What is the role of trust in your workplace? Give examples that not only address the existence, but also the absence of trust. Furthermore, lets say you do not trust a col

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MEETINGS

Plan a Better Meeting with Design Thinking by Maya Bernstein and Rae Ringel

FEBRUARY 26, 2018

DANIEL DAY/GETTY IMAGES

“Sometimes, when I sit in meetings, especially ones in which people don’t seem engaged, I

calculate the cost in staff time. I’ve estimated that one standard weekly meeting in my

bureau — 50 people sitting in a cookie-cutter conference room, looking both bored and

anxious — costs around $177,000 annually, and surely this scenario occurs throughout the

[organization] hundreds of times a day. It drains us, and it breeds cynicism. So many

meetings are lost opportunities.”

Do these sentiments — expressed by an applicant to the course on meeting facilitation we

teach at Georgetown University — sound familiar to you? They should, according

to these statistics on meetings:

Organizations hold more than 3 billion meetings each year.

Executives spend 40-50% of their working hours — or 23 hours per week — in meetings.

90% of meeting attendees admit to daydreaming in them.

73% acknowledge they do other work during meetings.

25% of meetings are spent discussing irrelevant issues.

At the same time, the right kind of meetings can be key to advancing a team or

organization’s agenda. So how do you ensure that the gatherings you host are productive,

not destructive?

By applying design thinking, a concept popularized by IDEO founder David Kelly and

Stanford’s d.school, which was first applied to the design of physical objects, then other

products, such as technological tools, and now to more complex challenges across a wide

variety of industries. The idea is to put the “user” at the center of the experience — an

approach that works with meeting design, too.

Start by putting your own expertise and agenda aside and thinking about the people who

will be affected by your meeting. Develop empathy for them by asking three sets of

questions:

1. Who is going to be in the room and what are their needs?

2. Who won’t be in the room but will nevertheless be affected by the meeting and what are

YOU AND YOUR TEAM SERIES

Meetings

their needs?

3. In what broader culture and environment are you operating and what are some of the

overarching challenges and opportunities?

Actively seek out individuals who will attend the meeting, or who will be affected by it, and

speak with them — ideally in person. Even if you run regular meetings with the same group

of people, these individual brief check-ins can help build trust, surfaces hidden issues and

ensures that participants feel more invested.

Next, set a frame for the meeting. Once you’ve attentively listened and observed, you’ll

want to suggest an overarching purpose for the meeting and articulate clear outcomes that

will connect to achieving it. We recommend that you ask yourself: If this meeting is wildly

successful, what will people feel, know, and do as a result? Include these desired outcomes

in your agenda, so that participants know why they’re attending and can gauge with you

whether or not the time has been productive. In our experience, people rarely spend enough

doing these things. Meetings are often put on the calendar without a particular goal in

mind — simply to hold the time — and, as a result, the cart often drives the horse; people

meet simply because they feel they must. Even — perhaps especially — short meetings

deserve a clear purpose and clearly articulated desired outcomes. This keeps people on task,

and ensures that people feel that their time is well spent.

The third step is to creatively design the

meeting. Once you know the core question to

address, and what success might look like,

you should create your agenda. People tend

to throw agendas together at the last minute,

if at all. We compare the design and execution

of meetings to the driving navigation app

Waze: what is the quickest, safest, most

effective way to get to your destination? The

The Seven Imperatives to Keeping Meetings on Track by Amy Gallo

How to Design an Agenda for an Effective Meeting by Roger Schwarz

Do You Really Need to Hold That Meeting? by Elizabeth Grace Saunders

first step, immersing yourself with people,

was about understanding where you need to

go (the beach? the city? the mountains?). The

second step was about identifying your

desired destination — your exact address and

location. This third step is all about the route.

Should you get there as fast as possible? Do

you need to take a detour? What is the most

scenic route? Are there roads that you’ve traveled so many times before that are perhaps

best to avoid? What might you need to watch out for — your team’s equivalent of potholes or

traffic jams? This is the phase where we encourage people to be playful, to put reality on

hold for a bit and push past their initial, “go-to” ideas. What would it look like for you to

infuse your meetings with a bit of fun? To begin and end in an unexpected way? To use film,

images, poetry, or music to spark ideas? To create an opportunity for personal sharing and

connection? While this might sound frivolous, it is actually extremely important. Meetings

are opportunities not simply to get things done, but also foster a positive team culture.

