Liane Davey's Blog, page 8

How to Have Your Ideas Taken Seriously

Do your ideas get the attention and appreciation they deserve? Are they reflected in your team’s decisions and outputs? Not always? If you’re not making the impact you want, it might be because you’re not seen as strategic. However, being seen as strategic takes more than being strategic; it also means being influential. Here are the factors contributing to your influence and tips you can try if you want your ideas to be taken seriously.

What Makes You More Influential?

One reason your ideas might be getting short shrift is that you approach influence as a purely intellectual process. In that mode, you collect iron-clad evidence to bolster your argument and try to convince everyone of your idea’s merit. Sadly, that approach is hollow and often ineffective. (It’s ironic because you probably recognize how ineffective this strategy is when someone tries it on you, yet the norm for data-heavy intellectual floggings as the standard way to persuade others might feel too strong to ignore.)

There’s a more effective approach.

The key is to recognize that influence is a social and emotional process rather than strictly an intellectual or cognitive one. When I say it’s social, that’s because influence happens inside the other person. That means your influence attempts start long before you think and extend well beyond your presentation of the facts.

You have to figure out how to be effective throughout.

How to Be More Persuasive

Let me start by saying that this isn’t exactly breaking news. We’ve known how to be persuasive since Aristotle published his three-pillar model of rhetoric (ethos, logos, pathos) in the fourth century BCE. Let’s dust off that approach and tailor it to a situation where you need to find ways of having a more immediate impact.

Credibility

The first pillar of influence is credibility. The importance of credibility is tied directly to the fact that influence is a social and emotional process. The unfortunate truth is that the quality of your idea, the strength of your argument, and the value of your plan could be irrelevant if the person you’re trying to influence doesn’t put any stock in you.

This should be a call to action for you to be routinely thinking about the most important people in your sphere of influence and the approaches you will take to enhance their trust in you. Credibility is a long game, but here are a few things that might help if you need a credibility boost in the short term.

Expertise: What do you know? What have you done? Who has certified your skills? Long-term expertise is about knowledge and experiences. If you have to bolster your perceived expertise in the short run, inject a dose of knowledge by attending meetings in another area, interviewing experts, or reading pertinent articles. Then, make a point of sharing what you did and what you learned.

Track Record: What have you done? How did it pan out? Did it work? A long-term track record is a portfolio of relevant experiences where you’ve succeeded—not something you can conjure in a few hours or days. In the short term, if you don’t have relevant examples, lean on examples from other areas where you demonstrated you could learn something new.

Methods: How will you do it? What’s your plan? Has it worked before? If your expertise and track record aren’t all that, you can enhance your credibility by leaning on the authority of an existing method or approach. Tried and true techniques, benchmarked data, or methodologies from reputable professional bodies or consulting firms can all reflect credibility on you and your idea.

Connection: Who are you? Do I like you? Can I trust you to think like me? Finally, you must factor in biases and prejudices, which are always present when someone assesses your credibility. In the long term, build connections by demonstrating that you trust people enough to be vulnerable with them. In the short term, find common ground by discovering you’re both Liverpool fans, fly fishers, or people who used to work at Cisco.

One last thought about credibility. You don’t necessarily need strong credibility with the decision-maker if you have a good relationship with other influencers. In that situation, you can borrow credibility from people who trust you by asking them to vet and endorse your ideas.

Logic

Probably the most obvious part of becoming more influential is improving the logic and strength of your argument. But while this is obvious, you might not be making your case as expertly as you think. Do you have room to improve on any of these dimensions?

Structure: Does your argument flow well? It’s hard for your audience to get on board with a plan they can’t follow. Ensure you use a logical order and provide organizing principles to help the audience understand and internalize your argument. Don’t do this alone. You’re probably a poor judge of whether your argument is structured well because you have the curse of knowledge. Run it past someone else and take their suggestions for structuring your argument.

Evidence: Are there data to back up your claims? Are they reliable and relevant? Far too many influence attempts involve people opining about the best path to take without any evidence for why that makes sense. Make sure you have proof, and remember that your evidence has its own credibility—low-credibility evidence can do more harm than good.

Counterarguments: The best influence attempts aren’t snow jobs with information cherry-picked to support your position. If you want to be more influential, show that you’ve looked at multiple options, considered the risks, and worked to counter any biases in your decision-making process.

Images: Another secret is that if you’re trying to be influential in a way that dislodges people from their current perspective, it can be beneficial to use images, graphs, and other visuals to do the talking.

Emotion

If you’ve done what you can to establish your credibility and packed your approach with well-structured facts and figures, your last lever is to dial in the emotional content. Think about both sides of the argument. How do you make your proposal’s upside sound more attractive and valuable while minimizing the fear and anxiety associated with its downsides?

Humans are emotional decision-makers, so don’t ignore how people feel about your idea.

Storytelling: Can you add a story that helps bring your proposal to life? Is there a hook or an arch that will draw people in and get them cheering for your plan? Stories are convincing (more convincing than they should be because we often weigh anecdotes in stories more highly than objective evidence).

Values: Do you know what your audience and the decision-maker value? Do you know what’s at stake for them? It’s best to do your homework to understand these dynamics in advance, but if you don’t, you will need to listen carefully to their questions and comments to know how they’re anchoring their decisions.

Aspirations: Can you paint a picture of how the world will be better if you implement your idea? A strong argument pulls on the decision-maker’s heartstrings (or their ambitions, greed, need to win, etc.) so they feel the prize is worth striving for.

Risk: Have you assuaged the decision-maker’s concerns about what might go wrong if you proceed with your approach? You need to consider the risks and anxieties that are holding people back. Avoiding talking about the risks will not make them go away; it will just leave the opposition unsurfaced.

Adaptability

One final comment—straying from Aristotle. You can have an extremely compelling argument built on a foundation of solid credibility, strengthened by logic, and energized by emotion, and it might not be enough. Rarely will your approach be as good as an approach that you tweak, change, and iterate with others. If you want to be influential, give people opportunities to put their fingerprints on the plan.

There you have it. Invest in the long-term approaches if you’re trying to become more influential. If you have to influence someone now, try this:

Seek out a source of expertise and share how you’ve incorporated your new knowledge into your proposal.Highlight past examples where you’ve done something similar or where you’ve been successful in applying a new skill.Draw on a well-known or credible method or external expert to increase confidence in your approach.Find common ground with your audience and decision-makers.Borrow credibility from others by asking them to vet and endorse your ideas.Run your approach past someone else to get the flow right.Add evidence with strong credibility from sources your audience will trust.Highlight the risks of your plan and how you’ll mitigate them.Use graphs and images to change engrained opinions.Tell stories to make the problem, the plan, or the potential outcome more compelling.Identify the values and beliefs beneath your audience’s perspectives and frame your argument in themes that have currency with them.Make an emotional case for what will be better if you enact your plan.Validate and empathize with their perceived risks and work together on how you might mitigate them.Adapt your plans based on the feedback you hear. Don’t be precious about your language if tweaking something would make it easier for your audience to agree.

