenda
chosen only those people who can contribute to the outcome
begun to get engagement and involvement through your expert facilitation of the team
assembled
a reputation for starting and ending on time
made sure that people don’t accept ‘back to back’ meetings
it is unlikely that your attendees will arrive unprepared. And certainly not twice in a row.
Make it a point as the owner of the meeting to ask anyone who clearly has not prepared for
the meeting, ‘Is there anything I can do that would help to prepare you better for the meeting
next time?’ Do this afterwards, in private, not in the meeting itself.
It would be unlikely that you would have to ask the question more than once.
People don’t want to look bad when the rest of the environment is a high performance one.
We all, deep down, want to conform and to look our best. And it doesn’t just apply to humans.
In psychological studies* even cockroaches that perform a task well, perform it better when
other cockroaches look on!
* 1969, Zajonc, Heingartner, and Herman, Social Facilitation
6. Appropriate Attendance
the owner decides who should come and who should not
Managers can have up to 60 meetings a month, and surveys show that we believe half of them
are a waste of time*.
* MCI Conferencing White Paper. Meetings in America: A study of trends, costs and attitudes
toward business travel, teleconferencing, and their impact on productivity
But despite the protests of ‘too many meetings’, a Harvard Business study revealed that
managers actually like going to meetings. The fact that you’re in a decision making team who
want you at the table counts for quite a lot.
The value you give to the sense of acceptance and belonging in groups has been obvious since
cave man times.
, Will Shutz came up with the ‘FIRO’ model in 1958 (Fundamental Interpersonal Relations
Orientation). It has been used by countless organisations to assess team interaction. It
measures degrees of inclusion, affection and control in group members. So, in short, we know
it’s important to belong and to be accepted and to have status.
These things work at a subconscious level and can influence a person’s conscious logic when it
comes to accepting a meeting invitation or not.
Some believe that this sub-conscious need for social interaction, status, acceptance and
belonging is the key reason that your organisation’s logical, conscious and sensible manuals on
meetings are unheeded and gather dust.
There’s also the fact that ‘the grapevine’ is one of the best ways to keep up to date in a
complex matrix organisation. Meetings certainly fill that role.
However, if you use Key 2, the owner will decide who should come and who should not. The
decision is made on the likely value of the person’s contribution to that specific meeting, to
obtain that specific outcome (Key 1) and not just because they are a manager or have a title
that seems to automatically include them.
What you do with them once they’re there is another matter.
Appropriate attendance implies appropriate participation. You only want them there if they can
materially contribute to obtaining the meeting’s outcome.
Part of appropriate attendance and proper participation is to ensure that each member gives
complete focus to the job at hand.
Not an easy task when 75% of us try to progress some of our own work during a meeting*.
Recently 41% of British office workers were found to use cell phones, laptops and iPads during
meetings.**
Those individuals would be astounded to read the degree of incompetence associated with
multi-tasking**.
We can all respect phone-free areas when we need to - aeroplanes, hospitals, funerals,
theatres and film shows to name but a few.
A good chairperson simply does not allow personal mobile technology to be used during
meetings.
As the owner or chairperson of the meeting, the people who do arrive on time, have prepared
and do pay attention, will want you to facilitate a good meeting.
Good facilitators usually remain neutral, listen carefully and expertly - and encourage the
views, ideas, feedback and opinions of all present. They manage conflict and keep to the
agenda.
Obviously your primary objective as facilitator is to make sure the people in the meeting
achieve the meeting’s stated objective, the meeting’s outcome.
*The ‘harmon.ie’ UK study
** The Myth of Multi-Tasking, Eval Ophir & Anthony Wagner, Communication Between Humans
& Interactive Media, http://chime.stanford.edu/
Defining the type of meeting and therefore the type of participation required at the outset will
help - but the meeting is primarily a people management exercise.
Understanding the personality characteristics of each person present is a key component in the
facilitator’s bag of tricks.
We expand on the different characteristics of personalities in the chapter on ‘Who’s in your
meeting?’
These characteristics or traits are worth knowing for the leader of any team, not just a
meeting.
Understanding them enables you to control diverse communication, keep to the agenda and
accomplish the outcome, whilst making everyone feel included and valued.
Your Notes
7. Action Plan
don’t end a meeting without issuing an action point
There’s nothing more dispiriting than hearing the same old things discussed in meeting after
meeting.