Finally, test-drive your plan, in the same way that a product designer would put an early

prototype into users’ hands. In a meeting context, this might be a draft agenda shared with

participants. Their responses will help you gain more empathy, frame new questions, get

even more creative in your meeting design, and increase your potential for success at the

actual gathering.

People who have applied this design process to their meetings tell us that it has radically

affected both the efficacy of those gatherings, and the attitude people in their organizations

have about them. Each phase has its benefits. Immersing helps people feel heard, and it

ensures that meeting leaders are connected to participants. Framing pushes the meeting

leaders to ensure that there are clear goals for each meeting. Imagining leads to more

creativity and experimentation in the meeting design. Finally, prototyping—something as

simple as getting feedback on your plan from a few people — makes people feel valued, more

accountable in the meetings, and more invested in their success.

This may seem onerous for every meeting but, with practice, you can learn to cycle through

these stages in less and less time, and you’ll find that small investment upfront saves

significant time in the long run. You’ll have fewer meetings, and those you do have will be

more productive — even sometimes fun.

Maya Bernstein is an independent consultant working in the areas of innovation,

leadership, and creativity. She is a faculty member at the Georgetown University Institute for

Transformational Leadership and co-director of the Executive Certificate in

Facilitation program.

Rae Ringel is the president of The Ringel Group, a leadership development

consultancy specializing in facilitation, coaching and training. She is a faculty member at the

Georgetown University Institute for Transformational Leadership and co-director of the

Executive Certificate in Facilitation program.

Related Topics: COLLABORATION | LEADING TEAMS

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Summer 2003 35

Virtually every executive staff I’ve ever come across believes in teamwork. At least they say they do. Sadly, a scarce few of them make teamwork a reality in their organizations; in fact, they often end up creating environments where

political infighting and departmental silos are the norm. And yet they continue to tout their belief in teamwork, as if that alone will somehow make it magically appear. I have found that only a small minority of companies truly understand and embrace teamwork, even though, according to their Web sites, more than one in three of the Fortune 500 publicly declare it to be a core value.

How can this be? How can intelligent, well-meaning executives who supposedly set out to foster cooperation and collaboration among their peers be left with organiza- tional dynamics that are anything but team-oriented? And why do they go on pro- moting a concept they are so often unable to deliver?

Well, it’s not because they’re secretly plotting to undermine teamwork among their peers.That would actually be easier to address.The problem is more straightforward— and more difficult to overcome. Most groups of executives fail to become cohesive teams because they drastically underestimate both the power teamwork ultimately unleashes and the painful steps required to make teamwork a reality. But before ex- ploring those steps, it is important to understand how the compulsory, politically cor- rect nature of teamwork makes all of this more difficult.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, teamwork is not a virtue in itself. It is merely a stra- tegic choice, not unlike adopting a specific sales model or a financial strategy. And cer- tainly,when properly understood and implemented, it is a powerful and beneficial tool. Unfortunately, management theorists and human resources professionals have made teamwork unconditionally desirable, something akin to being a good corporate citizen.

B Y P A T R I C K M . L E N C I O N I

The Trouble with

Teamwork

Leader to Leader36

As a result, many of today’s leaders champion teamwork reflexively without really understanding what it entails. Pump them full of truth serum and ask them why, and they’ll tell you they feel like they have to promote team- work, that anything less would be politically, socially, and organizationally incorrect.“What choice do I have? Imagine me standing up in front of a group of em- ployees and saying that teamwork isn’t really all that important here.”

Ironically, that would be better than what many—if not most—leaders do.By preaching teamwork and not demanding that their peo- ple live it, they are creating two big problems.

First, they are inducing a collective sense of hypocrisy among their staff members, who feel that teamwork has devolved into noth- ing more than an empty slogan. Second, and more dangerous still, they are confusing those staff members about how to act in the best interest of the company, so they wind up trying at once to be pragmatically self-interested and ideologically selfless.The combination of these factors evokes in- evitable and sometimes paralyzing feelings of dissonance and guilt.

Executives must understand that there is an alternative to teamwork, and it is actually more effective than being a faux team. Jeffrey Katzenbach, author of The Wisdom of Teams, calls it a “working group,” a group of executives who agree to work indepen- dently with few expectations for collaboration.The ad- vantage of a working group is clarity; members know exactly what they can, and more important, cannot ex- pect of one another, and so they focus on how to ac- complish goals without the distractions and costs that teamwork inevitably presents. (For guidance on decid-

ing whether teamwork is right for your organization, see sidebar,“To Be or Not to Be a Team.”)

Of course, none of this is to say that teamwork is not a worthy goal. There is no disputing that it is uniquely powerful, enabling groups of people to achieve more collectively than they could have imagined doing apart.

However, the requirements of real team- work cannot be underestimated.

The fact is,building a leadership team is hard. It demands substantial behavioral changes from people who are strong-willed and often set in their ways,having already accomplished great things in their careers.What follows is a realistic description of what a group of ex- ecutives must be ready to do if they under- take the nontrivial task of becoming a team, something that is not necessarily right for every group of leaders.

Vulnerability-Based Trust

The first and most important step in building a cohesive and functional team

is the establishment of trust.But not just any kind of trust.Teamwork must be built upon a solid foundation of vulnerability-based trust.

This means that members of a cohesive, func- tional team must learn to comfortably and quickly acknowledge, without provocation, their mistakes,weaknesses, failures, and needs

for help. They must also readily recognize the strengths of others, even when those strengths exceed their own.

In theory—or kindergarten—this does not seem terri- bly difficult. But when a leader is faced with a roomful of accomplished, proud, and talented staff members, get-

Patrick M. Lencioni is president of The Table Group, a management consulting and execu- tive coaching firm in the San Francisco

area. He is the author of three best-selling books, “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team,”“The Four Obsessions of an

Extraordinary Ex- ecutive,” and “The Five Temptations of a CEO.” He has

worked with hundreds of executive teams and CEOs to strengthen

teamwork. �

Summer 2003 37

ting them to let their guard down and risk loss of posi- tional power is an extremely difficult challenge.And the only way to initiate it is for the leader to go first.

Showing vulnerability is unnatural for many leaders,who were raised to project strength and confidence in the face of difficulty. And while that is certainly a noble be- havior in many circumstances, it must be tempered when

it comes to demonstrating vulnerability-based trust to hesitant team members who need their leader to strip naked and dive into the cold water first. Of course, this requires that a leader be confident enough, ironically, to admit to frailties and make it easy for others to follow suit. One particular CEO I worked with failed to build trust among his team and watched the company falter as a result. As it turns out, a big contributing factor was

To Be or Not to Be aTeam

So how do well-intentioned lead- ers go about deciding if teamwork is right for their staffs? They can start by recognizing that organiza- tional structure is not nearly as im- portant as behavioral willingness.

Most theorists will call for team- work in organizations that are structured functionally, but may not do so for those that are organized divisionally or geographically.

In other words, if the work can be organized in departments that op- erate largely independently (with regional territories, distinct prod- uct divisions, or separate subsid- iaries), then the executives at the top can follow suit and function as what Jeffrey Katzenbach, author of The Wisdom of Teams, describes as “working units.”These are groups made up of individuals who,

though friendly and cooperative at times, are not expected to make willing sacrifices to one another to achieve common goals that lead to joint rewards.

However, when executives run an organization that is made up of de- partments that have structural interdependencies, teamwork is usually presented as the only pos- sible approach for the leadership group. But although this is a sound and reasonable theory when all other factors are considered equal, it is not necessarily advisable in the messy and fallible world of real human beings. Before deciding that teamwork is the answer, ask these questions of yourself and your fellow team members.

• Can we keep our egos in check?

• Are we capable of admitting to mistakes, weaknesses, insuffi- cient knowledge?

• Can we speak up openly when we disagree?

• Will we confront behavioral problems directly?

• Can we put the success of the team or organization over our own?

If the answer to one or more of these questions is “probably not,” then a group of executives should think twice about declaring them- selves a team.Why? Because more than structure, it is the willingness of executives to change behav- ior—starting with the leader of the organization—that should de- termine whether teamwork is the right answer.

Leader to Leader38

his inability to model vulnerability-based trust. As one of the executives who reported to him later explained to me, “No one on the team was ever allowed to be smarter than him in any area because he was the CEO.” As a result, team members would not open up to one another and admit their own weaknesses or mistakes.

What exactly does vulnerability-based trust look like in practice? It is evident among team members who say things to one another like “I screwed up,” “I was wrong,”“I need help,”“I’m sorry,” and “You’re better than I am at this.” Most important, they only make one of these statements when they mean it, and especially when they really don’t want to.

