Meeting the objections in meetings May 20, 2008
Part of the work I’m passionate about is helping teams work better together. Some time ago I was working with an IT company that had a great team, “…if only Peter wouldn’t shoot down every idea.” (Once again, names are changed to protect the guilty.)
So there I am, Tuesday morning, watching my first meeting. I don’t remember what they were talking about specifically, but it had something to do with a client problem.
Someone offers a suggestion for a solution, and Peter immediately jumps in and says that it won’t work because of this, this and this.
Everyone at the table rolls their eyes. They’d been through this before. Yet I’m fascinated that someone could come up with so many examples of why it wouldn’t work so fast (and this guy was fast!)
This cycle goes on for a bit. Problem, suggested solution, Peter shooting it down in flames.
After about the fifth iteration I jump in and thank Peter for his input. This shocks him as he’s treated like, and acts like an outcast. I don’t think he’d ever been thanked for shooting down other people ideas. Then I go on to say that his comments are not just important, but critical to success. Now I have the entire table shocked.
I continue to Peter, “And, you’re jumping in too soon. You need to allow the potential solutions that are being offered to be fully formed before you offer your feedback. Hold off until they’ve finished their entire suggestion, or to put it another way, give them enough rope to hang themselves. ” Peter smiles at this. Everyone else was too shocked to comment.
Still, the rest of the meeting, Peter is responding differently, taking his time, allowing a solution to be presented and he would point out a specific problem, with only part of the solution (and thus improving the eventual solution). The team is suddenly more effective. And after a few more subtle changes to do with accountability, they are working together nicely.
Many meetings have this issue; Not a Peter, but a disorganised sequence.
Just like calling someone on the phone, you have to type in the right sequence of numbers to get the person you want. It’s the same with meetings. With the right meeting sequence, you can have a meeting achieve agreement in much less time (and have influence over which side that agreement is on), reach decisions faster, and best of all, shorten the length of the meeting!
Why is it… March 22, 2008
… That all photos of meetings have smiling people?
As one of the final steps for putting together my Stress Reduction Book, I went searching through istockphoto.com for some pictures.
One of the pictures I’m after is a meeting in progress. Every single picture is of happy smiling people having fun. No one is bored, no one is looking at their watch or staring out the window. The only exception are are a few notable, obviously joke photos. Now I’ll admit I’ve been in a few enjoyable meetings, but they are very rare.
So why are all the photos trying to depict something that goes against almost everyone’s ideas of a meeting?
Technorati Tags: Business, CEO, Change, Decisions, Leadership, Meetings, Psychology, Stress
How do you make decisions? March 18, 2008
If you are like most people, you don’t know the process you go through to make a decision. It happens quickly, naturally, and without our awareness.
The easiest ways to discover how you make a decision, is to take 4 of your friends out to dinner.
When you are handed a menu, place it closed in front of you and watch your friends. Notice how one might ask what someone else is going to have. Notice another might read through every item. Another might glance at the menu and close it. The fourth will do something different.
Once they have made their choice, pick on one of your friends with these questions. (I’ll leave the decision of which one to pick up to you, but if you’ve worked with me before, you’ll know my selection criteria).
“What have you chosen?” Listen closely to the answer. They will likely tell you everything about their decision process. Once they finish, ask:
“What made you choose that?” And again listen to their answer.
If you’re lucky, they’ll say something like “I looked through the menu till I found the dish I had before,” or “I opened the menu and picked the first thing I noticed.” If you’re unlucky, they’ll give you a long rambling story about their childhood. Both will tell you how they made that decision.
Now comes the real challenge. Pick up your menu and use their method to choose food for yourself. This doesn’t mean choose the same dish (although you might). If they choose something they have had before, then you do the same. If they choose the first thing they see, do the same.
Doing this can give you a powerful insight into your own decision method (and might have you eating something new - always a bonus!).
So after doing this, what does that get you?
- It gives you skills to notice someone else’s decision method. This in itself is useful for sales, negotiation, business or making your partner happy because if you know how someone makes a decision, simply give them the information they need to make the decision you want.
