Healthy Debate, Effective Meetings

Have you ever been part of a meeting that started late, that did not have a clear agenda, and that went on to discuss relatively irrelevant topics and avoiding the real issues? Have you ever been present at a meeting that did not allow for honest sharing of information and opinions, that droned on forever, where people were domineering the discussion, and that never seemed to get to the point? If your answer is no, I’d love to talk to you and your team.

Very likely your answer is a full-blown yes with a deep, frustrated groan.

Many different aspects make meetings effective, but it boils down to candid, healthy debate on topics that matter and that everyone prepared for and participates in. You have to plan, prepare, and effectively execute your meeting or you will lose time, energy, commitment, and revenue. It’s as simple as that. So if you don’t want this to happen, you want to avoid the following pitfalls:

-       Inviting people to the meeting who are not necessary for reaching the objective of the meeting. The next one, knowing what you want to accomplish, helps you determine who needs to be present.

-       Going into a meeting without considering what the desired outcome should be. Do you need to inform, discuss, generate, plan, decide? What is it that you want to accomplish? Everything that happens in your meeting should support your objective.

-       Starting late and allowing latecomers to disrupt and receive recaps, thereby allowing repetition and needlessly long discussions. Allowing reading time during the meeting is another mistake that is often made. Reading is part of preparation and should happen ahead of the meeting. Sounds too good to be true, right? But if you respectfully but promptly and consistently redirect people who want to read papers during the meeting, your meetings will be known for the ones you better prepare for.

-       Going into a meeting without a specific time management plan. To integrate some of the most common pitfalls: Without an objective, with the wrong or too many people, without a specific agenda, without a good clue on how long each item will take, and without the skills and courage to handle tensions constructively and to curb needless discussions, ego-tripping, and domineering behaviors you will be lost, for sure. You will be lost in time, and you will be lost in results.

In addition you want to note items that need further discussion and at the end of each agenda item, you want to quickly summarize what was said and get agreement on your summary. Don’t forget to agree on what needs follow-up by whom and by what date. At the end of the meeting, take time to debrief and evaluate the meeting's effectiveness based on how well you met the objective and what you want do differently and better during the next meeting.

My recap: An effective meeting needs structure, preparation, order, active participation, and candid and guided conversation.

I’ll leave you with some questions:

a.    Are your meetings compelling? Are important issues being discussed during meetings?

b.    Are your meetings focused? Do you know the objectives of the meeting and how to best reach them?

c.    Are your discussions time effective and do they result in conclusions and actions?

d.    Do you engage in unguarded and relevant debate? Do you honestly share thoughts and opinions, do you honestly and respectfully confront each other?

e.    Do you ever get out of line? Do you apologize if you get out of line?

f.     Do you really understand each other?

g.    Do you avoid gossiping about each other?

h.    Are you clear about possible next steps when leaving your meetings?

Just remember, effective meetings leave you energized and feeling that you've really accomplished something, together. Otherwise you might as well have done it all by yourself and saved others a lot of time and energy.

The power of an angle, the power of errors and biases

Not everything is always what it appears. Often it is not, even though we might be convinced it is. Too many times we look at situations from a limited number of perspectives, from only a few of the many available angles, and with many biases and errors. We neglect or dismiss certain viewpoints, we create realities that only we can see, and that’s what we often base our interpretations, conclusions and judgments on. Are you aware of the many biases and errors in perception and judgment that cloud your responses and decisions? Are you aware of the limitations of your personal perspectives?

I’ll mention a few of the many possible errors and biases that we are all subject to. Some examples of perception biases are seeing things according to the conventions of your profession while ignoring other views or overlooking and ignoring unexpected data as well as overestimating what you know and seeing patterns where they don’t exist. Biases referred to as comfort zone biases occur when people ignore information that is inconsistent with their current beliefs or when they keep doing the same things even if they don’t longer work well. Examples of motivational biases are the tendency of people to remember their decisions as being better than they were and the tendency to unconsciously distort judgments to look good and get ahead.

I could continue this list with all the possible errors and biases involved in groupthink and in other processes, but I think it’s clear: Understanding your likely perception and judgment biases and errors and seeing the bigger picture can totally change the narrative, it can change interpretations, and it can change responses and outcomes. The following half-minute video commercial of The Guardian provides a good illustration.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3h-T3KQNxU

Questions To Trigger You

I don't have all the answers, I sure don't. I do like to trigger you with bold questions. For different perspectives on many of the topics in these questions, please feel free to browse this blog with many different articles, all related to leadership, change management, and personal development. Over to the questions: 

1. How do you best recognize and resolve the tensions between flexibility and control both with customers and in the office with your subordinates, peers, superiors?

2. How do you avoid becoming the prisoner of your personality and tendencies?

3. How do you ensure not to be exaggerating your strengths to a point where they turn into your liabilities?

4. How actively do you combine perspectives, skills, and knowledge in new ways? How can you improve in this area? Who would be a good example and mentor for you to accomplish this goal?