If all this sounds like mother- hood and apple pie, understand that there is a very practical rea- son why vulnerability-based trust is indispensable. Without it, a team will not, and probably should not, engage in unfiltered productive conflict.

Healthy Conflict

One of the greatest inhibi- tors of teamwork among executive teams is the

fear of conflict, which stems from two separate con- cerns. On one hand, many executives go to great lengths to avoid conflict among their teams because they worry that they will lose control of the group and that someone will have their pride damaged in the process. Others do so because they see conflict as a waste of time.They prefer to cut meetings and discus- sions short by jumping to the decision that they be- lieve will ultimately be adopted anyway, leaving more time for implementation and what they think of as “real work.”

Whatever the case, CEOs who go to great lengths to avoid conflict often do so believing that they are strength- ening their teams by avoiding destructive disagreement. This is ironic, because what they are really doing is sti- fling productive conflict and pushing important issues that need to be resolved under the carpet where they will fester. Eventually, those unresolved issues transform into uglier and more personal discord when executives grow frustrated at what they perceive to be repeated problems.

What CEOs and their teams must do is learn to identify artificial harmony when they see it, and incite produc-

tive conflict in its place.This is a messy process, one that takes time to master. But there is no avoiding it, because to do so makes it next to impossible for a team to make real commitment.

Unwavering Commitment

To become a cohesive team, a group of leaders must

learn to commit to decisions when there is less than perfect information available, and when no natural consensus develops.

And because perfect information and natural consensus rarely exist, the ability to commit becomes one of the most critical behaviors of a team.

But teams cannot learn to do this if they are not in the practice of engaging in productive and unguarded con- flict.That’s because it is only after team members pas- sionately and unguardedly debate with one another and speak their minds that the leader can feel confident of making a decision with the full benefit of the collective wisdom of the group. A simple example might help illustrate the costs of failing to truly commit.

�

Becoming a team

is not necessarily

right for every

group of leaders. �

Summer 2003 39

The CEO of a struggling pharmaceutical company de- cided to eliminate business and first class travel to cut costs. Everyone around the table nodded their heads in agreement, but within weeks, it became apparent that only half the room had really committed to the deci- sion. The others merely decided not to challenge the decision, but rather to ignore it.This created its own set of destructive conflict when angry employees from dif- ferent departments traveled together and found them- selves heading to different parts of the airplane.Needless to say, the travel policy was on the agenda again at the next meeting, wasting important time that should have been spent righting the com- pany’s financial situation.

Teams that fail to disagree and exchange unfiltered opinions are the ones that find themselves re- visiting the same issues again and again. All this is ironic, be- cause the teams that appear to an outside observer to be the most dysfunctional (the arguers) are usually the ones that can ar- rive at and stick with a difficult decision.

It’s worth repeating here that commitment and conflict are not possible without trust. If team members are concerned about protecting them- selves from their peers, they will not be able to disagree and commit. And that presents its own set of problems, not the least of which is the unwillingness to hold one another accountable.

Unapologetic Accountability

Great teams do not wait for the leader to remind members when they are not pulling their weight.

Because there is no lack of clarity about what they have

committed to do, they are comfortable calling one an- other on actions and behaviors that don’t contribute to the likelihood of success. Less effective teams typically resort to reporting unacceptable behavior to the leader of the group,or worse yet, to back-channel gossip.These behaviors are not only destructive to the morale of the team, they are inefficient and allow easily addressable issues to live longer than should be allowed.

Don’t let the simplicity of accountability hide the diffi- culty of making it a reality. It is not easy to teach strong leaders on a team to confront their peers about behav-

ioral issues that hurt the team. But when the goals of the team have been clearly delineated, the behaviors that jeopardize them become easier to call out.

Collective Orientation to Results

The ultimate goal of the team, and the only real

scorecard for measuring its suc- cess, is the achievement of tan- gible collective outcomes. And while most executive teams are certainly populated with lead-

ers who are driven to succeed, all too often the results they focus on are individual or departmental. Once the inevitable moment of truth comes, when executives must choose between the success of the entire team and their own, many are unable to resist the instinct to look out for themselves.This is understandable, but it is deadly to a team.

Leaders committed to building a team must have zero tolerance for individually focused behavior.This is eas- ier said than done when one considers the size of the egos assembled on a given leadership team. Which is

�

Identify artificial

harmony; incite

productive conflict

in its place. �

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