7 golden possibilities (we don’t like rules).

1. Planning for success

What do you want? What do they want? These questions need to be answered in terms of emotional, attitudinal and behavioural outcomes. Try to wean yourself off purely business objectives because that’s rarely where your focus needs to be. Running meetings successfully is mostly about managing feelings, not facts.

2. Getting their minds on the right stuff

Sometimes a meeting can take a while to find its focus because people arrive from another meeting with their heads full of the old topic, unprepared, tired, under fed or caffeined up to the eyeballs. Consider some sort of transition device. One we use a lot is called ‘baggage check-in’. We go round the table and ask participants to check-in (mention/let go of) any distracting thoughts. All sorts of interesting things can turn up and people seem to enjoy the chance to decompress a little before being asked for more rigorous, intellectual engagement. All the leader needs to ask is “what’s on your mind?” or “what do you want to check in?”.

3. Handling the ‘big personalities’

We call these people: loud, pushy, talkative, chatty, bossy, show-boaters, big mouths etc. The trick (not really a trick, more of a point of recognition) is to involve these people as much as possible and at the same time to be prepared to protect the space of the less voluble participants ruthlessly. Golden rule: involve potential disrupters as you do your most co-operative participants. Keep everyone fully occupied. And the rationale for all this? People mostly kick up trouble when they feel left out or powerless. Kevin Holligan of Meeting Magic suggests partitioning time and attention by using devices such as sharing thoughts using Post-It Notes or giving the group other short tasks where everyone is allocated an equal voice. Probably most important of all – avoid the labels I’ve used – people aren’t born ‘pushy’ or ‘loud’ – we help to make them that way. And we can help them to not be that way too.

Inclusion not control

4. Keeping to time

Leaving a meeting on time is a rare event these days. People tend to put far too much on their agendas. Be sparing and respect your participant’s time boundaries. If you are realistic about how you plan the time slots within the meeting for each discussion point the people will be able to reward you with their attention. Meeting Magic suggest 12 minutes is the attention span for an adult. Sounds about right to me. To give yourself an even better chance of finishing on time… begin bang on time, do not wait for stragglers; they will soon get the message – even if you are as nice as pie when they come in late.

5. Involving the quiet ones

People who don’t say much in meetings behave in that way for a number of reasons. The meeting leader, and the other participants, rarely get to find out those reasons. One result of letting things continue without finding out the causes is that you always end up with the same result: the same people talk and the same types of outcomes come to pass. Another result of not involving the whole group is that unhelpful group beliefs have an opportunity to take root: “She’s a bit quiet, a bit shy…not much help really.” “You’ll never get a word out of him in the first hour… he’s a bit lazy… takes him a while to get going.” and so on. We think the key here is to identify who is likely to stay quiet and then ask their advice, before the meeting, about how they would like to be involved. Get to know them and how they like to be managed before it becomes a distraction for the group. If this opportunity does not arise then it can be helpful to go around the table at the beginning asking people to say a few words about the minimum that they want to walk away with at the end. This then gives you the excuse to keep checking that each person is getting what they wanted.

6. Getting things done afterwards

Meetings often get a bad reputation not because of what happens within it but from what is expected from participants afterwards. You might run the greatest meetings but if you get the reputation for weighing people down with long lists of To Dos your meetings (and you) will lose popularity. Meeting Magic’s advice here, and we agree, is to force people to prioritise before the meeting ends – set a group rule for the number of take-outs and encourage people to stick to it. Kevin Holligan also suggests giving people the chance to make a group start on the critical tasks. That way when people leave they have a head start on the task.

7. Helping other people’s meetings go better

But what if it’s not your meeting that is going wrong – what then? Do you just have to grin and bear it? We don’t think so. Here are three common problems and our suggestions on what you can say to nudge things along:

1. Help the other participants to regain perspective when they are getting buried in endless detail. Consider saying: “I’m finding the level of detail informative but I am starting to get lost in it – is that a problem for anyone else?”
2. Help the chairman who is losing his/her grip regain control by saying: “As the outsider I’d be very interested to hear what you (indicating the chairman) has to say.”
3. When the meeting shows no sign of ending and you either need to get away for another meeting or for your own mental health. Consider saying: “I have found this meeting really useful but I have completely run out of time.” Then watch three other people sigh with relief as they start packing their papers!

I was doing a spot of wiring at the weekend and whilst grovelling around through piles of dusty (and terribly itchy) ceramic insulation, in a part of the attic that I had never to, I stumbled across a large control panel bolted to the wall.