Having great ideas is only the first part of the problem. You also need to convince people of the merit of your approach. Doing so will require much more than a logical argument; you’ll need to strengthen your credibility and case.

Additional Resources

3 Big mistakes you make when trying to influence

Dealing with trust issues on your team

Simple Steps to Rehabilitate a Bad Reputation

 

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The Four Birkman Colors

 

You did a Birkman assessment and now you’re Blue, Red, Green, or Yellow. What does it all mean? Let me give you a quick overview of the four different colors on the Birkman, how to interpret them, and why they’re important in teams.

Birkman Blue

Blue on Birkman represents people in the subjective world of what could be. They’re people-focused, abstract, hypothetical, and have a future-oriented worldview. Blues bring a lot to the equation. They bring creativity. They’re strategic. They have a sensory flair. Don’t get them started in a brand conversation. They’ll go all day. You get so much wonderful value from that Blue individual. Blues are always asking the Why questions.

Birkman Yellow

Yellows, like Blues, are focused in their heads. They’re in a world of their own inner thoughts. They’re more introverted, less extroverted. But unlike Blues, who are focused on the abstract and the future, Yellows are focused on the concrete and the tangible and what’s in the world. Yellows are invested in predictability, order, stability, and fairness. They’re amazing on a team because they take the Blues’ vision and turn it into a plan. Yellows are interested in answering all the How questions. Blues are all about why: Why does the world work this way. But Yellows want to know how: How do I use this? How do I make this work?

Birkman Green

Greens are similar to Blues. They’re focused on this future-oriented, people-oriented, hypothetical world. But they’re more extroverted. They’re more likely to interact directly with the world. Also like Blues, they’re fantastic at thinking about *what could be: “*Let’s change,” “let’s evolve.” “Let’s influence and champion.” They’re great storytellers, they’re great coaches. They’re invested in interpersonal relationships. And as you might guess, their question is Who. Who do I need to call? Who would be helpful here? Who is impacted? This wonderful green energy on a team makes you better at stakeholder management and figuring out how a change or a decision is going to impact people. It’s great having that on a team.

Birkman Red

Finally, Reds stay in the top of the Birkman grid with a very hands-on, extroverted kind of focus. But now, instead of that future-oriented, people-oriented focus, Reds shift to the here and now, to the task, and what needs to get done. Reds are fantastic for expediting things, and making things happen. They’re practical and logical. There’s no BS with a Red. They just want to say, “What do we gotta do?” And that’s their question: What next?! You get a lot of energy from having Reds on a team.

Great Teams Need All 4 Colors

Great teams need Blues, the Blue energy, the Blue contribution because it’s strategic. Blues make sure that you’re anticipating what’s coming in the world, that you’re paying attention to the right things.

But you also need the Yellow because a vision is nothing without a plan. You need the Yellows who say, “Can you define what you mean by that? What would we need to do to make that happen? How do we nail it and scale it?” Yellows bring that. But if you have the most amazing Blues and Yellows, a great vision and plan, but haven’t brought anyone along, you’re completely missing the boat.

You need Greens to mobilize people, win their hearts and minds, to get them to come along on the trip. And finally, all that’s great, but you still need somebody focused on getting there, on doing it.

That kind of accountability, expediting, and execution comes from a Red. You need all of these different styles on a great team. And if your team is missing any one of these styles, you’ll probably see risks, and even dysfunction, tied to what’s missing.

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One last thought. You don’t necessarily need all of these different styles at the same time. In the early phases of a project, blue energy, which is about diverging and thinking about what’s possible, changing your mind, and iterating, is great. But once you’ve made a call, those people who keep saying, “But what about,” can make it hard to be decisive and move ahead. You want that blue energy early, but you want it to trail off a bit.

Similarly, if the Reds get going too soon in the process, they shut a lot of things down by saying, “Yep, sounds good, let’s go!” This can increase risk as well. Maybe there’s a rush to judgment or you’re moving too quickly. You want these different styles at the right time. Be deliberate about how and when they contribute and then you’ll have an incredibly effective team.

Want another hot tip on how to make your team more effective? Check out this team effectiveness exercise.

More On This

How to Communicate Strategy

How Team Dynamics Affect Strategic Planning

How Do I Know I Have a Healthy Team?

Video: Team Effectiveness Starts With You Being an Effective Team Member

The post The Four Birkman Colors appeared first on Liane Davey.

How to Ask For Help at Work

 

People are struggling. I see it on so many people’s faces. You ask, “How are you?” And you get “Fine.” And you know that something is going underneath that they don’t feel they can tell you. They don’t know how to ask for help. We need to make it much easier for people to ask for help.

The problem is, there’s a tremendous amount of what psychologists call social friction that makes it hard to ask for help. We worry that if we ask for help, people will think less of us. Maybe we’ll think less of ourselves. We worry it will affect our job prospects, our performance ratings, or how much people like and respect us.

The other thing is that we don’t know how to put it into words. We don’t know who to ask. There’s no forum or time to ask where it feels like it makes sense. We need to make it much easier for people to ask for help and I’ve created an exercise to do that.

Four Kinds of Help

All it is is a set of four words. You don’t need anything formal or fancy, but maybe you could have little figurines or something that people in your meeting can grab to ask for one of the four kinds of help. Here they are:

1. Ovation

There are times when we need to ask for an ovation. Woo hoo! An ovation is about recognizing effort, whether it’s your effort or that of a team member. It’s about celebrating achievements, expressing pride, and acknowledging your own efforts or highlighting the value and importance of someone else’s efforts. Asking for an ovation is so important because we all need to celebrate more.

When people toil away doing unseen work, resentment grows, which can be very hard on our team dynamics. Ovations are way too rare in this world. It’s perfectly okay to say, “Hey, I want to share this with you. I’m excited about it and I need to know that you noticed, that you care, and that you’re proud.” Asking for an ovation, either for yourself or for somebody else on the team, is a wonderful way to ask for support.

2. Inspiration

During times of struggle, we often find it challenging to ask for help. Yet, one effective approach is to ask your teammates for inspiration. Many people mistakenly believe that success hinges solely on their ability to independently solve every question and find all the answers, but this simply isn’t true. For example, I’m often begging clients, “What am I going to blog about this week? What would be helpful? I need some inspiration!” That’s a really important way of saying, we don’t have to have all the answers, and we don’t even have to have all the questions. You can say, “I’m struggling with this account. Has anybody tried anything that works?” Or in other circumstances, “I’m working on this code and I can’t figure out a way to make it work. Do you know of anything?”