It is a constant reminder of how much time has been wasted in talking without acting and a
reminder of how wasteful meetings can be.
The biggest complaint about organisational plans and strategy is how difficult it is to get the
strategy done.
“Making strategy work is more difficult than the task of strategy making. Execution is critical
to success” *.
If you’ve established the right outcome for your meeting and you want the meeting to produce
something you didn’t have before you met someone, somewhere will have to do something.
In the UK summer riots of 2011 it was fascinating to see the number of politicians, pundits,
gurus, professors, policemen, celebrities, clerics and commentators making pronouncements in
the media as to “what should be done”. The implication was that someone, somewhere should
do something. Exactly who, and exactly what was often missing.
And no-one began their conversation with ‘This is my action plan’.
Don’t end a meeting without an action point. Make at least one person do something before
the next meeting. Make the people who accept the action points accountable.
Include the execution of any action points from the last meeting as an agenda item for the
next meeting.
Make your meetings make people DO things. End with an action plan, targets agreed and
assigned and where possible, agree who will follow up action points between meetings.
Make them high payback meetings.
* Professor Lawrence Hrebiniak, Wharton Business School
Your Notes
Types of Meeting – suggested protocols
When you’ve decided your outcome from the meeting it will probably fall under:
•
•
•
•
•
Decision Making
Problem Solving
Task Assignment
Relationship Building
Briefing or Update
As we’ve said, Brainstorming, Creating Strategy, Planning, Agreeing Budget, Untangling Stalled
Projects, Emergency Resolutions --- all fall under one of the five above.
Let’s take the ‘Briefing or Update’ first.
‘Briefing / Update’
Where possible, we suggest you brief by e-mail or company
intranet or by using cloud technology where people can be
directed to updates without the need to meet.
However, there may be times when you do need a physical
meeting to brief people, where an e-mail or other method
would be considered insensitive.
If so, publish the agenda and hold the briefing meeting -- but
limit all questions to those for clarification only.
If it really is a briefing and NOT a participative, decision-type meeting then do not permit
opinions or comments. Allow questions for clarification only. Answer the questions and
conclude the meeting.
If you don’t mix outcomes (Key 1) you are unlikely to mix the type of meeting.
Types of Meeting – Decision Making
Inform your chosen attendees of the meeting’s
outcome and that part of it will be to make a decision.
Prepare the agenda and distribute it in advance of the
meeting, being sure to allow adequate time for
understanding.
If the agenda can offer at least 3 options for the
attendees to consider, so much the better.
The
quality of decision will improve if people are
presented with a few distinctly different options to start
the process.
With your facilitation skills, make sure each attendee gets a chance to present their view on
each of the options.
If you don’t already have one, you’ll need a process for making the final decision. (Is it a vote,
does the final decision rest with an executive?). People need to know what the process will be,
so that the agenda and session aren’t thrown off by uncertainty and disagreement).
There should be no other agenda items.
.
Problem Solving
!
The Problem Filter
Spheres of Influence
Remote Influence
Outside Your Control
BRAINSTORM
FORGET
Pareto
TOTAL FOCUS
Within Your Control
20% time given to problem
80% time given to solution
We all have a tendency towards focusing on situations that we can’t control. They often contain
the biggest emotional impact. As a result, problem solving (and other types of meetings) can
sometimes descend into a group ‘protest’.
When you’re the facilitator, accept all answers and comments and list everything the group
believes is a problem.
At the earliest opportunity get some agreement on what items are within the group’s control,
which ones the current group are genuinely able to influence and what they are not. Draw up a
‘Problem’s Filter’ and clearly place the issues in the correct location as to whether they can be
directly controlled or changed, partially influenced or are outside the control or influence of the
people present.
1. focus on what you CAN control
2. brainstorm what you may be able to influence and
3. steer discussion away from anything you can’t control.
It doesn’t mean that you don’t try to do something about all areas of the filter - at some point
in time - but go for the items in the centre, the controllable items first.
When you’ve correctly worded the problem, use the Pareto principle and spend 80% of your
time and energy on the solution.
When you have sufficient solutions that the group believes can form an executable action plan,
conclude the meeting.
Task Assignment
This type of meeting usually requires a
‘what by when by whom’ commitment
from an already existing strategy or plan
or set of decisions.
Team weekly action planning or the
execution of a project are examples.
Start with an assessment of the agreed
action points from the last meeting to see
what was executed and what wasn’t.
Don’t get into discussions or lengthy
explanations of how things were achieved
or not achieved. Save that for a separate
meeting.
When something was not done, simply ask
for a new target date and note it in the
new action plan.
Limit discussion to requests to change or
cancel the action points or to acquire
resources to be able to execute them.
Don’t mix this type of meeting with problem solving or decision making.
Styles and Spaces
One of Walt Disney’s animators said of him,
“There were actually three different Walt’s:
• the dreamer
• the realist and
• the spoiler
You never knew which one was coming to your meeting”
There is a further, very useful differentiation you can make between types of meeting.
One of Dr. Robert Dilts’s approaches to aspects of his ‘Disney Model’ holds that you need a
different quality of thinking for ‘brainstorming’ or creative meetings (dreamer) than you do for
planning type meetings (realist) or for critical appraisals (spoiler). We’ve also called them
‘creative’, ‘operational’, ‘hard decision’ meetings to help categorise them.
Not only should the types not be mixed in the same meeting, but each type of meeting should
be held at clearly different times, and preferably in different spaces.
He argues that spaces tend to ‘anchor’ people to the emotions and behaviours they once
experienced in them. This seems empirically true. In simple terms, we wouldn’t choose to
return to the location of an appallingly bad holiday yet we often go back to areas where we
had ‘great times’ to try to recapture the good feelings we associate with those spaces.
Different Styles, Different Spaces
!
Dreamer
Realist
Spoiler
Most people would agree that to get the best from creative type meetings, brainstorming,
certain decision making or problem solving meetings etc., you don’t want the attendees to hold
the same mindset as when they approach detailed planning meetings, difficult task assignment
or number-crunching type sessions.
Brainstorming uses more of the brain’s alpha wave ‘day dream’ frequency. Operational type
problems use more of the brain’s faster, beta wave type activity.
Creative meetings seem to go best when you’re less formal and a lot more relaxed.
The ‘critic’ or ‘spoiler’ type meeting is necessary when deciding what NOT to do and what
should be cut or ignored for the sake of focus. It requires a different mindset and even a
different physical and emotional feeling from the more creative type meetings.
If we accept this reasoning, your meeting’s stated outcome should tell you the type of meeting
required. It’s worth bearing in mind the above advice and testing the concepts for yourself to
see if they increase the efficacy of your meetings.
See the Physical Positioning section on meeting layout and location.
The Art of Not Meeting
Where does a 600lb gorilla sit?
The obvious way to save time and money on
meetings is to decide when you won’t meet.
We’re not talking about informal sessions like
meetings in the corridor, checking progress,
exchanging informal ideas, chasing deliverables
and the types of encounters you’re likely to have
in the daily routine of managing your people.
Meetings for our purposes are agenda-driven
events requiring multiple attendees.
When you ask your outcome question for the
meeting. “If this meeting is a success, what will
we have that we didn’t have before it?” you can
also ask: ‘Is a meeting really the best way to
achieve this objective?'
Take ‘Update’ meetings as an example. If you want to brief someone without needing to get
immediate feedback you can brief them by email or use the company intranet or cloud
technology, where people can be directed to a central source of information.
There are some executives with the type of personality that learns by talking. They need an
audience. If you’re a middle manager and your boss is one of those people who calls a meeting
when he or she wants to talk, there may be little you can do.
It’s the old corporate joke:
Q. Where does a 600lb gorilla sit?
A. Anywhere he pleases.
If you’re the gorilla, find one person to talk to where possible. If you really can’t, at least
evaluate the return on using lots of peoples’ time.
If you’re on the receiving end, you can develop a reputation for running your own highpayback meetings. If you’re faced with a 600lb gorilla, gently, in an unchallenging way, keep
requesting that the team in general looks hard at outcomes for meetings. As well as circulating
the 7 Keys, you can try to better understand and influence the different personality types.
Facilitating Meetings
We’ve mentioned all the way through that – as the Owner of the meeting, ideally
you have the job of facilitator.
It’s down to you, really, to get the people at your meeting to obtain the outcome.
If you haven’t already been trained on facilitation skills, you might find our notes helpful.
There’s a wealth of opinion and lots of ways of describing a good facilitator and the skills a
facilitator needs. You’ll probably have your own style and your own ideas but from the
meetings perspective, we’ve noticed that a few, simple things seem to work best.
Remain Neutral
Firstly – there’s a very different feeling to a meeting if the Facilitator is neutral.
That means valuing everyone’s view, treating everyone as equal.
Tough to do sometimes, particularly if you have a set idea on the outcome or the way it needs
to come about but you’ll get a richer exchange of ideas and a smoother meeting if each
participant believes you’re generally accepting of them individually and their right to a
viewpoint.
Be curious even when you think someone’s clearly wrong. How did they arrive at what they
said? You don’t have to agree but let them have their say and value the fact that they’re
participating.
To do that you need good listening skills.
Listening Skills
There’s a lot information around on listening skills and how to truly listen.
The late Dr. Thomas Gordon, coined the term ‘active listening’. What he himself said about it
was that "Active listening is certainly not complex. Listeners need only restate, in their own
language, their impression of the expression of the sender. … Still, learning to do Active
Listening well is a rather difficult task ..”
But without delving too deeply, we recommend you just start by doing what Gordon says. At
intervals and particularly when someone’s finished their point -paraphrase - repeat back to
them in your own words what you think they said.
They’ll soon let you know if it’s not what they meant – or if you didn’t quite get it. This lets
THEM hear what YOU’VE heard and put it right if they need to.
As well as you being a good listener you need to make sure the rest of the meeting listens too.
ONLY ONE PERSON TALKS AT ONCE. HOLD THIS AS A CAST IRON RULE. Everybody listens first -then they can comment.
To do that -- the meeting members need to trust that you keep people who waffle and
meander to the point.
It works best when you do it gently and politely. Don’t make them wrong but find clever ways
to repeat the question – ‘well … that’s interesting but could you say a bit more about ….’ And
repeat the original question. You’ll find your own subtle ways to do it, no doubt.
Congruence
Another great tip for listening skill is to be aware of congruence. A person’s congruent when
body language and the content of what they’re saying is the same. If you ask me ‘How was
your holiday?’ --- and I say ‘well, uh, yeah, uh it was fine, yeah’ – whilst shaking my head
from side to side, what does my body say?
Just imagine switching the volume down so you couldn’t hear what I said. Shaking my head
from side to side and looking neutral - now what do you think I said?
Gently probe when you see incongruence. There’s a tale behind it – and it makes you a more
thorough listener.
Your Notes
Manage Conflict
You need to manage conflict well. It was the man with the very impressive name -- Count
Alfred Korzybski –who coined the term “The map is not the territory”.
When we think, when we talk, try to discuss things we talk from our ‘maps’ of the world. It’s
not the world. We all operate with maps and mental models.
In modern psychological terms there’s a huge amount of generalisation, deletion, omission all
going on just to be able to speak some of our thoughts.
‘How was your holiday?’ – again. Do you really want to know all of the events?
From finding a passport, to packing the suitcase, to the airport procedures, to the waiting
time, to the flight performance to the in-flight movies, to the air temperature on landing, to
the hotel journey, to the menus, to the poolside temperature, to the sightseeing trips to the
gymnasium – and so on?
Your usual answer is ‘yes, great weather, we relaxed’. That’s really NOT what actually
happened. It’s mostly your ‘map’, your ‘model’. You were stressed at some point. Did the sun
shine every single hour? Wasn’t it too hot occasionally?
Just remember, everyone who speaks is working hard to condense their thoughts and ideas.
It’s not always easy. Hear them out, ask questions, listen - in order to understand their maps
and their models. Bear in mind none of us has an absolute take on reality.
It was the statistician, George Box, who cleverly pointed out ---- “All models are wrong; some
models are useful”.
So let them have their say. Then find a process for resolution – vote on things if necessary.
It doesn’t mean you’re right – it means the highest number of ‘shared maps’ wins out. Most
people buy into voting as a process.
Keep It Visual
It takes a lot of work to mentally remember all the points that other people make, whilst at the
same time sorting through your own thought processes.
All the strategic / creative / planning type thinking you do consumes huge amounts of brain
energy, mostly in the form of glucose.
And it runs out faster than we think. Particularly in meetings. What helps minimise this effect
is to save the brains in your meeting from having to store images. Stick some ‘images’ or key
words or notes up on white boards, flip charts, slides, handouts or whatever you can get hold
of.
