Running an Effective Team Meeting

What meeting procedures and processes do you need to operate efficiently? Many team members have never had to conduct a meeting. The Notes in this section provide how-to advice that will help all team members conduct efficient and effective meetings.

Agree on a Game Plan

Before you begin any team task ask, "How should we approach this task?" You don't have to have a game plan in mind; just ask the team and they will usually come up with something that will work. The member who moves the team toward getting agreement on a game plan before beginning to work on a task is playing the Initiator role. This role is really as simple as asking the six-word question about how to approach the task; yet it is a powerful intervention.

No matter how small the task seems or how fast you feel you must get it done, formulate a game plan first (take aim), and then work the plan (fire). Not only will you arrive at better decisions and solutions, but you will also feel more confident in the process.

Decide How You Will Decide

Before you make a decision, give some thought to how you will make it. How you decide is just as important as what you decide. The process you use has a direct impact on how members feel about the decision. It can influence commitment, excitement, and buy-in; or it can create feelings of resentment and exclusion.

It scares me when teams tell me they use majority rule to make most of their decisions. For minor decisions this is fine. It's quick and easy and probably the way to go. For major decisions, however -- those that require a high level of commitment to implement successfully or those that significantly affect team members' quality of life -- majority rule can spell disaster. As the name implies, the majority does rule. They are the winners. They feel powerful because the decision went their way. But how does the majority feel? No matter how good the decision, majority rule means that some people feel like winners and other feel like losers. The losers are generally not committed to carrying out the decision. And because they feel excluded, they often subconsciously (and sometimes consciously) sabotage the team's efforts. You may have made a great decision, but because all members are not on board, implementation may be shaky at best. When you need commitment, ownership, and smooth implementation, use the consensus process. It's time-consuming and sometimes frustrating, but in the long run it's well worth the effort.

Let's take a look at the consensus decision-making process. Many people misunderstand it. For starters, if you have unanimous agreement you obviously have consensus, but unanimous agreement is not necessary for consensus. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines consensus as "a collective opinion". I take it a step further. My team dictionary says consensus is "a collective agreement among team members to support a decision actively". In other words, team members may disagree with the decision, but if they agree to give it their full support, you have reached consensus.

Most likely you've heard the expression "building consensus" -- and building support for the decision is what take so much time. Both the majority and the minority share responsibility for building support for the final decision. The majority must make a concerted effort to understand the concerns of the minority.

Having been given sufficient air time, the minority now has the responsibility of working with the majority and, for the good of the team, finding some way to provide active support to the ultimate decision. Often, all that is required is a slight tweaking of the original idea. Sometimes, an entirely original suggestion comes out of the discussion. There are also times when the majority shifts its thinking completely and sides with the minority view.

When in doubt about whether you're dealing with a major or minor decision, try this: ask your teammates for a show of hands. "Raise your hand if it makes a big difference to you whether we decide to go this way or that way". If you see some raised hands, you are more than likely dealing with a major team decision. Take the time and use consensus. If no hands go up, you probably have a minor decision. It makes no sense to spend a lot of time discussing the options in this case. Majority rule will work.

Brainstorming: Use It at the Right Time

Brainstorming is great when you're looking for creative solutions to a problem or for innovative approaches for seizing an opportunity. It's intended to help you look at things differently. It encourages you to color outside the lines, to diverge from your logical line of thinking, to forget the traditional paradigms. When used in these situations, brainstorming can be valuable.

But the situation is different when you're facing a problem or making a decision for which you have all the information and which requires a hard look at the facts. In this case, creativity is not what you need; a rational, approach is much more effective. Opting for a brainstorming approach in these cases might, in fact, mean that you're simply delaying making a decision. At these times, it is far more appropriate to engage in some dialogue. What ever happened to this very natural form of communication? Dialogue is a decision-making technique that can be just as spontaneous as brainstorming, but it allows you to comment on and debate ideas as they are brought up and helps you do what brainstorming does not: make a swift decision.

It is not that dialoguing is better than brainstorming; they are both great techniques, but they serve different needs. It is important for you to use the method that best fits each situation.

Of course, using a dialogue is not the only problem-solving and decision-making technique available to you. Force field analysis, fish boning, root cause analysis, and priority gridding are only a few of the other approaches that work very well when you need to make a decision based on the facts at hand. Mind-mapping and story-boarding are methods similar to brainstorming, designed to get your creative juices flowing. A number of books have been written on these techniques. Treat yourselves to some training in this area. Learn how to use these techniques and, perhaps most important, when to use them.

