Meeting First Aid – Making Meetings Effective

action is required to save your meeting canoe and its crew. When someone goes overboard in a physical canoe, you throw a paddle or toss a life preserver. You don’t stop to talk about who should throw the paddle and how.

The same is true for meetings. Failure to act, threatens your canoe and everyone in it. Your job is to stop the current pattern of behaviour and offer a more productive way to handle the situation. Summoning your courage can lead to a large, worthwhile, dramatic change that keeps your canoe from capsizing.

When it is not clear what to do, doing nothing will only make matters worse. In these situations, Dick and Emily Axelrod recommend a three-step process in their book, Let’s Stop Meeting Like This.

Step 1: Say the unspoken

Make it obvious what is going on by naming the troublesome behaviour. This is sometimes called naming the elephant in the room. Making a behaviour or pattern of behaviour obvious to everyone in the group allows the group to do something about it.

When you state what is going on in a group, you make the behaviour public. When the behaviour is public, the group can decide how it will handle the situation. If the behaviour remains unspoken, the group cannot change it. When you say the unspoken, it is important to state what you see and what your thoughts or feelings are about the issue. For example, when people don’t follow through, you could say,

“At our last meeting, we agreed to have our budget ready for review. It appears that no one has a budget ready for review. It appears to me that it happens with agreements we make as well. Remember our agreement?

By saying the unspoken, you prevent the situation from getting worse because you interrupt the group’s current pattern of behaviour and provide an opportunity for the group to address the problem behaviour.

Step 2: Ask, “Do you see what I see?”

Once you have called attention to the behaviour, ask others in the group if they see what you see. “Have you noticed this pattern?” Here, you are asking those present to verify your observation. You do not assume that others are with you. This step also begins to place responsibility on the group for what is occurring in the group.

By asking, Do you see what I see? You  make sure that other group members share your observations before you address the issue.

Step 3: Ask, “What do you want to do about it?”

Assuming that people in the group agree with your observation, the next step is to ask the group

e.g.“What do you think we should do about the follow through issue?”

This question places a decision in front of the group. The choice is whether or not to handle the follow  through issue. This puts the group solely in charge of the behaviour of its members and how it would like to function going forward.

What if people don’t agree with your observation?

1. Listen to understand their point of view.

2. Seek to identify areas of commonality. They may not see everything you see, but they may see some of what you see. This common ground provides a zone of agreement that allows you to move forward. Later, you can return to areas of disagreement. If all fails, take a break

In the end, it does not matter whether the group agrees with your observations or not; what is important is that the group decides what it wants to do about it.

By asking the group what it wants to do, you put responsibility for what happens in the group solely on the group members.

Other problems with the meetings

• Sometimes people are not right for your canoe, and they are actively working on sinking the canoe. These people have no place in the canoe.
• You have the best crew but still, things go out of your control. Stop and ask these questions:
  • Is this meeting still necessary?
  • Do we have the right people?
  • Is our purpose still relevant?
• Sometimes you will find that the water has taken you as far as you can go and unless you change something, the group’s progress will stop. When this happens, you need to take the canoe out of the water and move it to the new location. You can do this by
  • Changing where you meet
  • Lengthening or shortening the time you meet
  • Breaking up in pairs, trios or subgroups
  • Conducting your meetings while standing up
  • Holding your meeting while walking outside.
• Sometimes bad meeting habits are a problem. Remember  you can not change the habit. You can only create new wiring in the brain that is stronger than the old habit. Either you reinforce  the current positive habits that are working for meeting effectiveness or you create and reinforce new patterns.
• Sometimes you need professional help, take it

When you make a decision to provide support to the group to keep the meeting effective, it enables the group to not only finish this trip successfully but make future trips as well.

If you decide not to support, this is your decision to be a bystander and watch the group destroy itself or watch your canoe sink. It is important to speak up as soon as you see the problem.

When group is stuck in the meeting

When the group is stuck, as a facilitator, describe what you see and hear and ask the group members what they want to do about it. This technique places sole responsibility for what is happening and what will happen next in the group on the individual.

This technique also helps facilitators keep what we call the first rule of facilitation: Do not do for the group what it can do for itself. When you apply this rule, you increase autonomy and responsibility for the outcome.

Make sure everyone’s voice counts in the meeting

Facilitators can balance power in the  meeting by making sure everyone’s voice counts.

• An effective technique for doing this is to go around the table and ask all those present what they are thinking right now.
• You can also make sure everyone’s voice counts when you invite people who are quiet into the conversation and ask those who are dominating the conversation to take a timeout and listen.
• Electronic polling provides the safety of anonymity and prevents people from being influenced by others opinions.
• Finally you can make sure that everyone’s voice counts by paraphrasing a comment when you think someone is misunderstood or the group is ignoring what he or she just said.

Also see Meetings – Time Investment and Facilitation tips