They can be individual scribbles from your members on post it notes – scribbles on flip charts –
but try, as facilitator, to note, very visibly the key points as you go along in your meeting. It’ll
help keep people fresh and engaged.
Keep To The Agenda
All of these things combined should help you to keep to the agenda.
As time goes by, you’ll improve on the Outcome-finding and stating, and on your choice of
attendees and on your listening and directing ability.
Styles & Spaces
Also, it’s probably worth remembering how style and environment can effect your meeting.
In Key 3, Clear Agenda, and subsequently, we mentioned what Robert Dilts called the ‘Disney
Model’, keeping different types of meeting separate, separating not just the time factor but
keeping each type of meeting to a separate session – using a different space for each type of
meeting.
We don’t think this is absolute science – but it’s all worth trying, if you can do it, to see what
gets the best result from your meetings.
So the big takeaways as facilitator are:
Repeat back, paraphrase and summarise where
you’ve got to frequently at the key points of the
agenda
Allow structured participation – you listen, they
listen, you understand and THEN and only then
allow comment
Any impasse gets summarised and voted on
Keep major thoughts, points, milestones
sketched or written clearly for all to see as the
meeting progresses
Have a very visible clock to check progress
Value all contribution
If you did just these things you’re far more likely to get your outcome. You’ll also have a very
involved and energised team of people at the meeting - whilst being perceived as a good
facilitator.
Talking of the meeting as a mini-team’ event – the next section describes briefly what we
mean by team and how it might increase meeting effectiveness even more.
Facilitating Meetings
!
TEAM DYNAMICS
Clear performance goals
Focus on outputs
Success measures
Tasks
Processes
Relationships
Clear Roles
Process inspection
Change points defined
Trust
Team spirit
Mutual accountability
Contribution and Engagement
There are LOTS of models and plenty of viewpoints and masses of good material available on
the subject of teams and what makes a good team.
All we want to do here is just mention a few simple points. We’ve said quite a few times
throughout the 7 Keys that what seems to work well is to consider your meeting a ‘mini-team’
event.
The meeting as a team concept works well for most types of meeting, except perhaps where
it’s a formal board meeting or a simple briefing type meeting.
If we’re a team, then everybody attending has a direct role in producing a result in obtaining
the meeting’s outcome.
This approach creates a lot more engagement.
In a lot of meetings, three out of four of us try and do a bit of our OWN work during the
meeting. We’re probably more engaged when we drive a car! So as the facilitator of the
meeting it’s best if you think of yourself as the leader of this little team, just for this moment
in time.
As the leader, like with any team, you’ll want to get the best contribution from everyone there.
Relationship
Notes on Teams
One of the big focuses team building
concentrates on the relationship that
each member has with the other.
That’s the area of Relationship in our
little triangle.
•How much team spirit is present?
•How accountable are you to your
team mates?
•How much trust is there between
team members?
to say what you need to and so on.
That includes trust in their support
when you need it, trust in being able
We’ve mentioned Shutz’s FIRO model for instance, and we go into the ways people are likely to
interact with you and with their fellow members in the next section ‘Who’s in your meeting’.
It’s about the different personality types you’re likely to see at the meeting and just how each
type is likely to interact with other. This varies under different conditions, different levels of
stress and so on.
Everyone recognises that the Relationship part is hugely important, of course, but let’s make
sure we give attention to the other two points.
Task
The TASK corner of our triangle looks at the fact that teams are
usually assembled to get something done. Most of us,
hopefully, know what it’s like when a hard working team
achieves its goal.
If you’re on the football field, a team win can create relative
euphoria for thousands of people. In administrative teams,
there’s usually a little less euphoria but the need to know your
team has done what it’s there for is massively important. So;
•Clear goals and
•Success measurements
are vital for team cohesion and morale. If you have a clear
outcome specified for the meeting and a clear road map, in the
form of the agenda, you’ll have taken care of most of this
corner’s requirements.
Process
As far as PROCESS is concerned do you know what shared the number one spot, along with
‘pointless meetings’, for wasting people’s time in companies?
It was ‘a lack of team communication resulting in unclear objectives’.