Everyone Must Respond Out Loud

"Everyone must respond out loud". This ground rule serves two purposes: it energizes the team, and it confirms agreement or disagreement, which, in the end, helps to clarify decisions.

Although members often have to force themselves to respond, they feel the team's energy level rise when everyone begins contributing vocally.

Besides depleting the team's energy, the other problem with silence is that most teams assume it means agreement -- and that's a huge mistake.

We can't possibly know what silence means. It could mean agreement but quite often it means disagreement. It might be an indication that there is a lack of understanding or maybe it's just a lack of interest. The only way we can know for sure what someone is thinking is for him or her to verbalize it.

"Everyone must respond out loud" is a very simple ground rule; but like most simple things, it is very powerful. I encourage you to include it on your list of team ground rules. Feedback from those teams who have done so is very positive. their meetings have come alive, they are energized, and their decisions are clearly understood by all members, a situation that facilitates a smooth implementation.

Call Your Own Time-Outs

It's critical that you intervene when you see your team or teammates acting in dysfunctional ways. I know this is a lot easier said than done. It's probably even a little scary -- my teammates will think "Who does he think he is? He's not the team leader. What does he know?" If everyone agrees that it's not only okay to call a time-out but that it is mandatory, all members will begin to feel comfortable doing it. Everyone will have permission.

Understand this about calling a time-out: the purpose is to self-correct, to turn dysfunctional behavior around so the team will be effective. Its purpose is not to get the floor during discussion. You use the two-handed time-out signal to help facilitate the meeting. Don't abuse it, but please do use it.

All Ideas Aren't Good Ideas But...

Our human tendency is to look at an idea in totality and judge it either bad or good. When we assign the "bad" label to an idea, we shoot it down quickly. The end result is lost opportunity; one more idea down the drain.

To avoid this problem, follow four steps for building on ideas and see what happens.

1. Paraphrase the idea to confirm that you understand it.

An idea is often rejected simply because it is not understood. That's why it is so important to paraphrase. But even if the idea is clearly understood, it's important to complete the next three steps.

2. Look for pieces of the idea that have merit; start with, "What I like about your idea is..."

We tend to look at ideas in totality. If we can train ourselves to look at an idea as a set of components rather than as an monolithic whole, we have the opportunity to create.

3. Identify the piece(s) of the idea that you don't like. Start with, "What really concerns me about your idea..."

Frequently an idea is rejected based on one major objection. If that concern can be eliminated, the idea may be a great one.

4. Use the pieces of the idea that have merit; eliminate the major concerns you identified, and create a new idea.

Every idea may not sound like a good idea but it's always a good idea to explore every idea. As a team, once you reject a thought, you are at a distinct disadvantage because you can't build on it -- however zany -- once it's been killed. Stretch you thinking; look at every idea as a springboard for creating a new approach by following these four steps.

Meeting Minutes Made Easy

Minutes are a recap of the content of your meeting. They are an important communicating vehicle. They provide an update for team members who were absent from the meeting, they offer information to the rest of the organization, and most important, they help to clarify and confirm your decisions.

Constructing meeting minutes is a far less complicated task than we think. Let's look at a typical meeting. In terms of content, only a few things happen. Some members might have given status reports, surely we've discussed some topics, we've probably made some decisions, we may have taken assignments for action items, and if we're really organized, we've determined the agenda items, date, time, and location of our next meeting. So do we need a lot of prose? I don't think so.

The hang-up about writing minutes seems to be that people think they have to write a book or at least a chapter. Actually, if you've recorded your decisions and action items, and if team members have provided hard copy of their status reports, your minutes are just minutes away from typing. All you have to do is transfer information from charts to computer, make copies of status reports, and distribute the minutes to all members within two days of the meeting.

Since the scribe has captured the pertinent information on flip charts, I suggest that he be responsible for writing and distributing the minutes. If you rotate scribing responsibilities, there's an added benefit. You'll no longer have to ask for volunteers; everyone will get a shot at doing the minutes.

Highlighting the information with bullets will provide the communication coverage you need and make the job a lot easier. Teams who have used the Meeting Minutes Form say it works nicely for them.