- You get insight into your own process. Even though you are only choosing what to eat, the chances are this is the same process you go through to pick a car, house, shoes or a pen.
- You now have another way to make a choice. Chances are you may not like this new method - thats ok, you don’t have to use it. You can keep it in your back pocket when you want a change, or are faced with a very difficult decision.
Notice how the people around you make decisions. Notice how you make your own decisions.
Technorati Tags: Business, CEO, Decisions, Group Dynamics, Learning, Management, Motivation, Negotiation, Persuasion, Psychology, Sales
How to get a meeting back on track December 17, 2007
If you have sat in more than two meetings, you’ve had the experience of someone or something that distracts the meeting off onto other areas.
Might be the game of golf, might be the failing company. Who knows.
If you want to bring it back to the agenda, there is a very simple and effective formula.
I Notice …, which Means …, Can we ….
First say, “I notice…”
Describe what you see. No evaluation, no demands, no anger. At it’s simplest it’s “I notice that we’ve moved off the agenda.”
Then say, “I’m concerned…”
State what this observation means to you, the team, the meeting, the general state of the environment. Again, the simple observation is “I’m concerned we won’t cover everything on the agenda.”
Finally, “Can we…”
State what you want to happen next. Most likely what happens next is to have that talk after the meeting. It might be to table that idea for another meeting. If you don’t know what the next step is, you can even ask the group what can be done.
Using this method will save time, effort and frustration. Not to mention ensure the meetings stay on time and on track.
Technorati Tags: Business, Communication, Group Dynamics, Leadership, Management, Meetings, Persuasion, Productivity
5 steps to becoming a manager or leader December 6, 2007
Leaders are born and made. Like any skill it takes time, effort and attention to improve.
The following 5 steps can be used to build not only your leadership (or parenting, or work, or employee, or management) skills, but also the coherence of your team, and those around you.
1. Make your clear goal and instructions.
Make your goals clear and give reasons. Once you’ve done this, ask for questions. You can find what I think are the questions to ask here. If you screw this step up (and many people do) it undermines your leadership and damages your teams ability to do their job.
2. Establish open communication.
This is commonly called the ‘open door policy’. Allow everyone to come to your with their problems. That doesn’t mean you fix the problem, just that you are at least aware and can act. Having open communication gives you direct feedback to ensure you don’t fall into one of the biggest risks of leadership.
3. Act quickly with problems.
This shows everyone how to deal with problems. Everyone in your team looks to the leaders how to act. If you float around, unable to make a decision, it will kill morale and confidence. The problems you avoid get bigger. You are a leader, and leaders solves problems and remove limits.
4. Insist the team report all the news.
Good and bad. If you get only good news, you are unable to fix the problems. If you get only problems, you also damage morale by not celebrating the wins. And the worst case is when you get no news.
5. Use crisis as a method to develop people.
If a crisis happens, don’t take the problem from the person. Help them solve it. Help them find the opportunity in crisis. Help them develop, design and implement good solutions. This helps you, as they are able to be comfortable and deal with bigger problems in the future, and also give them more confidence in you as a leader.
Through using these 5 points you are leading by example and doing what the very best leaders are renowned for; Developing the people around them.
Technorati Tags: Business, CEO, Communication, Leadership, Management, Team building
Ultimate question of team management November 13, 2007
If you are a leader, then this is the simplest question that will get you the best results to keep your teams working well together. Ask it, and your team will love you. Skip it and you might never know about how bad the team is.
Did you hire the right person?
In February 2007 a manager asked me for some advice. A few weeks prior he had hired a new person and thought they were a great fit into the office. Even though this new person was hired to take the pressure off, it didn’t seem to make any difference. The manager was asking me how he could update the procedures to make things work more efficiently. As usual, I asked him a question in response, “What do your team members say?”
“I don’t know,” He replied. “I’ve not asked them.”
I looked at him, he stared back. Then he got up and started asking people in the office. Five minutes later he returned with the answer. The new guy was just not working out.
Ask this question when you add a new person to your team. This question will quickly identify if the new person fits within the team, is disruptive, supportive, negative or positive for the team. The question will allow you to find out if you made the right decision in hiring the new person faster than any other method I know. Discover if they really can integrate into and improve the group dynamics.
