Do your team give meetings the thumbs up?

If you asked your team today for feedback about your meetings, would they give you the thumbs up? This blog explores three ways to be curious about your team's experience of meetings to enable good to happen.

There are three questions I like to ask teams about meetings. What is helpful or unhelpful about the way we currently run meetings? What helps you stay focused in meetings? And, perhaps surprisingly, what would need to happen for people in the team to disagree more in meetings?

What is helpful or unhelpful about the team's current meetings?

I am genuinely curious about teams' perspectives on how the scheduling and running of meetings is helping them to do their jobs. Areas for discussion include clarity on meeting purpose as well as frequency, duration, online or in person, agenda setting, preparation, and action accountability. Leaders who take the time to talk through their expectations and team's perspectives on meetings at least once a year are helping teams to own and commit to making meetings as effective as possible.

What helps staff to stay focused in meetings?

The key here is for everyone to understand the value of being focused and to agree on making this a priority. What follows are three ways leaders can work with teams to increase attention in meetings.

Firstly, acknowledge and address the impact of attention residue on staff. In 2009, Sophie Leroy published research on Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks - ScienceDirect which demonstrated that “people need to stop thinking about one task in order to fully transition their attention and perform well on another.” Leaders need to help staff be aware of and manage attention residue if they want meetings to be as productive as possible. Avoiding back-to-back meetings is a great place to start. What other changes do you think are needed so team members can arrive at meetings already focussed on the meeting agenda?

Secondly, acknowledge and address the impact of phone use in meetings. I encourage teams to engage with the data on how problem-solving capacity is impacted when we keep switching attention between phones and meeting agendas. Teams benefit from consistently applied agreements about phone use in meetings.

Thirdly, attention in meetings will be enhanced by anything that helps people let go of tension and builds connection between members. A joke, a couple of deep sighs, talking about successes or inspiring quotes. It needs to be what will work for your team and that meeting. I encourage you to build your repertoire so that you can input an appropriate positivity booster in every meeting you run.

What would support more disagreement in meetings?

When everyone in a team knows they will not be shut down or put down if they disagree, there is an opportunity to get the important and difficult issues on the table for discussion and for energising disagreement. Leaders often have to help teams to constructively talk through differing points of view. That includes ensuring the team agree explicitly on rules of engagement. Key elements of robust conversations are willingness for members to share their thoughts and genuine interest and curiousity in alternative points of view, especially by the leader. Neither of these behaviours are likely to be in place just because we agree they are a good idea. Teams have to build a culture that makes this happen. Leaders have to manage the big voices, support the hesitant contributors and respond helpfully to the inevitable miscommunications.

In my experience helping people to openly share challenges and experience curiosity from others increases the energy and positivity in meetings exponentially. It creates a culture where people feel free to ask each other for feedback and different ideas are valued, not shut down. Teams that can disagree constructively are able to collaborate to make great things happen.

Next steps: Schedule time to have a first or next conversation with your team about making meetings work well.

I'd love to talk to you some more about how to ensure your team give meetings the thumbs up. www.changecollaborations.com.au