So as facilitator all your good activity to ensure that
•
each person knows why they’re there and what their role is in the meeting,
•
what type of meeting it is,
•
only one person speaks at a time
•
we listen first and
•
understand by asking clarification questions,
•
we listen to EVERYBODY,
•
we’ll be checking how well we did through a couple of minute’s feedback (review of the
7 Keys) at the end
- all those good things will pretty much take care of the items under ‘PROCESS’.
The model is just one way to slice this fascinating subject of teams and team performance.
If you can imagine the best possible meeting you could have, using these 3 points of team
dynamics, you’ll probably agree it feels like a good team effort and a worthwhile effort.
Your Notes
Facilitating Meetings - who’s at your meeting
“If one does not understand a person, one tends to
regard him as a fool.” C.J. Jung
Communication and Personality Differences
As the facilitator/owner, you’re guiding the people
at your meeting to achieve the meeting’s outcome.
Recognising and managing the different personality
types at your meeting, so you can get the very best
out of them becomes an important point of focus.
The challenge now becomes – how do you manage
the process of pooling people’s strengths so they
get the outcome in best way? A method to predict
an individual’s strengths (and weaknesses for that
matter) would be useful.
It’s generally called the study of temperament and
personality type. In this section we’ll present a
short background to the theory. The basic idea for
teams - is that if you can see individuals as a
recognised ‘personality type’ ------ you’ll be able to
predict better how they’ll prefer to be
communicated to, how they’re likely to respond and
decide on certain things.
And all of that would allow a smoother interaction in your meetings.
However, we should start by saying that generally, the psychology community isn’t impressed
with the validity of the science behind what’s called ‘personality theory’.
Whilst any controversy rolls on – about 2,000,000 people take the MBTI test, the Myers Briggs
type Indicator, every year.
There are masses more brands of personality tests that people, mostly corporate professionals,
take and use for themselves and their teams each year.
So, one way or another, despite the exact science of it all, millions of managers and teams
seem to get a benefit from this broad model of ‘personality type’ approach.
Examining the subject a little more can shed some light on the fact that inside or outside a
meeting, the responses of your colleagues, bosses and subordinates can appear to be quite
random.
But Hippocrates, Jung, Kiersey, Shultz, Myers and Briggs, to name a few, worked to help us
understand the more predictable patterns in people’s behaviour and communication.
They gave us the study of temperament and personality type.
If you can view individuals as recognised ‘personality types’ you’ll be better able to predict
their responses, adapt to their communication preferences for better results and, hopefully,
find better ways to ethically influence them.
The Four Humours
!
Melancholy
Choleric
Phlegmatic
Sanguine
For your day-to-day exchanges and for running and facilitating meetings in particular, it would
be useful to know:
•
•
•
How people take in information, what they’ll accept or reject
The way they’ll make decisions as a result
The style of communication they respond to best
Hippocrates, was probably one of the first to record these patterns around 370 BC. They were
subsequently referred to as ‘the four humours’.
They represented what were thought of as the four body fluids, black bile, yellow bile, phlegm,
blood.
Your ‘type’ from these fluids was determined as ‘Melancholy’, ‘Choleric’, ‘Phlegmatic’,
‘Sanguine’.
They were the personality temperaments.
Melancholy indicated moody, Choleric indicated fiery,
Sanguine indicated outspoken.
Phlegmatic indicated passive, and
Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung began a huge amount of work on the subject and in the
1940s it began to be popularised.
It is from this body of knowledge that much of the current theory on temperament originates.
Communication and Personality Differences
Who’s in your meeting?
!
The various types of psychometric profile have become well used in teambuilding.
Myers Briggs (MBTI), Belbin, FIRO B, Insights Discovery and countless others are mostly based
on Carl Jung’s ‘Theory of Personality’. Each system provides a slightly different slant.
They are useful to help explain your own reactions and those of your fellow team members,
under a variety of circumstances. When you understand the types, you get greater prediction
of peoples’ likes, dislikes, responses, strengths and weaknesses – as well as the signs of stress
in each personality type - including your own.
Meredith Belbin (Cambridge) created his ‘team-role types’ with metaphorical names:
Action-oriented roles
People-oriented roles
Cerebral roles
- Shaper, Implementer, and Completer Finisher
- Co-ordinator, Team-worker and Resource Investigator
- Plant, Monitor Evaluator and Specialist
They all describe the characteristics, relative strengths and weaknesses and contributions to
the team that we could expect from such personality types.