There are great opportunities to ask for support from your teammates. Maybe they’ve dealt with the same challenging issue before, or they possess insights into something that you’re facing. Requesting inspiration, drawing on their past experiences, or advice is terrific for team building because helping people creates a sense of affinity and increases our trust in them. That’s cognitive dissonance at work. It’s really valuable when you create an opportunity for your teammates to help you. Don’t hesitate to ask for inspiration when you need it.

3. Validation

You’ve done a piece of work and you want to check it with people. You want someone to edit it, review it, or spot any assumptions or errors in it. You just want to know that your work has had a second set of eyes, that someone who has your back has looked at it, and it’s good. It’s been stress-tested. Validation is another wonderful form of support that you can ask for.

When we seek validation from others, we demonstrate respect, trust, and interest in their input. Not only is this good for our relationship, but it also improves the quality of our work by incorporating different perspectives. Don’t be afraid to ask someone to validate your work if you need to.

4. Resuscitation

Many people face challenges and sometimes struggle to find the right words to ask colleagues for support. Occasionally, we may need to ask for resuscitation: support when we’re tired and struggling, a hand when we’re unsure about projects or meeting deadlines, and help when significant personal matters demand our attention.

It’s okay to express feelings of exhaustion and uncertainty, and to let people know you’re struggling. For example, “I’m going down here. I have no energy right now,” or “I’m really anxious about this,” “I’m stressed out,” “I’m coping with something at home and just really need you guys to create some cover for me while I cope with it.”

Asking for help and support from our colleagues can strengthen our relationships. It can be just what we need in that moment when we feel overwhelmed or like we can’t do it alone. Everyone needs a little resuscitation once in a while. Just ask for it.

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Introduce this set of four words during your regular team check-ins. Each week, someone may choose one, and then another week, opt for a different one. Ideally, team members will select varied prompts, providing insights into underlying issues. For example, with an ovation, you might discover that individuals are feeling resentful because their accomplishments are going unnoticed. Similarly, worries about showing imperfect work can be addressed through validation, in turn creating a sanctioned team norm where everyone has each other’s backs, and everyone is putting out great work. Similarly, you might find team members in need of inspiration or resuscitation.

Again, I created this exercise because there is so much friction in asking for help and so many people in need of it. I wanted to create a routine way that people could ask for help. The more help that we can ask for and offer and receive, the better we could all use it.

Looking for more pointers? Check out my next post, How to Participate in a Meeting.

More On This

To Foster Trust, Ask for Help

10 Helpful Things To Do When You’re Overwhelmed

Improve Your Team Dynamics

Video: How to Be a Good Team Player

The post How to Ask For Help at Work appeared first on Liane Davey.

The Easiest Way to Make Meetings Shorter

I facilitated a couple of full-day meetings last week. In both, I implemented a simple process that made the discussions quicker and better. Try this structure to make your meetings shorter (and more effective).

Why Meetings Are So Inefficient

You’d need a page longer than your arm to list why some meetings are poor uses of time, including many mistakes made ahead of anyone assembling. Let’s ignore the dysfunction associated with missing agendas, mismatched goals and participants, and inappropriate timing for what you’re trying to accomplish and zoom in on problems with how your team works through a single agenda item.

If you’re anything like most of the teams I see in action, it goes something like this:

As the item sponsor, the chair turns to you and gives you the floor, “Over to you!” (So far, so good.)

You fire up your presentation and start with your overview slide, which will orient the team to the discussion you want to have.

When you get to the third bullet on your overview slide, where you mention that you’ll discuss roll-out strategies, Amira throws up her hand and says, “I thought we agreed that roll-out wasn’t going to start until my team had signed off.”

Uh-oh, the dam is broken. From here on out, you’re trying to keep your head above the rushing current.

You try to reassure Amira, but in doing so, you say something that twigs Bob, causing him to raise a separate concern.

You jump to your seventh slide to assuage Bob.

Deb doesn’t understand what you’re talking about on slide seven because you skipped some of the context you intended to share. So, you flip back to slide three to catch everyone up.

Thirty minutes later, everyone is dizzy and discombobulated. You’ve only covered 40% of the issue, and the topic must be tabled until your next meeting. Wow, what a waste.

How to Work Through an Agenda Item

Instead of unleashing chaos and spending lots of time accomplishing little, implement a standard discussion structure like this.

Prime the Discussion Ahead of Time

Ok, I’m cheating for a moment because this is not something to do in the meeting. Still, if you distribute a primer document before the meeting with context, necessary information, and the questions you will ask during the meeting, you’ll be halfway to a great meeting before you start.

Uninterrupted Presentation

When the item sponsor starts, give them a fixed amount of time to present without interruptions. This will allow them to reiterate the discussion’s purpose and cover the most important material in a logical order. By guaranteeing the presenter a set amount of time, they can prepare and optimize their approach.

This presentation should NOT be a regurgitation of the primer. Instead, think of it as a facilitation tool to help the sponsor walk the group through the questions that need to be addressed, using only the most salient information and the conversation prompts on the screen.

One other note. Often, during this time, someone will interrupt with a clarifying question. That question is usually quick and innocuous. The problem is that once one person asks a question, everyone else feels it’s their right to ask one, too. In my experience, even the one question opens the floodgates. If you allow a clarifying question, have a rule that it’s only one at a time. The better alternative is to make the primer an interactive document where you can clear up those clarifying questions in advance.

The uninterrupted presentation should take up a quarter to a third of the time you’ve allotted to the topic. In a 50-minute meeting, that’s about 15 minutes.

Questions of Clarification

If you get through an uninterrupted presentation, you’re doing great! By this point, the participants are going to be raring to go. And when I say “go,” I mean to start rebutting, opining, agreeing, or challenging. They want to have their say. Don’t go there yet.

You’ll have a better discussion if you reserve the second round for questions of clarification. What wasn’t clear? Which parts of the presenter’s thought process need to be better elucidated? How else might you interpret the data? What would the sponsor like you to focus on?

You don’t need to belabor this section. If you require it to be a certain length, participants will start sneaking their opinions disguised as questions. “Don’t you think that this would be better if…?” Name it if this happens. Then, ask again for any clarification questions, and when you don’t get any, move to the next section. It’s probably around 10-15% of your allotted time. In a 50-minute meeting, that’s five to ten minutes.

Debate and Deliberation

Now you’re ready for the good stuff. This is why you’re meeting: the chance to have some productive conflict about the best way to proceed. You want to focus this time on novel contributions. What do you need to pay attention to if you’re going to make a good decision? What perspectives have you not yet considered? How will this play out in implementation?

