GALT Consulting LLC

I recently presented a 3-hour workshop on leadership at a University, and I asked the class if they liked meetings.  The universal response was a quick "no!".  Just as quickly I responded, "then you aren't doing them right".

Meetings are a funny beast because people tend to tolerate them and accept really bad ones.  The truth is that meetings are an opportunity to pull together a team of people to do things that individuals can't do themselves.  Meetings should be energizing...  exciting...  fun!

Here are 3 ways to transform your meetings...

1) Don't avoid conflict.  This is the main output of the popular business book "Death by Meetings".  It is often a mistake of people who run meetings to make sure the meetings are harmonious exercises of love and acceptance.  Boring!  Instead, let the passions and individuality of your team shine through... just do it in a respectful way for a common purpose.

2) Introduce the elephants.  If you are going to bother meeting on a topic, you might as well discuss it, right?  Many times meetings are brutal because the "real" topic is avoided altogether.  A common symptom of this problem is when "after-meetings" are common where people discuss quietly in the backroom what they are "really thinking". 

3) Find a common language.  There is a lot of baggage around the language that people use.  The thoughts and meaning behind simple words like "leadership" or "management" are complex and different for different people.  For example, holding a meeting on how to "improve the company" is a potential waste of time.  Some will think of "improving the company" as making it a better place to work while others will think of the balance sheet.  Make sure you are playing by the same rules before you start the game.

Meetings can be energizing.  If your meetings aren't, you are doing something wrong!

3 out of 4 change efforts fail.  Ouch!  Think about that for a minute.  That means that every time you decide to make a real improvement in your organization or decide to launch a new product or attempt to improve the performance of a team or employee, you are more likely to fail than succeed.  Why is that?

It is helpful to know a little about how the human mind processes information.  The world is very complex.  If we tried to wrap our minds around all of things going on around us, we wouldn't be able to function.  Just sitting her at my desk typing this blog article requires an amazing amount of technology, biology, knowledge and practice.  Thinking about all of this while writing the article would make me less than productive!

Therefore, our minds do something remarkable to help us cope with the noise of day to day life.  It simplifies things into packets of information that we can understand.  The skills I need to have in order to type this article at a reasonable rate have become almost subconscious.  My fingers move faster than I can consciously make them move.  The words flow from inside my head calling upon my knowledge and experience without a second glance or particular attention to the specific source of the information.  It is a good thing that our brains work this way.

The challenge occurs when we realize that different brains sum up information in a different way.  I have no trouble turning on my computer in the morning, accessing the internet, opening up my blog editor, and then typing an article.  To someone else, this may appear to be a monumental task.  There are many people who don't know what a blog even is, much less how to create, edit, and maintain one.  Our brains are shaped by our experiences.

Within a team attempting to drive change within an organization, there are multiple collections of experiences.  Team members have very different perceptions on how the world works, especially people whose day to day lives are very different from each other (ex: like executive management and an hourly laborer).  Teams use language to create a vision for the desired change.  For example, a team may assemble to find ways to "improve the organization".  The challenge arrives, and this is the reason change efforts often fail, is that the language used means different things to different people.

"Improve the organization" to an executive might mean improving the balance sheet or creating organic growth.  "Improve the organization" to a laborer might mean improved working conditions and more benefits.  The point here is simple, common, and very often ignored: in order to win at a game, the team must first make sure it is playing the same game. 

Overcoming these perspectives requires some work.  First of all, the major perspectives must be represented within the team.  Second, the perspectives must be discussed openly.  Finally, the team must create a new language to define its purpose.  This new language uses old words in a way that invokes the discussions of the team.  This language becomes known as change or transformational language.  Examples of powerful transformational language includes "We the People" and "I Have a Dream Today". 

If you have some change to make in your organization, make sure you get all the players at the table and then make sure you playing the same game.  Use a whiteboard to collect the team's thoughts to make sure you are finding a common perspective.  Then utilize language to define that common perspective for the team.  Change efforts don't have to fail!




 

Are you a football fan?  I am.  Who is the best football player in the history of the game?  Some of you might say Joe Montana or Lawrence Taylor.  Others might say David Beckham or Pele.  Let's debate it.  Who is a better football player, Lawrence Taylor or David Beckham?  Our debate wouldn't be very fruitful because one side would be talking about American football and the other would be talking about Soccer (called "football" everywhere else in the world).

This analogy is actually very common in business.  Large companies are often accused of doing "stupid" things from the outsider's perspective, which are actually very clever on the inside.  In an extreme example, Enron managers repeatedly entered into reckless, short-term deals that eventually helped to bring the company down.  Dumb, right?  Depends on what game you are playing.  The very structure and culture of Enron was one of short-term thinking.  Managers were quizzed regularly and rewarded (or punished) for the quantity and size of deals they closed.  Many of these managers were rapidly promoted, collected their big checks and got out before the house of cards collapsed.  They were playing a different game... and they won.

This phenomena also occurs between different roles within an organization.  A manager holds a very different perspective than an employee.  The two perspectives are not right or wrong, they are just different.  When employees are treated like a commodity, their game evolves into surviving day to day.  They start doing things that management regards as "stupid" because they are playing a different game (ex: running out the clock vs. growing the company).

These perspectives ALWAYS exist and they are different between every individual and between groups of people.  This is why it is absolutely critical that you allow "groups" of people within your company to continuously mix and interact so that you can build a common perspective around the organization.  When management has very little interaction with a certain level of employee, how do they expect to effectively communicate?

Mix up your people.  Utilize cross-functional teams to solve problems within your organization.  Allow the lowest levels of employees to have real input on your organization.  Winning the game starts by getting everyone on the same playbook!