Use it as a pressure gauge
Ask the question at least once a week as a gauge on how well the team is working together. Ask it of different people within the group - as each person will have a different answer. With each answer, you’ll be able to build a complete picture of the social dynamics within the team.
Build a complete picture of your Group Dynamics
It is a very simple question with many many answers. Each time you ask the question, the answers will be different. Ask it when the group is under pressure, ask it when they have free time. Ask when a new person joins the team or when someone leaves.
I know I’ve labored the point somewhat, but I don’t think I can express any better how important this question is to running an effective team. The question can be asked in any form, but the most common is:
“What do you think about [insert the name of another member of the team]?”
Encourage their self interest
Make it clear when you ask the question, that you want their personal opinion. Some will tell you that so-and-so is disruptive, argumentative and difficult to deal with. This information is pure gold! If everyone in the team says the same, you may well have a problem. If only one person says it, you have something different.
Ask them all!
In July of 2007 I had one manager almost destroy his team by asking this question only to one member. The team saw this, and reacted like most people - by ostracizing the ’snitch’. The team started having secret meetings and private email communications. Make sure you ask every member of the team, about every other member of the team. If you skip one, you run the risk of causing a similar situation.
Technorati Tags: Business, CEO, Change, Communication, Group Dynamics, Leadership, Management, Productivity, Team building
The worst position to be in is September 30, 2007
When you are making mistakes, and no body is pointing these mistakes out to you.
What this really means that the people around you have given up on you. They might have tried to point out mistakes in the past, but have learnt that it makes no difference. So they keep these thoughts to themselves.
If you can’t accept or don’t get feedback, then it’ll be just like not watering your household plants. You’ll live for a time but eventually you’ll wither and die.
Technorati Tags: CEO, Change, Communication, Leadership, Management
Ways to boost your confidence August 13, 2007
The words you use might be wimp, spineless, shy or fearful. Other people always seem to be able to tell that you are lacking in confidence and walk all over you, take advantage or just ignore you. And it feels like, after each individual event they build together to make a huge barrier to your success.
This vicious cycle goes on. You try something, forcing yourself past the wall of past failures, but fail and get humiliated, so it makes it harder to try again. Because you don’t try next time, the wall becomes higher and thicker and more difficult to overcome.
Some helpful people might just tell you to “Stop being a wimp and get over it”. As if it’s easy to entirely change who you are. That’s what it feels like; that you’d have to change everything about yourself in order to feel like tackling the world’s challenges.
Confidence, like everything else in life, is a skill that needs to be practiced. When you lose confidence it can genuinely feel awful, and for many people might feel like there is nothing you can do to change it. It’s a common statement, “I just don’t have the confidence to do that.” As though we can walk into a shop and buy a kilo of confidence.
Everyone has times when we feel we can do anything, conquer any fear, take on any project, deal with any problem. The skill of confidence comes in when the situation start to become difficult. Thats when our confidence can start to be eroded.
Confidence may take a while to build, and it can be undermined or lost in a second. All it takes is for something to remind us of that wall and we feel wrong-footed, embarrassed or demoralized. It might be something that reminds us of a past failure or previous time we lost confidence. Think back in your own history, is there a certain situation that you always lack confidence in? It often only takes one episode where you feel humiliated or weren’t sure what to do next, and suddenly your confidence is shattered in that event and possibly future ones as well.
Evaluate what trips you up and what doesn’t
There will be some situations that undermine your confidence and some that boost your confidence. Take a piece of paper and divide the page in two. On the right side make a list of the times and places where you know you feel more confident. You might want to start with listing things you do well. If you know you’re a good listener, for example, you probably feel relatively confident when you take on the listening role.
On the other side of the paper make a list of the times and places where you don’t feel confident. Meeting new people, confrontations, giving a presentation, making decisions, etc.
Now we combine the two sides to create a whole. Pick one or two parts on the right hand side of the paper that you could use to improve your confidence in situations on the left hand side. Let’s say you don’t feel very confident meeting new people, but you do feel confident as a good listener. Get a new page and write these two things on the same line. The left side is again “I’m not confident meeting new people.” and the right is “I’m a confident listener.” In between these two statements combine them into one sentence using the word ‘but’. Now read that whole new sentence aloud. Writing it like this and then reading it changes your experience and understanding. Many people have said this alone is enough to fill them with confidence.