If you get to the point of violent agreement, solicit different perspectives. If you get none, move to the close. If you get the opposite, unrelenting opposition, reiterate the concerns you’ve heard and ask if there’s anything you’re missing. If not, move to the close. In a 50-minute meeting, you want 20-25 minutes to be reserved for deliberation.

You’ll notice that this section is not called decision-making. Teams shouldn’t make decisions. You need to know who owns the decision and ensure that this section of the meeting serves their needs. Your goal should not be to reach a consensus; it should be to give the decision-maker confidence that they’ve got the insight they need to make the optimal decision.

Topic Close

Finally, when you reach 95% of your time, stop the discussion and move to the close. Even if you’re not done, stop. It’s better to use the time to stick the landing than to cram in another new point. When you close, summarize the key points, especially any concerns or opposition, share your next steps, and agree on when you’ll come back to the team.

This structured approach has obvious benefits in helping you move more efficiently and effectively through an agenda item. Beyond that, it helps people feel heard and respected, which is particularly valuable if the person presenting to your team is a guest. Try it at your next meeting, and let me know how it goes.

Additional Resources

How to go faster

Running a great monthly meeting

How to Evaluate the Quality of Meetings

Brian Tracey has some good advice in 7 Ways to Make Meetings More Efficient

The post The Easiest Way to Make Meetings Shorter appeared first on Liane Davey.

How to Participate Effectively in a Meeting

 

Are you trying to get noticed or get ahead in your career? How you show up to meetings is one of your best opportunities to make a great impression. You’re trying to create an impression that you’re strategic, smart, a good team player, and a good communicator, and there is no better place to put that to the test than in meetings.

How do you participate in a meeting in a way that will skyrocket your career? There are three broad categories:

Meeting Participation Category #1: Prepare

One is preparation because I’ll tell you, most of the folks sitting around that table, or on that Zoom call, have not prepared. They’ve lost an opportunity to demonstrate their investment and forward-thinking insightfulness. All of these qualities make a positive impression on people, which is lost if you don’t prepare. And how do you prepare?

1. Understand the Official Agenda

First, understand the official agenda. What are the objectives that the person convening the meeting wants to accomplish? How can you prepare in a way that will make you more valuable in achieving those outcomes? Do you understand what the key questions are? What are you solving for in this meeting? Have you read the primer material? Do you know who you’re supposed to be representing in this conversation? Are you advocating for specific stakeholders? If so, can you speak with them in advance to understand their perspective?  That’s a great way to come at it.

2. Understand Your Agenda

In addition to the official agenda and making sure you’re prepared for that, I encourage you to consider your own agenda for the meeting. And no, that’s not to say that I want you to have some ulterior motive or shrewd way of taking advantage of the situation, but I do want you to give some thought to what you want to get out of it. Do you have a developmental goal for this meeting? Do you want to demonstrate your executive presence? Do you want to show that you have a longer time horizon and are more strategic than everyone else?

One of the ways I love to approach this is before I go into a meeting, I just ask myself, “What is one thing I could do in this meeting that I would be super proud of afterward?” For example, that might be disagreeing with Frank, who tends to be mouthy. I usually give in and say nothing, but if I could challenge Frank in this meeting, I would feel amazing.

You’re not trying to be insubordinate here, but consider your own agenda and ask yourself:

What do I want to do?What do I want to work on?What do I need to make sure I bring to this conversation?

Prepare by being ready to contribute lots of value to the official agenda and by being clear about your own agenda for the meeting and what you hope to accomplish.

Meeting Participation Category #2: Balance

Balance in meetings is also something hard to come by these days, and people who help create balance in a meeting are incredibly effective and helpful. They stand out, and that’s what you’re trying to do. And how do you create more balance?

1. Listen

Most people in meetings are kind of on transmit. They’re talking all the time, probably interrupting, and leaving very little silence after somebody else speaks. You can create some balance in a meeting by doing less talking and more listening.

Now, listening might not be something that people can see you doing unless you do it really well. For example, using the I’m curious head tilt. That’s a good body language move. But you demonstrate that you’re listening by reflecting on what other people are saying and asking for clarification. All of those things show, “Hey, I am right in it here.”

2. Ask Questions

A second way to balance is to ask questions. Most people in a meeting chime in with a statement like “I think this,” “This is true,” “We need to do this.” Another way you can balance a meeting more effectively is to make fewer statements and ask more questions. I like to think of this as bringing more oxygen into the conversation.

When we throw more wood on the fire, it doesn’t always burn brighter. Sometimes it just smokes and goes out. More and more statements don’t make for a better meeting, but stopping and asking a great question is going to make you stand out in a meeting.

3. Disagree

A third way to help achieve balance is that often we get this unproductive, unhelpful dynamic in a meeting where everyone is violently agreeing with each other. For instance, “let me be the seventh person to chime in and say in my own words exactly what the last six people have said.” What a waste of time.

Instead, shift from speaking when you agree to more frequently speaking when you disagree, when you have something novel to bring to the conversation, when you want to put a little tension on where things are going, when you want to stop the freight train and say, have we considered this? Are we making this assumption? Where’s a scenario where this wouldn’t hold?

Again, all the people who jump on the bandwagon and go along with a meeting that’s got a lot of forward momentum aren’t very memorable afterward. However, the person who says, “Before I throw my hand up to agree with this decision, I would like us to spend a few minutes considering this potentiality.” That is going to make you stand out.

Balance the meeting. This means more listening, less talking, more questions, fewer statements, and making sure that you’re dedicating more of your contributions to adding tension and providing novel insights, rather than simply saying, “Me too.”

Meeting Participation Category #3: Optimize

The third major thing is to help optimize the meeting. So many of our meetings are not as effective as they could and should be. Anything you do to contribute to making the meeting a more productive and effective tool for collaboration on your team is a big win, and there are three roles you can play to help optimize:

1. Be a Connector

When I sit, and I sit in a lot of hours of meetings every week as I’m facilitating teams, I notice that points are often completely disconnected from one another and it doesn’t create momentum or a flow in a meeting. I’m often thinking, “What? Like, how did that point fall at that point?” If you can be someone who says, “Okay, if we go back to something that Lucian said, how is that connected?” then you’re being the connector, and being a connector is a great role to play to start to create alignment. That’s one way to optimize a meeting.

2. Be a Communicator

Another thing you can do, and it doesn’t have to be you or your point, but you can be an effective communicator, bridge, or ambassador between other people talking. For instance, you may hear some friction starting to build up between two people, but you suspect it’s because they’re not understanding each other. They’re kind of missing each other. For you to ask, “Can I just take a crack at this? I think what I’m hearing from you is this, and I think what I’m hearing is, am I getting that right?” When you help to moderate conflict so that it becomes productive, when you spot friction and help turn it into some kind of productive tension, that’s a great way to optimize in a meeting.