The Meyers Briggs Type Indicator (often described as the industry ‘gold standard’) sticks more
closely to Jung’s original language. If you take the test you’ll be described as one of 16 types*
with coding such as ‘INTJ’ or ‘ESFP’.
It’s not as complex as it sounds.
Let’s take a very brief look at Jung’s *‘Theory of Personality’. It will probably assist you more
than anything else in understanding people’s interaction in meetings and teams.
* If you become seriously interested in the subject, recommended reading is ‘The Psychology
of CG Jung’ by Jolande Jacobi, Yale University Press.
Introverts and Extraverts
The following are excerpts from
‘The Crystal Ball of Behaviour’
!
Personality
There are two questions that can determine and predict a very accurate range of strengths,
weaknesses and behaviours in yourself and others.
There is also a raft of remedies and strategies available, once you answer two questions
accurately.
Q1. Is the person in front of me an Introvert or an Extravert ?
This is the 'attitude', as Jung called it, of Introversion or Extraversion [Jung’s spelling].
Introverts are more 'inwardly' focused, generally quieter, more reflective and thoughtful.
Extraverts are more 'outwardly' focused, more action oriented and more outspoken.
There are degrees of each of course, but you are usually one type or the other.
Pick someone you know well and decide - are they talkative, gregarious, bold, outspoken,
action-oriented with bigger networks of friends and associates (Extrovert)
- or are they
observant, a bit more thoughtful, cautious, a bit more reserved with smaller, closer circles of
friends (Introvert)?
!
Introvert
or
Extravert
In social situations – like meetings - Introverts are often accused of 'not contributing'.
Extraverts are more outspoken and 'think on their feet' or think out loud. They often 'speak
before they think'. They appear faster than Introverts. An Introvert would not normally speak
before thinking. Sometimes in a fast exchange, the moment can pass before the Introvert
collects his or her thoughts and is ready to speak.
No doubt you’ll have witnessed occasions where a more introverted person in the team will
approach you later, quietly, one-to-one and make a very valuable contribution to the subject
matter, after the meeting has concluded.
As a facilitator, you want everybody’s input. The trick is to give Introverts time to reflect.
Taking breaks isn’t always easy in fast paced meetings but it doesn't have to be a long or
formal break. A short pause for reflection will capture the Introvert's viewpoint.
Thinking and Feeling
!
Thinking
Feeling
Next, we’ll dissect the circle of personality horizontally, the 'Thinking/Feeling' preference. It
shows an entire new set of combined strengths and weaknesses - and blind spots.
The second question is:
Q2. Does the person in front of me mostly have a Thinking preference or a Feeling
preference?
We all think and we all feel – of course but if you tend to make decisions mostly in a logical,
analytical, detached way, you have a Thinking Preference. If you make decisions in a more
subjective, involved manner, you have a Feeling Preference.
Simplistically – are you slightly more ‘Task’ oriented [Thinking] than ‘People’ oriented [Feeling].
It doesn’t mean you don’t care about people, if you’ve answered to a thinking preference.
You’ll simply tend to focus more on the task aspect of most situations.
.
Just like Introversion or Extraversion, neither is right nor wrong, better or worse.
Jung made other differentiations too, like the way people absorb information. He called it
‘Sensing’ and ‘Intuition’. Sensing people tend to favour past patterns and observable, more
tangible – the five senses - material. Intuition people are more influenced by general
impressions and possibilities.
.
But for now let’s stick with the 2 sets of differentiators ‘Introvert/Extravert’ & ‘Thinking
Feeling’.
Putting It Together
!
IT
ET
IF
EF
If we superimpose the two semi circles for the person you selected, the vertical slice over the
horizontal slice, a quadrant appears as in the examples above.
The person you’ve assessed will be an ‘IT’ or an ’ET or an ‘EF’ or an ‘IF’. We can now predict a
range of behaviours for the individual selected.
As an ultra brief example:
IT – your Introvert Thinking type, the combination of Introversion and Thinking preferences will seem quieter, more reserved, analytical and perhaps appear a bit detached. Their decision
making will tend to favour the ‘task’ importance over the ‘people’ importance. They can be
slow to reach a decision and will nearly always want more detail.