Given that above example, people love to talk about themselves, so you only need to get them started (and every good listener knows how to ask good questions) and they’ll be off. Then you can listen to your heart’s content because you know you’re good at it. This then in turn increases your confidence of situations that previously sapped your confidence.
There will be many other possible times and places where you can borrow one skill to help you overcome a deficit in another. Even combining two or three to become a whole lot more confident much more quickly than you think possible.
Repetition is the mother of skill
If you put yourself into those times and places where you naturally have confidence more often, you will increase your experience and bolster your confidence, not just in these situations but also into the rest of your life. If you’re good at riding a bike, go on more bike rides.
Confidence is just like a muscle. You have to use it to develop it. Unlike a muscle however, you don’t have to spend any extra time lifting weights or going to the gym. You can build it throughout your daily activities by consciously focusing on improving your existing confidence.
If you do have a bad day, and your confidence has been undermined, focus your attention on the parts of your day where you did have confidence. Dwelling on the bad does not help. If you get stuck, use the above evaluation sheet to help focus on the good.
And there’s nothing wrong with every once in a while deliberately avoiding situations that do stop you. There’s nothing so confidence-undermining as consistently forcing yourself in situations where you know you’re vulnerable.
The Confidence Cycle
Losing confidence can be a vicious cycle. You lose a little bit of confidence, and then because of that you do something wrong which chips away another bit of confidence. This in turn causes another error and we are suddenly plummeting towards jagged rocks.
Of course, I’m being a little extreme here, it’s not always like that. In fact you can reverse this cycle so that anything that happens can make you even more confident. Everyone has some areas of their life where they’re really confident, or at least confident enough. This is when those lists of qualities and skills come in when we look at the Confidence Cycle.
This is how it works: when you are confident, you try new things, and the more you try the better you get. Like public speaking, for instance. Any good presenter will tell you that the more they get out there in front of an audience, the more confident they feel about handling whatever happens. NOT that they feel less nervous (some people, no matter how practised they are, never learn how to be calm on stage), just that they know what to expect and also feel able to deal with the unexpected. If they get unbalanced they have enough experience to get themselves upright again.
But without confidence you won’t try new things. Where do you begin?
The one and only place you can begin is to practise. Practice for success. That means to practice just above your current level so that even if you make mistakes you are successful overall. This might mean you practice where no one will necessarily notice or where you are not in the spotlight.
For example, if you feel you have zero confidence speaking in front of a group, don’t start practising in front of a group. All you are doing in practicing zero confidence. Practice in front of the mirror first. Then practice in front of a trusted friend. Do this until you can do it with confidence. It might feel false and embarrassing, but practising with an audience of one friend is very different than going into the lion’s den of an audience of strangers.
Proper Preparation Prevents Poor Performance
Alongside practise goes preparation. Whatever the situation is you can prepare for all manner of eventualities. For example, one of the training drills I give to everyone that I train in public speaking is to give a 5 minute talk. During that 5 minute talk they are to make at least 3 obvious ‘errors’. These errors might be dropping a whiteboard marker, tripping, forgetting a major point of their talk, or anything else. This gives them the ability and experience of dealing with something going wrong. Before something like that would undermine their confidence and set them up for more errors. Now it builds their confidence because they have direct experience of dealing effectively with these errors.
Whatever you choose, remember to practice for success. Doing something correctly once is much better than doing something one hundred times wrong.
If you found this article useful you might also like to read how to build self-confidence.
Technorati Tags: Business, Change, Learning, Motivation, Psychology, Self-Confidence, Stress
Business and leadership is about removing limits July 20, 2007
“Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent.
It takes a touch of genius, and a lot of courage, to move in the opposite direction.”
~ Albert Einstein
These limits might be your own, limits of those around you, limits of the industry or even limits of humanity.