3. Be a Closer

The closer means don’t let everybody jump up and run out of a meeting without agreeing on what you’re doing next, who’s doing what, for whom, with whom, and by when. Also saying, “What else did we identify today that we should put on an agenda for a future meeting? How did we do today? Do we think this was as effective a conversation? Were we talking about the right things?”

You don’t have to be the meeting chair to be the closer. When you take a moment, look at your watch and say, “I notice we only have five minutes left, I would love to pause, and not add anything new, and just make sure that we stick the landing on all the things we’ve already discussed,” you’re being the closer. And being that closer is going to have a lot of people around the room thanking you for creating better clarity outside.

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Meetings. We do spend way too many hours in meetings, but they’re the main opportunity where you are on display to your colleagues and to your boss. They’re the chance to show that you perform well, that you have lots of potential, and you do it by being more prepared, by helping to bring balance in many ways, and by optimizing the meeting so it leads to some positive outcomes. That’s a great way to use your meeting time to advance your career.

Do you want more tips on meetings? Check out the benefits of virtual meetings in my next post.

More On This

One trick to turn a useless meeting into effective communication

10 questions to increase collaboration

Why you owe it to your teammates to disagree with them

Video: 3 Ways to Prevent Coworkers Feeling Unheard at Work

The post How to Participate Effectively in a Meeting appeared first on Liane Davey.

Benefits of Virtual Meetings

 

We’re all getting pretty accustomed to virtual meetings these days, and I just want to take a minute to say that I love virtual meetings! They have so much going for them. I’m not saying we should use virtual meetings for everything, in this post I want to explore some of the reasons why I love them.

1. Efficiency

One of the first things that I love about virtual meetings is their efficiency. Now, it’s not good for my daily steps when I can go from a meeting with people in Los Angeles to a meeting with people in Madrid with one click, but the efficiency of working across different time zones without having to change buildings is great. It could be one minute to the hour when I click into a meeting, then we have the conversation, and I click out. Virtual meetings are very efficient in cutting down on commute time.

2. Automation

Another thing I love about virtual meetings is that you can record them with different tools and even use AI to summarize and take the minutes of the meeting. You don’t have to have someone spend an hour after the meeting going through all the action items. Instead, it’s all there and it’s automated, which is also very efficient.

3. Evening Power Differentials

A more meaningful thing I’ve noticed in virtual meetings is the evening of power differentials that used to come from people having more senior positions. I’m thinking of one case where a person was physically very large, intimidating, and would often raise their voice. When we shifted into virtual meetings, their box on the screen was the same size as everyone else’s box. It was amazing that during the virtual meeting, this person took up less time in the conversation and people seemed more willing to disagree and add different thoughts than when this person was physically in the room, turning red in the face, and yelling at them.

For various dimensions of diversity, giving introverts a chance to use chat is also common. I see this all the time, someone shares a great idea in the chat, and then a colleague will suggest they speak up about it. We’re bringing more people into the conversation, and that’s a really good thing about virtual meetings.

4. Inclusivity

This leads to another thing I love about virtual meetings: inclusivity. The inclusivity goes beyond people who are already on the team. I do a lot of keynote speaking and another thing I found is that you can do some of these events virtually. Folks at different levels or in different geographies, who wouldn’t have been included if they had to fly in for an event or a keynote, can now participate. It doesn’t affect the cost, you’re bringing great content, and you’re allowing people to hear conversations firsthand instead of hoping that their managers will take these learnings back to them. I love the inclusivity that a virtual meeting creates.

5. Centralization

It’s also much easier from a technical standpoint to create omni-media, omnichannel interactions. You can easily share your screen and attach documents. For instance, in systems like Microsoft Teams, there’s an entire setup for each meeting, including chat and follow-up action items. You have all the slides or documents related to the meeting conveniently stored in one place. You have an amazing library of tools and resources to streamline the workflow and complete tasks more efficiently. It just makes a lot of sense.

6. Camera Control

One of the last things I like in a virtual meeting is the ability to turn cameras on or off with a simple click of a button. This feature is useful because there are times when body language gets in the way of effective collaboration. If you’re physically in the same room, you can’t turn that off. You notice the person who is rolling their eyes or turning their body language away from you. It might be completely unrelated to what’s going on in your head, but it’s very distracting.

In many cases, it’s advantageous to turn off the cameras and share a screen instead. For example, when co-creating people often do better when they hear other people’s voices without seeing their faces. You can’t magically turn off people’s faces in an in-person meeting, but it’s amazing how easily you can do that in a virtual meeting.

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There are other great things about virtual meetings. For instance, if you have to leave a meeting, it’s much less intrusive than physically getting up, packing your stuff, and exiting during an in-person meeting. So, there are many reasons, but these are just a few of the reasons why I love virtual meetings and have invested a lot of time in using them as another tool in my teamwork toolkit.

Alright, do you want more on how to make virtual meetings more effective? Check this post out: Why Have a Meeting?

More On This

Reduce Stress With These Best Practices for Virtual Communication

Are You Using the Right Virtual Collaboration Tools?

How to Manage Conflict in Virtual Teams

Video: It’s Time to Get Comfortable With Communicating Virtually

The post Benefits of Virtual Meetings appeared first on Liane Davey.

8 Alternatives to Having a Meeting

I love a good meeting, especially if its format is well-tailored to its content and purpose. But, wow, there are way too many meetings! Why is a meeting the default? There are a raft of topics that are better addressed (and progressed) using asynchronous or informal communication methods instead. Here are some of my favorite alternatives to avoid meeting.

Ways to Avoid Having a Meeting

Before you schedule a meeting, consider whether one of these approaches would get you an equivalent outcome without causing as much disruption or requiring the same time investment as pulling people together to meet.

Digest Email

What it is: An email message that follows a standardized template to efficiently share multiple pieces of information needed to keep team members in sync. You might work on a draft of a digest email all week and send it at noon on Friday to wrap up one week and prepare for the next.

What it’s good for: Disseminating project information, coordinating action items, and processing operational issues, allowing one-on-one meetings to focus on more nuanced, contentious, or personal discussions.

What not to do: Don’t use an email digest to pass off an unpopular or controversial message—this is not like hiding vegetables in your kids’ lasagna. Novel, emotional, or contested information deserves a meeting.

Collaborative Document

What it is: A written document, spreadsheet, whiteboard, piece of code, or other work product hosted somewhere that multiple people can read, edit, and comment on—examples: Google Docs, Excel spreadsheets, Notion, or a wiki.

What it’s good for: Iterating on drafts, spotting holes or assumptions, asking clarifying questions, or blending multiple perspectives.

