Preface
This is no ordinary meeting book. Our purpose is to help you improve your leadership skills one meeting at a time. We intend to do that by turning upside down much of the popular wisdom about meeting management. We aim to help you free yourself from the burden of having all the answers to the mysteries of human interaction.
We will introduce you to a philosophy, a theory, and a practice that is at once radical and simple. To apply our ideas you will not need to worry about anybody’s behavior but your own. We will illustrate our principles with examples and provide practice tips you can use starting the next time you lead a meeting. We will back up our advice with experiences from colleagues around the world.
Meetings are as common as dirt and about as popular. This presents you with a delicious paradox. You can practice almost any day of the week an art few people trust. You will find that low expectations work in your favor. Every meeting you run gives you a chance to surprise people with a gratifying experience. Why not take it?
Well, you have your reasons. You hate meetings, right? You consider them time wasting, boring, and unproductive, unavoidable rituals to be repeated endlessly in agencies, communities, corporations, and schools. That’s just the way things are. Hold on a minute. You may be kidding yourself. While writing this book, we came across research showing no connection between meetings and people’s job satisfaction. “It may be socially unacceptable to publicly claim that meetings are desirable,” write the researchers. “Instead, a social norm to complain about meetings may exist” (Rogelberg, Leach, Warr, & Burnfield, 2006, p. 95).
Whatever your reality, everybody hates certain meetings for their own reasons. So do we, and we should know. We have been leading meetings separately and together for decades. We have been in more meetings than we can count and taught meeting methods worldwide to thousands of people. We have been burned in meetings that promised much and delivered little; and, alas, we know the guilt of promising more than we have to give. Let us say at the outset that we are not writing about all meetings, certainly not those that rely on speakers, panel discussions, and one-way information. Nor do we deal explicitly with conference calls and online forums, though you may find some of our ideas applicable. Our focus in this book is purposeful, interactive, face-to-face meetings. We present a new way of thinking about and leading gatherings where diverse people solve problems, make decisions, and implement plans. We are writing about meetings where people expect to participate, be heard, and make a difference—in short, meetings that matter. When they are badly led, the main output is cynicism and apathy.
So we write for you if you run meetings. Our book will be of professional interest if you are an executive, manager, consultant, facilitator, or meeting planner. You may also find it useful if you lead work teams, teach school or college, coordinate work in hospitals, chair civic boards, or manage nonprofits.
Our theme is this: you can make every meeting count. You do not have to knock yourself out memorizing checklists to run a good meeting. You can work less hard and get better results. Anytime we “just stand there,” we are in no way practicing passivity or indifference. Calm we may be to the naked eye, but a lot is going on inside of us. We stay continuously alert to a few matters—very few, it turns out—that we believe make or break a meeting. Those are the ones we will describe.
In that regard, too, this is no ordinary meeting book. We will not tell you how to interview people or to diagnose a group’s needs, before, during, or after a meeting. We will not advise you on how to reduce boredom and apathy, overcome resistance, surface hidden agendas, deal with people who talk too much or too little, or get people’s deepest feelings on the table.
To the contrary, we take the position that if you want to accomplish important tasks under trying conditions, you need to work with people the way they are, not as you wish them to be. You do this by learning to manage structure, not behavior. You focus on matching participants to goals, inviting people to share responsibility, and paying attention to the use of space and time. Control a meeting’s structure, we will show, and participants will take care of the rest.
This book has been 20 years in the making. Starting in the 1980s, we noted two global trends that made meetings harder to lead. First, we were living in a world changing so fast nobody could keep up. We and many others found ourselves seeking to reduce complexity by ducking it-the “shorter, faster, cheaper” meeting syndrome-and compensating for lack of depth with more entertaining techniques. This proved to be a blind alley.
