This section introduces ways of establishing presence in playing the meeting game: (1) set ground rules; (2) use creative techniques to involve members; and (3) separate brainstorming from decision making.
1. Set Ground Rules
Let’s return to the tennis analogy. When you play a game like tennis, what counts is how you perform on the court. The wind may be strong, or your ankle can hurt, but you need to keep hit- ting winners. Similarly, in the meeting game, conditions can change, but ultimately meetings thrive or die based on the way they are run. If you want to make sure that your meetings are more productive, I suggest you try out some ground rules at your next meeting.
Ground rules (see Figure 13) are guidelines the team agrees to follow. They help to put some controls on the meeting process.
Here are a few considerations with ground rules. (1) Consider your ethnic and organizational culture. In Asian countries, for instance, it would not work to have a rule about “speaking in headlines.” The norm is to encourage consensus and group discussion. (2) Discuss the rules and get buy-in from the group. Make sure the wording fits and that the meaning is clear to everyone.
As a meeting leader you can get commitment by asking peo- ple to do a thumbs-up or thumbs-down if they agree or disagree with the proposed rules. A few minutes can be taken at the end of the session for people to weigh in and make suggestions for the next time. Request that everyone write down one thing they thought went well about the meeting and one thing to improve.
This can include comments about the meeting room temperature or the scope of the project. You can read the comments out loud and ask for clarification if needed. Suggestions for fixes can be made then, or you can make adjustments between meetings to respond to the feedback.
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Sample Ground Rules
• Be on time—start and stop time of the meeting, back from breaks and agenda items
• Participate—with your mouth and in your head
• Show respect—no side conversations and one person at a time
• Cell phones and Blackberries on silent—that includes vibrations
• No laptops—takes away focus from the meeting
• Speak in headlines—focus on main points
• Confidentiality—what is said stays in the room
• Silence—gives us time to shuffle our thoughts Figure 13. Sample Ground Rules
Be willing to enforce the rules. One group I know had a “be on time” ground rule. They decided to lock the door once the meeting started. Everyone agreed and the door was locked at future meet- ings, causing some anticipated surprise from several team members.
They were on time in subsequent meetings!
2. Use Creative Techniques to Involve Members
Good tennis coaches use a variety of different drills to improve tech- nique. Team leaders do the same thing when they initiate “right- brain” strategies that play to the preferences of introverts in addition to other practice. We are all familiar with brainstorming. A tech- nique called “brain writing” is a variation on this technique that can work well with introverts. Put a problem at the top of a sheet and ask for solutions. Pass it around the table. The first person puts their idea on the sheet, and the next person builds on it and/or writes a new idea. The ideas that emerge are usually more robust than if spo- ken on the fly. The brain has time to marinate and is stimulated by other ideas. Check out www.aboutyouinc.com for more ideas on cus- tomizing brainstorming techniques for the preferences of both intro- verts and extroverts.
3. Separate Brainstorming from Decision Making
Since introverts often want time to process information before they weigh in, schedule two separate meetings to handle these two functions. Or if time is of the essence, or it is an all-day meet- ing, take an extended break and give people time to get away from the table. This is a good idea to do in general. The right side of our brain, the creative and emotional side, works separately from the left side, which is responsible for more logical processing and logical thinking. Breaks allow us to leverage the capabilities of our whole brain.
Martin Schmidler has figured out a way to manage this with his team members. When they want a decision from him he buys some time by telling them that he will respond the next day. People are usually fine with that response. “It is all how I frame it up,” he says.
Push
Take your meetings to the next level with three push considerations: