You're planning your next meeting. You need to rally your people around a disruptive business challenge that threatens your share of the market, and even the organization itself. It's critical that you not only get the best ideas, but also walk away with an action plan that will drive you to your target.
Here's how your meeting will fail:
1. You'll do all the talking: You may be the leader of your department or organization, but you don't have all the answers. Talking too much leads to confusion, both for yourself and those around you. You have one vantage point, and its skewed--the same for all those in the room with you. You need to create conditions for everyone to share their ideas.
2. You won't allow dissenting voices: Finding a new solution requires a hard look at what you're not doing right, or what you're missing. Chances are, there's at least one person sitting in your meeting who sees things like it is, and holds an important perspective; only he or she's leery of speaking up and appearing disloyal. You need to have honest dialogue about what's working and what's not working, even if that means some of your ideas or dearly-held projects are flops.
3. Reliance on obsolete information: It's easy to rely on old information when trying to come up with new solutions--we do it all the time when we leave our beliefs unchallenged and forge ahead without checking our facts. Information is changing all the time; and new information can bring insight to your planning that could be missed otherwise. When you're working on a tough challenge, take time and resources to get the latest and most valuable information.
4. Narrow perspective: When gathering information for your planning, it's important that you research broadly. You'll thus fail at your next meeting when you rely only on information about your industry, or product/service. You need to look at information from myriad places and sources for good ideas to emerge. Technological trends are impacting everything, so one of the most basic areas of research should be in the various areas of technology.
5. Poor environment: The boardroom doesn't cut it--really. I've often had to reconfigure boardrooms in my consulting practice, with the table being the most restraining factor. The boardroom table is traditionally meant to create a hierarchy: the leader sits at the head, and the minions sit on the sides. It also restrains body movement and keeps attention front and centre which limits ideas. For those on your team who are kinesthetic--who think best while moving--you've shut down their creativity. Add to this fluorescent lighting--that is known to enhance aggression--, low ceilings--which creates too much intimacy when you need a higher ceiling for ideas--, pallid walls--lack of colour dulls the senses--, and tiny whiteboards--there only to showcase the boss's ideas and no one else's--and you've got the makings of a failed meeting.
6. Rushing to conclusion: You'll fail at your next solution when you rush to a conclusion because it's late, or it's lunch time, or the idea seems slightly better than the other dull ones that have deflated all over the room, or you have another meeting you've crammed into your morning, or you've got another fire to put out somewhere else. I've heard so many times that big decisions are made in a rush before lunch when the majority of attendees have no clue what's been decided or what the next steps are. It's important to work an idea through; to reconvene and kick the tires on it; to order food in and work through lunch; to come to the end of the meeting and schedule another for the following day.
7. All talk, no action: Businesses love meetings because they a) give employees something to do, b) usually include snacks and coffee, c) make everyone feel important, and d) run down the clock. The problem with most meetings is that decisions are made without having enough information, or without adequate consensus, or without a deliberate plan of action. Actions plans take iterations of thought, dialogue, and even conflict. Often meetings are concluded without people knowing what's been decided, and what needs to get done. A good action plan will have a process with adequate steps that will get you closer to the solution. But most often than not, the action plans can be focused on the wrong things or lacking true buy-in from the majority of attendees.
Meetings are very common in business--especially in a world of change and complexity. Having the right kind of meeting at the right time with the right people through the right process will make the difference between being on the right or wrong side of change.
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