Productive Meetings

How productive are the meetings that you run or attend?

I was a manager and expected to be able to run meetings, solve problems, give people direction and help the team to success.  Many of these things I thought I did quite well.  But it wasn’t until I noticed things going wrong that I was able to see the situation through other people’s eyes.

I noticed it at first in meetings that I chaired. Arguments would bounce back and forth between me and the other participants. The arguments were often over trivial things.  People would get the wrong end of the stick, others sat back with their arms folded, and others were taking sides against me.  I felt panic stricken and unfairly treated as their anger rose against me in a palpable way with the atmosphere becoming distinctly chillier as the meeting wore on.  The more frustrated I felt, the more obnoxious and difficult the participants became. 

After one particularly bad meeting, I asked someone what was happening, expecting a discussion of office politics and some reassurance that I was doing the right things and that the participants were just being bloody minded.  The woman I asked wasn’t exactly an ally of mine but she was a trainer and I generally respected her opinions. I steeled myself for the reply.  She said I had not been generous-spirited to the participants so they probably didn’t see why they should cooperate with me.  She said three things (in the most patronising voice she could muster):-

1. Why did I think only my agenda was important?  No-one else had been allowed to contribute to it.
2. Why hadn’t I been more clear about the purpose of the meeting and what it was trying to achieve?  The meeting was more than half-way through before some people knew what they were there for.  
3. Why was it that every time someone made a point, I had to jump in and answer it first.  People didn’t feel I was listening to them.

I could hardly speak with anger and shock.  I thought she had offered no constructive criticism whatsoever.  I managed a terse ‘thank you for the feedback’ and then went off to brood about it feeling sure she had just been vindictive because she didn’t like me.  I played the last meeting over and over in my head and asked myself ‘had I not been generous spirited?’  It just made me feel worse and I didn’t want to think about it.  All it was doing was making me carry out a mental witch-hunt against all those individuals who had sabotaged my meetings. I was going round and round in circles and I didn’t really accept her criticisms.

Eventually, after stewing about it for several days, I asked a good friend whether I was over-reacting to the criticism and whether she thought it was true that I had been mean-spirited to the other participants. She didn’t answer my question but said, ‘Well, why don’t you try it a different way and see what happens – then you will know which is the best way’.

So, still not convinced, I took my friend’s advice.  I did three things differently:-

1. Before the next meeting I phoned up a number of participants and asked if they wanted anything on the agenda – a time-consuming task but there were about three new issues raised which I added to the agenda.  
2. At the start of the meeting, I thanked the contributors and took extra trouble to explain what we were trying to achieve during the meeting and emphasised how helpful it was to have their contribution.  This bit felt a bit insincere.  Those were the easy bits. 
3. The hardest bit was to sit on my hands and not leap in with an answer when someone raised a point, no matter how misguided or misinformed the point was.  Instead, I tried, clumsily at first, to thank them for their point before inviting responses and views from others.  At the end of each issue, I tried to summarise views objectively (not easy when I didn’t always agree with them) and steer people into thinking about next steps.  

Afterwards, I reflected that it had been a lot of extra work for me but that we seemed to have made more progress than in previous meetings.   How could that be when I seemed to have spent so much time waiting for people to explain themselves or for the penny to drop? 

I wonder, do we need the hard sharp shock before we can accept the need to change what we have always done?  Would I have done anything about it, even then, without a kindly friend encouraging me by saying ‘why not just try it and see’?

Productive Meetings

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