Second, our meetings grew increasingly multicultural. As businesses went global and nonprofits expanded their reach in health care, education, and sustainability, our participants differed markedly by age, culture, education, jobs, gender, sexual orientation, language, race, ethnicity, and social class. Moving in and out of cultures not our own, we soon learned caution in applying what we took for granted at home. We came upon unspoken cultural norms about which we knew nothing and probably never would. No matter how many theories, strategies, and models we acquired, we had a hard time making our ways of learning fit all the meetings we sought to manage.
We realized that our best methods were no longer producing the desired results. In the late 1980s, we set out to redo from scratch the way we organize, use, and run meetings. First, we vowed to stop wasting people’s time. We would no longer attend or lead meetings when we thought the goals were not attainable. Next, we began experimenting with ways to make every meeting matter, even in unfamiliar cultures.
We defined our quest as finding methods anybody could use whether trained or not, whether systems thinkers or not, whether blessed with new technology or not. We set our sights on enabling any group, regardless of culture, education, or language skills to go right to work without having to learn new concepts. We began to structure meetings so that people could cooperate relying only on their own experience.
To make ourselves both more peripheral and more effective, we found we had to make big internal shifts. We had to manage the anxiety we felt as we waited for people to connect across boundaries that no one can simplify. We had to let go of leadership demands on ourselves that we knew to be unrealistic. Rather than worry about outcomes, we taught ourselves to tolerate multiple realities and stay focused on goals.
TEN PRINCIPLES THAT MATTER
The purpose of this book is to introduce you to 10 principles we have evolved for making every meeting matter. They reflect a good bit of refining that we have done on our methods. More to the point, they reflect persistent work on us. Despite recurrent bouts of self-doubt, we have let go of many theories and techniques we once relied on. How, for example, would you diagnose “group needs” when every person needs something different? We could no longer work successfully with increasingly diverse groups in a world of nonstop change using methods favoring homogeneity in more stable times.
In this regard, too, we depart from mainstream meeting guides. To deal with diversity and uncertainty, we offer a single theory that you can use whether looking at organizations, groups, or yourself. It is a theory that we have tested in many cultures. We describe it in the introduction. If you hate theory, skip that part. Stay aware, though, that we ground our practical tips and techniques in research and theory going back decades.
In bringing each principle to life, we have chosen to limit ourselves to a few practices that you can use all the time. We run meetings the same way with teens and senior citizens, students and teachers, artists and engineers, tribal chiefs and captains of industry, making only small adjustments that help people preserve norms central to their identity. We have learned to help people cooperate regardless of their differences by discovering capabilities they did not know they had.
From this book, you will learn to
• help groups achieve shared goals in a timely way,
• manage differences without flying apart,
• solve problems and make tough decisions without delegating the task back to you, and
• structure meetings to greatly increase the probability that people will share responsibility.
While we believe that the action steps we propose are simple to execute, they take self-discipline to learn. You may have to exercise uncommon restraint to “just stand there” when a group falls into chaos and blames it on you; or when somebody says something divisive and everybody looks to you to fix it; or when people split over goals, question your authority, or stereotype each other to the point where work halts. You can, however, learn to deal skillfully with the unexpected if you are willing to persist in working on yourself.
Ours surely are not the only principles and methods for leading meetings that matter. We ask you to consider each one because so many others have adopted them. In writing this book, we compiled stories from colleagues around the world. Hundreds have applied the practices described here in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, India, and North and South America. They have integrated our principles into their work regardless of the size, length, and goals of their meetings. You can do the same.
As a fringe benefit, you may lift from your shoulders the yoke of worries about people’s attitudes, motives, hidden agendas, status, and styles. Instead, you will learn to use structural practices that keep groups whole, open, and task focused. As you discern when to act and when to just stand there, you will find yourself adding your own positive ripples to the stream of life. In other words, you will learn how to make every meeting matter.
The stone landmark that appears on the cover symbolizes our title. The Inuit of the high Arctic call it an Inuk-suk. For centuries they have used it for guidance in navigating the barren tundra. Signifying safety, hope, and friendship, the Inuksuk stands immobile. Yet people rely on it to find their way.
Marvin Weisbord and Sandra Janoff
Wynnewood, PA
March 2007