Stephen Billing’s Blog

Suggestions for team meetings

Looking at the whole context of your group’s dynamics over a month or so can help you to identify the natural flows of interaction and how your team meetings can best contribute to and shape it.

What kinds of interaction does your team need? in a month? Most teams need opportunities for the following:

• Understanding what is going on in the organisation that may affect their work.
• Working on ideas for improving your operation.
• Catching up on new developments or information that affects the team.
• Knowing how the team is performing.
• Acknowledging / celebrating success.
• Letting off steam.

Some team meetings rather unrealistically try to achieve all these things in one session – no wonder no one ends up being satisfied! Please don’t think that the team meeting has to accomplish all these things. Think of the other avenues you have for the different kinds of interaction that are required.

For example, do you have Friday night drinks, or a regular day when you have morning or afternoon tea together? If so, then that can provide an opportunity for people to let off steam. You can couple that with acknowledging success. One company I know puts up their wins for the week on a whiteboard at their Friday night drinks – this practice began when they were first starting out. Facing some tough times they decided to use this as a way of focusing on some of the positive things that tended to get buried during a difficult period.

In one group I know, everyone comes to work 30 minutes early (not because they’re super-motivated – it’s so they can get a carpark) and this time before work is where they catch up on how things are going in their personal lives, let off steam and develop their informal relationships with each other.

Even if you don’t have this kind of opportunity for informal group dynamics to take place, you could consider having an ‘informal’ meeting every second time you meet, where there is a much more informal agenda.

Or you could allocate a section of the meeting for informal checking in, perhaps at the start for example. There will always be new developments in your organisation and so it’s good if you can keep this on the regular agenda.

As far as team performance goes, if you are reporting monthly, then you could include this as part of your meeting once a month around reporting time, so it doesn’t have to be on every agenda.

The thing with team meetings is to consider the overall flow of your team’s work and how the team meetings can assist in facilitating the group dynamics your team requires to accomplish its work.

In which I begin contemplating that common bug bear of working groups: team meetings

Recently clients, friends and participants in my management development workshops alike have all been talking with me about team meetings. What are yours like? How frequent? Do you and your team look forward to them? Or are they in the category of “necessary (or unnecessary) evil”. 

When it comes to making team meetings more productive, there is plenty of advice out there about improving team meetings by tightening up control of the meeting.

The following, for example, are all ways of attempting to gain control of the meeting in order to make it more productive:

• Having a preset agenda. 
• Rotating the chairing of the meeting.
• Establishing ground rules.
• Assigning strict amounts of time to each topic.

Of course, these are all attempts by the facilitator to control the meeting in the interests of achieving the predetermined outcomes.

Needless to say I have a different approach.

I think it is useful to consider team meetings in the context of the overall patterns and flows of communication throughout the course of a week or a month.

What do I mean by that? More about this in my next post.

In which change gets a life of its own and the plan gets in the way

I was once engaged to facilitate some change workshops to help an organisation implement new ways of working – what they were calling a new culture – it involved moving to a new building. These workshops were stage one of the change, and were to concentrate on the strategic picture, the vision of the organisation, and inspire them to see need for change, This was preparatory to more detailed workshops that would follow in stage two where the nuts and bolts would be worked through.

The workshops were highly designed affairs, designed in fact by a PR firm and included magnetic boards, glossy handouts with inspirational stories of pioneers, video with a well known comedian, fancy posters and other similar artifacts.

So, guess what the managers wanted to talk about in this workshop full of vision, inspiration, pioneering, and clever artifacts? Laptops – i.e. would they have laptops? Car parks, i.e. would they have car parks. And even, would there be space in the fridge to put their lunches? I kid you not – I couldn’t have made that up.

At the time, I was pleased to hear this stuff because I could hear issues relating to status and identify, which I wanted to explore.

However, the change project team could only hear "irrelevant detail," and was disappointed in the managers who were not supposed to be interested in these things until stage two, when logistics of this nature would be covered in the next series of workshops they had planned. The change project team, who knew the answers to these questions, did not want to talk about these things, which they dismissed as “detail.” I’m sure you can imagine the conversation “Those managers just do not understand the big picture – they’re only concerned about themselves.”

Sound familiar?

The managers were disappointed, feeling they could not get answers to their questions and that the project team were hiding things from them.

The project team was frustrated with me for not keeping it “strategic” enough.

And I was frustrated with the project team for having so much emphasis on the flash artifacts and not recognizing that when one of the General Managers said “Up until now I had not considered the impact of this on my people,” that this was a break through, not something negative, it was not resistance.

We have a problem in our thinking about change projects, which is that so often they are supposed to go according to the grand plan. And this means that after all the elaborate project planning and gantt charts, when things don’t go according to plan, such as when managers are interested now in where they will sit, instead of "strategic" things, project teams don’t have an adequate response.

If, instead, you are paying attention to what is going on NOW and responding to it in a genuine way in a spirit of ‘joint enquiry,’ then you will notice when people are interested in these other things and be able to flex with their needs, answer them and then carry on together.

Look, Ma, no resistance!

 In which I discover the blog of Chris Mowles and appreciate his take on how we might make the best use of time in meetings.

I have just discovered the blog of Chris Mowles called Reflexive Practice, who, like me, is exploring organisations as complex responsive processes. Chris and I did our doctorates together and he is now on the faculty of the Complexity and Management Centre at the University of Hertfordshire where we studied together.

Coincidentally, as I have been writing my most recent posts about time seen as the living present (here, here and here), Chris has also been writing about the living present (here) – in his case about how our theories of time affect our meetings.

In his latest blog post, Chris points to how our desire to ‘make good use of the time’ in the meeting can lead to over-planning and attempts to tie things down to the last minute. He makes a good point that it assumes that we can anticipate how things will unfold at a certain time in the future and that our current thinking is adequate for the situation we will encounter when we meet together.

Chris comes to the conclusion that our meetings never unfold in a linear fashion but emerge as we struggle with each other over what we think we are doing and who we are. Skillful discussants then will allow for episodes of reflection, be alert to suggestions and conflict, be tolerant of ambiguity and and have an expectation that important and unplanned things may arise as a consequence.

I have written in a similar vein from the point of view of facilitation that tolerates and encourages this reflection and ambiguity.

Thanks Chris, I am looking forward to reading more of your provocative work.

Dealing with resistance depends on how you deal with difference

People who resist change are negative, troublemakers, or just don’t understand the benefits. Right? Not necessarily.

Perhaps they have legitimate concerns about the change as it is framed and planned. If so, these concerns, even legitimate ones, when expressed would sound to senior managers like resistance, wouldn’t they? Cooney and Sewell see dealing with this resistance as a question of who we deal with difference.

Cooney and Sewell’s stimulating research article is called Shaping the Other: Maintaining Expert Managerial Status in a Complex Change Management Programme, and is published in December 2008 in the academic journal Group and Organization Management.

Cooney and Sewell identify three means of dealing with difference:

• Confrontation – overt domination through the exercise of power – in other words, crush all opposition.
• Appropriation - a more subtle form of confrontation in which you take ownership of their position. For example, managers might appropriate the technical knowledge of the workers by eliciting it and representing it in a standardised and formalised manner, and then use it in service of their own ends.
• Dialogue – engagement with the other in a process that recognises each other’s difference and does not seek to dominate or appropriate them.

Note: the above are based on the work of the German philosopher Hegel, as discussed in the work of Collins.

While at first blush the dialogue option seems to be the most desirable, I think it is unlikely to be attained. Why not? Because of the power relations that are part and parcel of all human relating.

However, these alternatives gave me an insight into the work of the leader in making change happen, and my own role as a consultant in facilitating change.

I think that it is quite possible and indeed likely, that the issues of staff and managers are based on genuine concern for the organisation. I don’t assume that people are damaged.

In sessions I run with managers and staff, I am seeking to recognise difference, and not to dominate the discussion, in line with the dialogue option above. I do all sorts of things to minimise the power differential between me and the participants in order to meet this objective. And I am seeking to create dialogue. However, everyone knows that there is a power relationship going on, no matter how unacknowledged it might be. People are often surprised that I am actually listening to them, and that their views are reflected in the written documents that are produced in the course of the change project.

But nevertheless, the organisations I work with are not democracies (whether they be private sector, government agencies, NGOs or Crown entities), and the power differentials are real. By the way, do not read this as meaning that I think the power is all on the side of management. In one restructuring project I worked on successfully, a previous attempt to do similar things resulted in pickets and the resignation of the CEO. Naturally enough, the new CEO, General Manager and I took this very seriously as it graphically illustrated that the power was not unilaterally on the side of the CEO.

How are the power differentials in your organisation getting in the way of you dealing with difference (and resistance)?

I have been thinking about how my facilitation is different from other facilitation I have experienced and criticised in previous posts.

Rather than conducting structured exercises that take participants through a process where beginning and end are known, with the facilitator very separate from the group, I become a temporary participant in the group, examining issues together with the members.

This means that instead of looking for a "positive" outcome, or one where no negativity or resistance is expressed, I am looking to get people to express what might be seen as their negativity, if that is what they have, within the forum. The alternative is that they will express it amongst themselves in the tea room or around the water cooler.

I am not seeing the session as separate from myriad other conversations that occur in organisational life in many different settings and amongst many different participants. The manager cannot control those conversations and it does not make much sense to me to try and control the conversations in a facilitated session.

You might say that I am trying to replicate in the session the water cooler conversations that take place all the time. The difference is that the most powerful in organisations are usually insulated from these water cooler conversations through the hierarchy of managers who decide whether issues are important enough to raise with the senior managers, or not.

I am trying to discuss what previously was undiscussable, to bring the shadow conversations into the room. In this, I would suggest, my intentions are very different from those of most facilitators.

What do you think?

In uncertain times, many people want to make sense of what is going on and reflect on the events and experience that has led to where we are now, while planning for the future.

Many facilitators become enamoured of creating some innovative new session design that has novelty for them. Inadvertently perhaps, these session designs end up not providing the opportunity for people to make sense of their real world. For example, doing skits or presentations back to the big group of what was discussed in a small group. Or even just taking up a half day discussing your MBTI or TMI profile. Too many corporate facilitators, in my opinion, take up their time with abstractions from the group’s reality.

The facilitator’s innovative design, even if it has very engaging activities that the participants love at the time, ends up being run at the cost of the participants making meaning of real experiences occurring for participants at their workplace.

This is like the IT specialist who becomes enamoured of their technology (i.e. falls in love with their technology) and must explain every last nuance of it to the user. All the time, the user just wants to know what button to push.

Many facilitators are lost without their preplanned activities which lead to the creation of lists of activities or issues which come to be seen as ends in themselves. I.e we produced the list, we successfully delivered the desired outputs of the session.

As the manager of your group, think about the last away day or retreat session your team was involved in. Were you more concerned about achieving your predetermined objectives or did you identify and then address the issues your team was concerned about? Many facilitators design sessions that identify but do not address these issues. And they identify them in a way in which people do not have to be accountable to each other (e.g. anonymous comments on post it notes). But that is the subject of another post! 

I am convinced that the value of a facilitator is in fostering free flowing conversations among participants, related to the job in hand. During this process they generate meaning for the work they are involved with, for example coming up with new ideas, enhancing a relationship between 2 units, proposing a collaboration between 2 groups or understanding a situation from the other person’s perspective. There are many more possible outcomes – these are just a few examples.

And yet how many times have you seen facilitators who:

1. Create structured activities that are engaging but do not foster real conversation about real things going on in the work place (e.g. cutting articles out of newspapers, getting people to vote on arbitrary rating scales).
    
2. Are more intent on getting through their predetermined programme than meeting the needs of the participants (and the sponsor).
    
3. Build in restrictions on the conversation (e.g. speaking only one sentence at a time) that interfere with the natural ebb and flow and repetitions of normal conversation.
    
4. Get participants to talk to the flipchart or to the facilitator, but never to each other?
    
5. Regard participants talking to each other as a waste of time, something to be discouraged. Why is it that the most lively conversations seem to happen at breaks?
    
6. Close conversations down rather than opening them up.
    
7. Divert attention from what is important to participants, for example through skits or artificial presentations.
    
8. Generate ideas in brainstorming sessions but never discuss the merits of the ideas?
    
9. Ask questions that they already know the answers to in order to reach the predetermined outcome – this amounts to a subtle manipulation.
    
10. Use devices that touch on, but avoid, dealing with real concerns, for example getting people to write their concerns on yellow stickies and posting them anonymously on a flipchart (never to be seen again), or posting anonymous ratings of how we are getting along at the moment or how we are doing as a team. If the items raised by these techniques are not discussed in the group then they amount to disguised manipulative techniques to get the group to think that something has been done just by undertaking the exercise.
     