ET – your Extravert Thinking type, the combination of extravert and thinking preferences - will
appear quicker to speak, more direct, even blunt. They will want to take control of most
situations. They too will mostly favour task issues over people issues. They want fast action.
They certainly don’t want detail.
EF – your Extravert Feeling type will want more social activity. An obvious extravert, they are
occasionally prone to being impetuous. Under pressure they are quick to display ‘exaggerated’
responses. They favour people issues over the task. They’re often ‘the life and soul of the
party’. They can be quite creative but are not great completer/finishers and they’re easily
bored.
IF – your Introvert Feeling type will appear very relaxed, but on the quiet side. They are
accommodating, affable and very much in favour of harmony and consensus. They tend to
favour people issues over the task element but will show persistence in completing tasks
themselves.
There is far, far more detailed and useful information you can get from personality theory, but
the key thing to note for our purposes in meeting facilitation, is that the people at your
meeting are all different and they are, each of them, no matter which personality type, equally
capable of the same number of right and wrong conclusions and decisions. They all have their
relative strengths - and their blind spots too.
Tips On Handling The Types
!
IT
ET
IF
EF
Some hot tips when facilitating the different personality types:
IT - Give enough detail to your IT and don’t invade their space. Where possible,
don’t demand fast decisions and don’t ‘put them on the spot’.
ET - Don’t be slow, fumble or focus on emotions and don’t overload your ET with
detail.
EF - Don’t be glum and don’t expect detailed, finished work but find ways to
acknowledge your EF and don’t criticize them openly, in public.
IF - Give them a bit of ‘thinking time’, time for reflection. Don’t be confrontational with your IF
– and don’t suddenly make them the focus of attention in groups.
Give the introverts time to think. Keep things fast paced for your extroverts.
The adjustments you need to make towards the personality types to get the best from them
are relatively minor. Creating and maintaining good rapport and building relationships is a
prime skill for facilitators and team leaders.
Understanding how these different personalities respond best opens the door to creating
greater rapport.
As Peter Drucker says ‘Manners are what allow people who don’t like each other to work
together’. And manners are society’s basic rapport builders.
Everyone tends to treat family members and good friends very differently from people you
don’t have a ‘connection’ with - whether you should or you shouldn’t.
You make an exception, you ‘go the extra mile’.
The difference is --- rapport, your sense of connection or liking or seeing a similarity with the
person.
When you pay attention to the different personality types and make even the minor
adjustments we’ve discussed, their rapport with you will shoot up.
And obviously, if you can create good rapport in meetings you’ll have better co-operation and
co-ordination - essential team components.
These are the ‘soft skills’.
Their use prevents the hidden loss from subtle, non-co-operation and the less subtle team infighting with the resultant personnel turnover.
It’s worth giving these skills some attention.
If you want to a deeper understanding of managing the different personality types The
Crystal Ball of Behaviour and the Team Excellence E-books contain much more detail.
Facilitating Meetings - Physical Layout
!
Above are some suggestions for arranging the spaces for different types of meetings.
1.
Formal presentations (Announcements)
theatre style - the audience in rows, facing the chairperson.
2.
Participative meetings (Operational activities)
‘U’ shape, horse-shoe layout, with the open part of the U facing the facilitator’s
table
3.
Smaller discussion meetings (Decision Making)
board-room style - one rectangular table with facilitator/chair at one end.
4.
Creative sessions (Brainstorming, problem solving)
lounge style, with easy chairs and coffee tables.
Your Notes
Using the 7 Keys
It can be a challenge to attempt to change your meetings culture, particularly if you’re not at
the head of the company.
We suggest you start by setting an example. Get a few of those who openly complain about
meetings to look at the 7 keys with you and decide which one needs attention first.
Get as much agreement as you can to give the 7 Keys a try.
Work at getting one or two keys being used routinely in your meetings for a few weeks.
Then begin introducing the remaining keys as you perceive the need.
Get the people who witness the benefits to encourage more people onside.
Make use of the available downloads, the posters, the feedback forms and the laminated card
‘memory joggers’.
When you have enough groundswell, suggest to senior management that the keys that work
best become official company meeting protocols. When some or all are adopted consistently,
you will have made a cultural impact.
No matter how well you do, you will still need to revisit the subject from time to time to keep it
fresh. And we’d love to hear your success stories.
Good luck.
Your Notes