What not to do: Don’t erase or overwrite the owner’s work—suggest don’t change. Don’t spar in the comments; if there’s something worth fighting for, it deserves a discussion.

Project Management Tool

What it is: An application that tracks activities, due dates, assigned resources, completion rates, issues, etc. Examples: Basecamp, Asana, Trello, Click Up, Notion

What it’s good for: A one-stop shop to see where things are with a complex project’s intersecting parts. Replaces the need for the exceptionally boring status update meeting.

What not to do: Don’t upend agreed-upon due dates, responsibilities, or accountabilities without discussing it with people first. Changing expectations deserves a meeting.

Chat Based Collaboration

What is it: A software platform that allows you to send messages and files arranged into conversations or threads.

What it’s good for: Channels make it easy to decide which information you want and don’t want, so you can tune in or tune out information on the topics that are a priority to you. Communicate with internal project teams, across organizational boundaries, and even outside your organization with vendors or customers.

What not to do: In an article by Switchboard, the author cautions, ” Instant messaging tools aren’t suitable for complex discussions or working with visual files and demonstrations. Also, while they’re intended to be async, they can easily turn into a distracting synchronous tool as they create a sense of urgency that leads people to feel like they should respond now.”

Screen Capture Video Message

What it is: A video (with or without screen sharing or other embellishments) that allows you to provide a voice-over to visuals that are shown on your screen. Examples: Loom, Snagit, Droplr.

What it’s good for: Providing instructions for how to use software, sharing feedback on a document or presentation, training or onboarding new team members. Because videos can be paused, sped up, slowed down, and saved for later reference, they’re fantastic for letting people control the pace of their learning. (I often review on 1.5x, which saves time.)

What not to do: Hmm… I can’t think of many misuses of this tool. It’s one of the most underrated and under-used approaches for avoiding meetings.

Office Hours

What it is: A set time when an individual agrees to be available and accessible for communication, collaboration, and consultation.

What it’s good for: Quick check-ins on everything ranging from urgent feedback or approvals to pondering emerging issues.

What not to do: Don’t let one person monopolize office hours, risking creating the perception that some people have greater access than others. Don’t alienate remote employees; if you are a hybrid team, ensure office hours can also be accessed by video.

Communication Burst

What it is: I learned about communication bursts from a research paper about virtual team collaboration. A communication burst is a twist on office hours in which all team members choose a set period of time during which they agree to work independently while being accessible for collaboration if required.

What it’s suitable for: Replacing long, formal team meetings requiring a full complement of team members with ad hoc emails, instant messages, and short phone or video calls among a sub-group. Use it for quick clarifications, responding to or following up on emails, or commenting on shared documents. Communication bursts are beneficial in teams in different time zones. If each group agrees to do a periodic burst outside regular hours, the team can work more efficiently than the regular schedule allows.

What not to do: Don’t waste a communication burst using it for routine information sharing or monitoring. Save it for issues that benefit from synchronous interactions.

Casual Collisions

What it is: Good, old-fashioned, serendipitous, bumping into someone and starting to chat.

What it’s good for: Catching up, informing, musing, connecting, sharing, resting.

What not to do: Don’t initiate an in-depth conversation if your colleague has other priorities to address. Don’t wait near the washrooms or the coffee pot and poach people. Be respectful of people’s time.

Why Avoid Meetings?

While I’m still a fan of meetings, I’m a realist about the downsides. When you call a meeting, you force everyone to stop what they’re doing and focus on the meeting agenda. Interrupting someone who is working in flow is counter-productive. Another problem with meetings is that everyone gets the information at the same rate (and let’s be candid, some people take their sweet time getting to the point). And meetings work for some people and not for others—some people withhold their contributions because they aren’t confident, prepared, or psychologically safe. Sometimes, a meeting isn’t the right answer.

Try adding more asynchronous or informal approaches to your team collaboration and see how much more productive you can be!

Additional Resources

Are You Using the Right Virtual Collaboration Tools?

10 questions to increase collaboration

Want People Back in the Office? Deal with the Meeting and Email Burden

 

The post 8 Alternatives to Having a Meeting appeared first on Liane Davey.

Six Reasons to Meet Without Your Boss Present

Most teams I work with meet regularly. The routine is usually the same: the team leader calls the meeting, owns the agenda, chairs the discussion, and gets what they need from the interaction. Occasionally, the boss is away, ill, or otherwise occupied. The question inevitably becomes, “Do we cancel?” In my experience, the meetings that go ahead without the boss are different, valuable, and worth replicating. Here are six reasons to have routine meetings without your boss present.

Scenarios That Are Better Without the Boss

Reflect on the discussions you’ve had in your team meetings over the past couple of months. Can you think of any conversations that would have made more sense or been more effective if your team leader hadn’t been in the room? Here are some of the situations I see in team meetings and how they might be more efficient or ore effective without the boss.

1. Get Traction on an Issue

The first and most innocuous reason to meet without your team leader is to do the heavy lifting to get an idea off the ground without using the leader’s time. You know how scattered an early phase meeting can be: people throwing out disparate ideas of differing relevance. Don’t get me wrong, that’s important work, and it’s hard to start a project off well without casting a wide net, but does the team leader really need to be there for the lot of it?

Instead, meet as a team to frame the concept, define your terms, gather evidence, identify options, and recommend the next steps. Bring your preliminary thinking to a full team meeting to get your leader’s perspectives and direction.

2. Work Through Contentious Conflict

Suppose your team is wrestling with issues that feel particularly personal or emotional or where getting to the root of the problem will require team members to be vulnerable. In that case, you might be better off meeting without your boss present. It’s hard enough to feel psychologically safe exposing your thoughts, feelings, and struggles in front of your colleagues, but adding the person who does your performance reviews might cause you to clam up.

Instead, meet as a team to share how you’re experiencing the situation, ask open-ended questions to understand the underlying issues, validate one another’s experiences, and come to a shared view on the best path forward. Bring any unresolved issues (along with the context and different positions) to the full team meeting to have your leader decide if the team cannot. For more on why you owe it to your teammates to disagree, check out this article.

3. Encourage Debate and Dissent

In a slight twist on #2, another great reason to meet without your team leader is to encourage more productive conflict than you’re getting with the boss in the room. I’ve heard several team members admit that they have an implicit “we won’t throw each other under the bus” agreement that seems to include not disagreeing with one another or doing anything that would risk making the person look bad. Foregoing debate and dissent is a risky way to go.

Instead, meet as a team where you agree not to tolerate unhealthy acquiescence. Take more risks in putting tension on one another’s ideas, offer up unpopular opinions, and take the time to test the limits on essential issues. Bring your deeper, more diverse thinking back to the full team, where it will support informed decision-making.