11. Getting through a set number of Powerpoint slides in the time available (e.g. "These ones are not relevant to you so I’ll just go through them quickly").
     
12. Facilitate sessions that generate long lists of ideas or issues that never see the light of day again.
     
13. Have a pre-set agenda that gets in the way of what is meaningful to the participants (e.g. even though we know the answers now, we won’t answer your questions about the space you will have because according to our plan we will address that in stage 2, which takes place next month.)

These are examples that I have seen over the last four years or so. The embarrassing thing is that in the past I have been guilty of some of them myself! 

Misunderstandings allow both you and the other person to gain new insight into a situation.

Misunderstandings become apparent when the other person responds in an unexpected way. The unexpected response offers the opportunity to explore the misunderstanding and reach a new way of thinking about the situation. Many times in life we avoid exploring such a misunderstanding, perhaps for fear of escalating the threat of conflict that is inherent in these situations.

In organisational change situations, misunderstanding is often interpreted as resistance. And rather than attempting to explore the world from the point of view of the ‘resistor,’ such exploration is avoided either through trying to persuade with powerful reasoning and authority, or by moving on to another subject to distract attention from these difficulties – for example, moving back ‘on message’ by speaking positively about the vision for the change.

The golden opportunity when misunderstanding occurs is to explore the misunderstanding with the intention of making sense of the other person’s point of view. This joint sense making process can result in both parties having an expanded view of the situation. And this expanded view makes your implementation of change go more smoothly.

This golden opportunity is lost when leaders avoid exploring misunderstanding. The unresolved issues then cause problems for the change project later on. It is somewhat counterintuitive. By exploring the areas that are of concern to the targets of change, you let people know that you are listening and acting on the information they provide.

Instead of changing the subject or ignoring a misunderstanding, paraphrase what you understand them to mean and check whether you have got it right. Reflect on what you have said and what they have said and summarise both points of view. 

I have found that the more I am able to do this, the more I am able to negotiate situations to successful resolution. But it is not just about the techniques. It is about the intention.

By exploring misunderstanding with a view to making sure you have understood what the other person said, and clarifying your own intentions, perhaps several times and in different words, you are taking advantage of the golden opportunity to resolve issues before they become showstoppers.

Change consultants are all the same aren’t they? Change is change. Consultants are consultants.

I think not. In the real world, all consultants are NOT created equal. Consulting is not a commodity like flour or sugar. So much depends on the background of the consultant, specific skills for the job and the chemistry with the client.

Here are ten ways that you can tell if a change management consultant has the technical skills needed for a complex change project. Look for someone who has the ability and experience to do all ten. Your change consultant should be able to:

1. Help you prepare to talk to managers and staff about the change. Your change consultant should be able to help you work out what say, what not to say, and craft your message.
    
2. Facilitate meetings with managers and staff. However, having a consultant facilitate does not mean that you do nothing, nor can you sit back and watch the proceedings like watching a movie. Your participation as leader is still important. But having a facilitator means you can participate as a leader without needing to orchestrate the whole meeting. Someone else can take care of timings, logistics and directing the activities.
    
3. Make sure people have the opportunity to respond. Your consultant should make sure that everyone gets the chance to have a say.
    
4. Deflect criticism. Your consultant should be able to handle it when people are critical about past experiences.
    
5. Assist with formulation of strategy. Your change consultant should be able to lead the establishment of the approach to bringing about the change. They should also be adept at changing tactics in response to emerging events.
    
6. Debrief with you and your team at different stages during the change initiative, for example, after key milestones.
    
7. Explain what is happening in such a way that you and others see the situation differently. When everyone has a different way of making sense of what is going on, when they see things differently, they will be able to respond differently. This means they need to be confident and have enough experience to offer alternative ways of understanding what is going on in the organisation, and in the change initiative.
    
8. Contain anxiety. Help everyone continue to participate and continue on together, especially in the presence of anxiety.
    
9. Help explore misunderstandings. Misunderstandings offer the opportunity for new understanding to emerge. Your consultant should have the capacity to be able to stay with and explore misunderstandings with all players in the initiative so that the group can reach a point of having a different understanding of what is going on. They will then be able to act and react differently with each other.
    
10. Be provocative. At times, providing something to react to can stimulate a shift in people’s understanding of what is going on. Your consultant should have the ability to be provocative.