This shoebox-sized box sprouted a wild assortment of about twenty cables and was covered with an array of red LEDs – all lit. This large gadget had evidently been hanging there for the past three years, since we bought the house, fully powered up, doing it’s thing. What’s its ‘thing’ was I have not discovered but I do know that it did it quite without anybody’s help. No reset buttons to press, no dials to adjust, no displays to monitor. How clever of it, how resilient and independent; what a little stalwart. Not all machines are like this. The more we design machines to do, the more help they seem to need from us. Computers need upgrades, software needs patches, cars need servicing (oh, how they need servicing), bikes need mending and microwaves, well they just get thrown away – sorry. But we fully accept this maintenance burden; when we buy a machine we buy an uncertain future and usually a big fat warranty to ‘protect’ us from that future. But people, ah, now you’re talking.

"Come on ol' girl"

The beauty of buying, or as we like to say these days, ‘hiring’ people is that you just get them in the building, tell them where the coffee machine is (they always manage to find the toilets by themselves) and let them get on with whatever it said in the advert. Job done. Sometimes. The tricky ones need maintenance (oh gawd, here we go – should have bought another bloody machine instead).

Fear not, here is the Quick Start guide to help you get the best from your new person or ‘human’ without wasting valuable business hours.

1.  No need to read a book about ‘leading people’ instead ask it what it needs to operate properly: what turns it on and what makes it malfunction. Then believe it and do as it asked.

2.  Be aware that it will need a reasonably nice place to work properly: space for its cables and attachments, daylight, access to fresh air, a chance to eat and freewheel for a few minutes a day; in essence, somewhere that it is pleased to come to.

3.  If you are going to connect it with other people units make sure that all of them know why they are being connected and find out from them, or at a push, tell them, which person is going to do what. Of course, do make sure they are talking the same language. It doesn’t matter that they are different (you probably chose them that way), it does matter that they can make sense of each other.

4.  If they start getting dusty or crusty it is probably because you haven’t been near them for ages. As with any good machine, the better you get to know your person (and the better they come to know your preferences), the more productive and maintenance-free you and they can be.

5.  Preventative maintenance. This comes in a variety of forms; here are 3 critical ones:

• Communication. If there is an instance of good productivity or a malfunction – talk (like with the car).
• Time to think. If you load your machine with ‘stuff’ don’t expect great results. Like a washing machine – put too much in and it all comes out dirty.
• Be nice to it. We all talk to our cars and that works really well on an icy road or on a cold morning doesn’t it? (I hum to the microwave too – it helps the food to heat quicker). So be nice to your person and they will be nice back to you.

But if you are not entirely satisfied with your person, whatever the model, simply return them to where you got them and there is a good chance that there is someone out there who can successfully give them a more suitable home where they can function at their peak.

You can now listen to the teleseminar we held earlier this week. My guest was Martin Down, a Deep Democracy Black Belt. You might hear some new and very simple answers to some old and very tricky leadership and interpersonal problems… Listen now

Does it really exist?

Waiting for the hot water to come through in my hotel room. First a trickle, then a sputter, then nothing, then lots of gurgling, a breathy hiss, another trickle then final silence. Replace water for action and the hissing for talking and you have what mosty happens when companies employ consultants to help them to ‘team build‘ in the name of ‘doing management development’. Management development is a sticky business to begin with since most organisations don’t seem to want managers at all – especially now. They want thrusting, brave, articulate, sensitive, tough, creative, steady, ‘business-aware’ gods who can save the day. If that sounds batty, try getting a whole collection of these unicorns together in the same room (you’ll find them in any branch of Woolworths between the packets of Hen’s Teeth and the Fairy Wings).

The reality (according to me): team-building is to improving corporate performance what trying-for-a-baby is for family expansion. Have you ever ‘tried for a baby’? It’s horrible and the very act of trying kills much of the will to undertake the act that results in the conception of said baby. Why not just do the right things, naturally and the baby will come (IVF cases aside – apologies if you are one of those, of course).

So… If you want to build a team out of a group of individuals be very clear about what you are hoping for. It may be, for example, that if you just want people to talk to each other more, or relate to one another more warmly that you can do that for yourself and spend the money that you had earmarked for some sort of rope and barrel swinging exercise in the Dales to buying your team lunch somewhere once a month.

Bottom line: (does anyone else still say that?). Be clear about what you want to achieve in building your team, explain it to yourself in behaviours, think ‘common sense’ whe it comes to making the new behaviours happen and then get them to tell you how to do it. Hey presto – that’s team-building!

If your dreams still remain unfulfilled after many attempts then you may just need someone to come in. At least then you will know what you are asking for.

But the PEC’s rules for team-building consultant shopping are thus:

1. Be specific about what you want (“I want people to stop arguing about everything in meetings”)
2. Be precise about what you want instead (“I want challenge without the nasty stuff’)
3. Be conservative (“I want everyone to like one another” – is not realistic)
4. Be sure that you know who wants what (not everyone will want what you want just because you are the the boss). Check for REAL buy-in as you go along.

Good luck