5. Can and do you adopt new ways of doing things without necessarily being under pressure first? How do you stay sharp, how do you stay away from complacency?

6. How are you working on creating a culture, a tradition, of constructively challenging the status quo at  your company?

7. The majority of effective leaders have worked hard on themselves. Very hard. How is your ‘work-in-progress’ coming along?

8. In which ways do you actively encourage yourself and others to challenge ‘business as usual’?

Wishing you a reflective time resulting in the necessary insights, energy, and courage to make things happen. To make different things happen. To make things happen differently. 

·      

Advancing Your Career

Drawing from 22 years of experience as an organizational coach, mentor, trainer, and speaker and drawing from some insightful books and articles, I’d like to share a couple of insights related to advancing your career. No guarantees, just tips and thoughts. Use them to your benefit!

Diversity makes the difference.

Make sure to gain experience in different industries, in different divisions, in different job functions, and preferably in different cultures. People with international experience are not only culturally wiser, they are more likely to create new businesses and products – and they are more likely to be promoted. Another area where I strongly suggest you actively create diversity is within your network. You want to create a highly diverse network, where people don’t just echo your own experiences and perspectives but add to them. Brian Uzzi and Shannon Dunlap in “How to Build Your Network” in Harvard Business Review: “If your connections know you and one another through similarities in experience, training, worldview, background, or proximity, trust will be strong. But for your network to work for you, it needs to be more than an echo chamber.”

Candid feedback makes the difference.

Communicate and actively demonstrate a sincere desire to find out what might be holding you back from advancing your career and what might have caused you missing out on that promotion. This will increase the likelihood that you will get useful input from executives and colleagues. Input that you can translate into a development plan. Input that helps you learn, grow, and become more self-aware. You have to be willing to discover the unwanted, however. It might well be that at some point in your career the desirable next step is really out of reach, for certain reasons, for now.

A thorough assessment makes the difference.

A useful tool to help you prepare for promotions and to help you evaluate missed promotions is John Beeson’s 3-legged model. Beeson’s framework helps you identify and address any issues that may be getting in the way of promotions:

o   Non-negotiables, without which you will not be considered for a promotion. Examples are demonstrating consistently strong performance and displaying integrity and character.

o   De-selection factors, which eliminate you as a candidate even if you are otherwise qualified. Examples are weak interpersonal skills and holding a narrow, parochial perspective on the business and the organization.

o   Core selection factors, which ultimately determine who gets the position. Examples are building and maintaining a strong executive team and getting things done across internal boundaries.

Three traits that make the difference.

Three leadership traits that Larry Bossidy, former CEO of AlliedSignal looks for when evaluating job candidates:

1.    The ability to execute – turning ideas into reality.

2.    A team orientation – good leaders are able to work well with others.

3.    Having a wide range of experience – a factor already discussed above.

How do you evaluate yourself on these three traits? And maybe more importantly, how do peers, subordinates, and bosses evaluate you on these three traits?

Judging oneself makes the difference.

Justin Menkes uses the term “executive intelligence” and perceives it to be made up of three components: accomplishing tasks, working with people and judging oneself. The first and second of these components coincide with Bossidy’s traits. Menke’s third one, judging oneself, is a hugely overlooked trait if you ask me. I remember one of my clients ten years ago. In many ways he presented himself as a promising senior leader. He also showed himself to me and to his peers and bosses as someone who consistently misjudged himself in his capacity to engage his team members and in his capacity to act decisively in times of crisis. Both deficiencies resulted in the loss of some great team members and in difficulty achieving top team performance. The biggest problem with misjudging yourself is that if you do not have a good sense of where you are, it is hard to get to where you want to be let and to choose the right path and the right form of transportation. Judging oneself is a skill you want to develop in yourself and in anyone in the workplace regardless of the position. It fits in perfectly with the now widely researched and discussed self-awareness and emotional intelligence that I have written about on several earlier occasions. With a good amount of self-awareness and self-judging you are less dependent on the feedback of others to discover previously blind spots, that you can now turn into growth areas to further your career. You will know where you are and how you are as well as what is still needed to get where you want to be.

Growing with, not just towards the position makes the difference.

It is important to realize (and act upon the fact!) that different levels of responsibility and different positions in organizations require different mindsets and different skills. The mindsets, skills and expertise that have taken you to your new level, are likely not the ones that are most effective once you’re in that new position. For you to succeed, behaviors and styles need to evolve over the course of your career. When you advance your career, what lies ahead is generally new terrain that often cannot be conquered with just the old gear. Challenges are quite different and in some cases even the opposite from what you have encountered in the past. Approaches that used to work are no longer so effective. An in-company mentor or a coaching or training program specifically designed to help you acquire or cultivate these new insights and skills can help you make the transition successfully.

What do you want to explore more, what do you want to rethink and refocus, what do you want to receive candid feedback on?