4. Problem Solve on What’s Not Working

Does it feel risky to admit in front of your boss that something you’re accountable for is not working? You try to put on a brave face, clarify all the steps you’re taking to right the ship, and generally act as if you’re fully in control because it seems like a career-limiting move to do any less. Do you suspect that your teammates are also not quite as “on it” as they want everyone to believe?

Instead of faking it ‘till you break it, get together without the boss in a meeting specially allocated for sharing emerging issues and helping each other identify potential solutions. Not only will you come away with ideas for how to get on the right track, but you’ll realize that being vulnerable with your teammates can encourage them to be vulnerable with you.

“Don’t fake it ‘til you break it. Create a safe place to talk about what’s not working.”

5. Prioritize What You Need from Your Leader

Sometimes, you might find that your leader isn’t giving you what you need. Leader letdown comes in many forms, such as when you have a leader who provides insufficient clarity on assignments, fails to make trade-offs and spreads everyone too thin, is indecisive, harsh, a flip-flopper, or completely disorganized. If you stay quiet about it, you and your colleagues will likely suffer in solitude.

Instead, meet with your teammates to share what you need from your boss to be more effective. Work through the long list, venting and then striking off the grumpy complaints until you get to a short list of the most important things you need from your leader to set you up for success. Then, decide whether you’re going to slowly introduce the ideas one at a time in your team meetings or whether you’re going to divide them up for individuals to discuss in their one-on-one meetings.

6. Provide Feedback to One Another

Returning to the “I won’t throw you under the bus if you don’t throw me under” pact, your team is likely not being candid with one another about the impact of your behaviors if the boss is always in the room. You bottle up your frustrations, let resentments fester, and give up on having a great team in favor of having a superficially harmonious one.

Instead, meet with your teammates to share examples of where you could improve alignment, reduce friction, and make the experience of teamwork and collaboration more positive. Make sure that what you’re sharing is feedback, not judgment; otherwise, the conversation might start to feel unsafe.

Your team leader has a vital role in helping you develop into a high-performing team, but that doesn’t mean they should be responsible for everything. Create opportunities to meet without your boss so your team can work on more candor, stronger alignment, and better problem-solving than possible with the boss present.

Additional Resources

The Role of a Team Leader

Mistakes team leaders make: Culture of fear

Is it just a little too happy on your team?

 

The post Six Reasons to Meet Without Your Boss Present appeared first on Liane Davey.

Why Have a Meeting?

 

Meetings get a bad rap. I hear complaints all the time about too many meetings, wasting time, and being a snooze fest. Bad meetings suck. But that doesn’t mean we should eliminate meetings. There are lots of reasons to meet. The key is knowing when to meet and then making those meetings a truly valuable use of time and energy.

Let’s think about four different reasons why a meeting makes a lot of sense:

1. You’re Collaborating

One reason to meet is for collaborative co-creation. You’re working on something where no one person can see the full picture or bring the diversity of thought and perspective that will make something effective.

Sure, there are lots of opportunities for asynchronous collaboration. For example, you can share a Google Doc and invite people to comment. I love that. It can be very effective. But at some point, this linear approach of one person contributing after another lacks the kind of dynamic interplay that great collaboration often requires.

Continue to use asynchronous forms of collaboration. But when you’re faced with more contentious issues or complex situations that require visuals, whiteboarding, and in-depth discussion, move to a meeting. We know that novelty benefits from the body language, gestures, understanding, and context we get face-to-face. When collaborating on something new and novel, when you need to riff and have that spontaneous interplay where one person’s idea creates a new idea that sparks new insights and innovation among other team members, meetings can be great.

If collaboration is necessary, by all means, do a lot of it offline so that team members can work independently at their own pace, but every once in a while, it makes sense to meet to collaborate.

2. You’re a People Manager

In the second scenario, you’re a people manager. Recently, someone asked me, “I’m holding weekly one-on-one meetings with my folks, and I’m worried they’re a waste of time. Should I cancel them?” My response was immediate, “No, don’t cancel them, but think about how you use them.”

One great reason to meet one-on-one is to check in with your report and allow them to share their experiences, what they’re focused on, what they’re worried about, and what needs your attention and consideration or what you need to worry about.

The opportunity to experience nuances in the pitch and tone of their voice, body language, and gestures that you get in face-to-face interactions adds depth. The rich communication you get in a meeting with a direct report is different from what you get when they send you an email about what they’re doing or asking for help.

When this person asked me if they should cancel their one-on-ones, I advised them to be careful. If one-on-one meetings simply become places to check off boxes and focus solely on task completion or delegation rather than meaningful interaction and support, then that’s not a good use of a meeting. That’s a place where asynchronous communication makes more sense. You can use a Slack channel, or have a project login like MS Project, or some other tool.

Think about why you want manager-direct report meetings, and use them as an opportunity for interpersonal connection, check-ins, a chance to understand where each of you is at, talk through difficult things, and share feedback. All of these aspects of interaction are a great use of a meeting that can’t be replicated in an email exchange.

3. You’re in a Matrix Organization

Third, you’re in a matrix organization. What happens in a matrix organization is that we have to do things together. We have common goals, but we have slightly different priorities, we pay attention to different things, we have different expertise, and we often use different terminology. And again, you can do things asynchronously as much as possible. Still, you’re going to need to come together in a meeting from time to time. Occasional meetings are essential to look each other in the eye, to stop and define terms, to clarify places where you might be misaligned, and to pick up on nuances of misalignment that might be missed if you’re just using written communication.

In a matrix organization, in some ways, meetings across departments can be even more important than meetings with colleagues you trust and who share a common language. While you can get a lot done in a Slack or MS Teams conversation, it’s easy to misinterpret written communication in a matrix, so you’ll want to prioritize meetings more often in this situation.

4. You Want a Strong Team

Finally, you want a strong team. The foundation of any trusting relationship is connection and knowledge of each other, and that comes from spending downtime together. It’s the time on the way to and from meetings, as well as the time at lunch. These are opportunities to learn about people, find common ground, understand where you’re different, and how diverse perspectives can enhance both work and conversations.

Meeting to have a forum to build trust and get to know each other as humans is really valuable. Maybe some of your work meetings need to be content-free to give everyone the chance to blue sky about current focuses, upcoming tasks, and exciting projects, and if you have a defined agenda, maybe more of those sessions can be done offline in an asynchronous form. But when we’re together, we can chat, get excited about things, and get to know each other as people. That kind of connection is a really good reason to have a meeting.

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I know we have too many meetings and we really need to pare them back. We need to think about all the things we can move to asynchronous forums, like working on Google Docs and commenting together. But sometimes that’s not enough and we need to come together in a meeting. If we need to collaborate on something urgent, novel, or complex, if we’re managing people and need to foster connection and create a safe space for feedback, if we’re working across boundaries in a matrix, or if we just need to build a strong team, all of these things are worth having a meeting.