A good example of this is the Medicine industry. Working towards removing the limits of illness, sickness and accidents (genetic deformities etc). Think of Cochlear implants as a specific example - removing the limits placed on individuals thanks to genetics or accidents.
It is not the development of some new gizmo that makes one company profit, it’s removing limitations. A superb example for this is the blog you are reading right now. The boom in blogs over the last few years has been because it is so easy - anyone can, within 5 minutes, have a running blog. Five years ago, you needed knowledge and experience to achieve the same result.
Henry Ford made the car. But that’s not what made him wealthy and the car such a common item. It was the Ford company consistently focusing on removing the production limitations. Little by little making it easier and cheaper to produce.
You can hold this idea for yourself every day. Focus on removing limits in what you do and how you do it. Maybe something as simple as having to open a drawer each time you need a pen. Removing that physical limitation can help your day. Maybe it’s something bigger like using a filing cabinet for your documents, or using GTD (Getting Things Done) method of time management or getting into work early to miss the traffic. When you remove or avoid a limit, your productivity increases. Removing these limits for yourself means not only being more effective with work, but also reducing your stress.
Businesses grow and improve through removing limits. Some common examples are automatic printing of invoices, just in time production runs to remove warehousing limits, and mobile phones removing the need to be near a land line. Fedex’s whole premise is to remove the time limits for delivering packages.
And I think the number one job of a leader is to remove limits of the business and their team. That’s not to say the leaders will be able to achieve zero limits, there will be contextual limits, budget limits and more. The limits leadership remove are the limits that constrain the workers within the business and also external situations that limit the business itself. These limits might be cash flow problems, team cohesion, client retention etc. Removing those limits might be a strategy change, responding to customers, or sliming the operations.
What are the limits that are placed on you (or you place on yourself) that can easily be removed? What things limit the people around you that you can remove?
Technorati Tags: Business, CEO, Change, Leadership, Motivation, Productivity, Stress
The risks of Leadership July 3, 2007
When I was taught abseiling, the teachers drilled safety over and over again. Ensure you are always anchored, and to check all the major parts of your gear before jumping off. Go through the ABC’s. Anchor - Is your rope secured properly? Belt - Is your harness on correctly, buckle tight? Carabeena - are you tied in correctly?
The day I was learning, one person in the group, James, was learning how to train others.
During the middle of the day, after the beginners had just finished an intermittent level overhang, I watched Gary, our lead instructor, take the rope everyone had just finished using and intentionally tie a large knot about half way down. He then instructed James to tie off and begin abseiling down. James was naturally a little apprehensive. Gary had to spend several minutes convincing James that this was part of his testing.
Gary followed James down on a parallel rope. All the while James was very concerned about the knot, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to complete the jump.
As James approached the knot, he stopped about a meter above it, secured himself then began to untie the knot. Gary quickly stopped him. “That’s not the test. What happens if you can’t untie the knot, or there is some other obstruction?”
“I want you to continue all the way down, until the knot is hard against your figure 8″ (A figure 8 is the part that connects the rope to your harness).
“No,” said James. “I can’t get out from there if I do that.”
Again Gary was insistent. “Go down the rope until the knot is hard into your figure 8.”
James was beginning to get scared. He started stating that he’d never do that, stopping before an obstruction. Every excuse he came up with, Gary came up with another explanation and again told James to comply. All the while both of them were hanging ten meters above jagged rocks.
In the end, James reluctantly complied with the insistent requests. He then used his shoelaces as a method to climb his way back up the rope, disconnect from the rope and reconnect below the knot. Each step of the way he argued, resisted and complained.
This is a superb example one of the major problems leaders experience. The leader knows what needs to be done, and (sometimes) how to do it and then passes this onto the employee. Only to have the employee avoid doing the task, or doing it poorly.
While a leader may be completely comfortable with the given task, the employee may not be. And more importantly, as in the above example, the employee is the one taking the risks. If James fell during that test, Gary would be uninjured, James would be in hospital. The risk James experienced was vastly different that the risk Gary experienced. Yet Gary continued to insist that James followed instructions that were more and more dangerous.
Remember, what you find trivial, other may find difficult, even impossible. What can you do to help people around you through their fears? Who can you contact to help you through yours?
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