Now, if you’re going to meet, how do you make that meeting effective? Check out my next post, The Secret to Hybrid Meetings.

More On This

8 Techniques to Make Your Meetings More Effective (Part I)

10 questions to increase collaboration

How to Strengthen Connection on Remote and Hybrid Teams

Video: How To Support Your Team Without Checking Up On Them

The post Why Have a Meeting? appeared first on Liane Davey.

Dos and Don’ts of Different Meeting Types

How many times a week do you complain about meetings? Too many, too long, too boring. Not worth it, not set up for success, not the right people? Wrong agenda, wrong participants, wrong tone? Unfortunately, there’s no Goldilocks answer to the perfect meeting because each meeting should be fit for purpose. Instead, here are a few common meeting types and the do’s and don’ts that will make them “just right.”

How to Make Your Meetings More Valuable

Start with a clear purpose and then match the duration, number of agenda items, format, tone, and pace to that desired outcome. Considering these different types of meetings, you realize they shouldn’t all be shoehorned into the same two-hour Tuesday timeslot.

Do’s and Don’ts of an Operations Meeting

This is the regular meeting to ensure everyone knows what they need to know to be productive. The goal is to get in, share the info, and get out without any muss or fuss.

Sample Topics: activities, project launches, customer issues, coming events

Value to Add: advise, synchronize, reprioritize, coordinate, inform, triage

Duration: you don’t want an operations meeting to run longer than 90 minutes because that’s about how long you’ll be able to sustain the attention and quick cadence you’re looking for. If you need much more than that, you’re better off splitting it into two weekly meetings, which will also help you keep the information timely.

In an Operations Meeting, Do:

Raise issues that are relevant to most people in the roomKeep a quick cadence to move through lots of topicsTable in-depth discussions to a more suitable forumStop with 10% of time remaining to stick the landing

In an Operations Meeting, Don’t:

Share things just to sound interesting or importantContinue a conversation that needs more evidenceTable an issue and expect deep thought in the momentTalk a good game and then not follow up

A fantastic operations meeting should feel like a huddle. You’re calling the plays so everyone knows who’s going where and how you will move the ball forward. You shouldn’t need much (or any) preparation, and the actions on the log should mostly be things you will address in short order. (More on running Ops meetings here.) Anything more complex or with a longer time horizon belongs in a Business Builder meeting.

Do’s and Don’ts of a Business Builder

There isn’t a standard name for a more in-depth meeting about longer-term issues, so I call it a Business Builder. The goal is to consider the changes that will increase your team’s capability, capacity, resilience, or agility. In contrast to the Operations meeting, where you’re working in the business, in a Business Builder, you’re working on the business.

Sample Topics: strategic project review, talent planning, stakeholder management

Value to Add: prioritize, commission, cultivate, assess

Duration: you want enough time in a Business Builder meeting to go on a few tangents and to have a productive conflict with lots of time for listening and adapting. Ideally, this is a half-day meeting with a good long break if virtual and up to a full day if it’s in person.

In a Business Builder, Do:

Have fewer, more in-depth topicsHave a sponsor for every agenda itemUse a primer document to get people up to speed and focus their thinkingCommit to productive tension to promote diverse thinking on each topic

In a Business Builder, Don’t:

Allow anything onto the agenda that hasn’t been prepared forShy away from contributing because you’re not the subject matter expertLeave the room without the meeting closeKeep looking in the rear-view mirror

A great Business Builder should feel like a workshop with a few excellent questions and lots of back-and-forth. You won’t always leave a Business Builder with the correct answers or plan, but you want to leave with a plan to get to the plan. (More on running Business Builders here and here.)

Do’s and Don’ts of a Strategic Meeting

Every once in a while, you stop focusing on the business as it is today and consider what it needs to be in the future; that’s a strategic meeting. The goal is to achieve or maintain relevance and competitive advantage as the world evolves.

Sample Topics: macro trends, competitive environment, scenario planning

Value to Add: anticipate, envision, strategize, commission, transform

Duration: when you have to think beyond the status quo, you need both the time and space to distance yourselves from the day-to-day. Strategic meetings benefit from having more than one day, particularly when the increased duration allows time to eat together and to have some downtime.  

In a Strategy Meeting, Do:

Include external perspectivesHave a sponsor for every agenda itemUse a primer document to get people up to speed and focus their thinkingUse the Tarp and promote diverse thinking on each topic

In a Strategy Meeting, Don’t:

Make decisionsLet anything on the agenda that hasn’t been prepared forGet stuck in the present—consider the art of the possible!

A great strategic meeting should feel like you’re at a retreat, taking in new information and changing your thoughts. You won’t leave with a plan (or even a plan for the plan), but you’ll walk away with many new questions you need to answer. (More on running strategic meetings here and here.)

Do’s and Don’ts of a Monthly Business Review

All of the meetings we’ve discussed so far are future-focused and that’s how it should be. That said, many teams benefit from having one opportunity each month to look backward to see what they can learn from where they’ve been.

Sample Topics: results, lessons learned, course corrections, achievements

Value to Add: reflect, evaluate, celebrate

Duration: Monthly business reviews often get bloated with too much content. They get too heavy when they try to cover both the lessons learned and the plan for the future. Instead, keep these monthly meetings under two hours, focus on reflecting and gaining insight, and wait to apply that insight in a Business Builder.

In a Monthly Business Review, Do:

Use a dashboard to focus on the most important metricsLook at both outputs (in your control) and outcomes (out of your control)Identify assumptions that didn’t come truePivot to what needs to be different next time

In a Monthly Business Review, Don’t:

Blame or make it feel unsafe to take accountabilityGet in the weeds and try to solve an issue in the roomTurn it into a Business Builder…save the major course corrects for another forum

A great Monthly Business Review should feel like a post-mortem: what happened, what went right and wrong, what can we learn, and what do we need to do differently next time? Stay curious when it comes to others, and be willing to be vulnerable and accountable when it comes to your own contributions.

When you’re in an Operations meeting, it should almost feel like you’re a different person and part of a different team than in a Strategic meeting. If you can, use a different room to emphasize the distinction. If not, use other cues to remind people of the purpose, tone, and pace you’re striving for. When you get each meeting type into muscle memory, you’ll find that your meetings have more energy and impact.

Additional Resources

From HBR: A Step-by-Step Guide to Structuring Better Meetings

8 Techniques to Make Your Meetings More Effective (Part I)

8 Techniques to Make Meetings More Effective (Part II)

 

The post Dos and Don’ts of Different Meeting Types appeared first on Liane Davey.