Drama – in our opinion, it is THE biggest factor missing from meetings and often communication in general.  Almost always the status quo is maintained.  The group chooses to avoid conflict and so meetings are boring!

Last newsletter we introduced you to Patrick Lencioni’s book Death by Meeting.  Lencioni, much to my surprise (and to the surprise of his friends too he reveals in the book) suggests that more meetings rather than less are what we need.  He says that context and drama are required for productive meetings

And most meetings lack both context and drama

Here is a quick review on context.  A meeting is either an update, tactical or strategic.  Depending on your context your have different structures for your meetings.

Updates are short and about communication.  Hold the meeting standing up. Five minutes for five people, one minute each to communicate the two or three important tasks they are focusing on today and what (if any) help they need from the others.  That’s it.

Tactical meetings (usually weekly) are to discuss and create actions for current & topics, issues and operations.  Communicate your KPI scoreboard.  Get on top of and/of fix what’s happening now.

Strategic Meetings (monthly, adhoc and quarterly) are when you step back and look at the bigger picture. Review, brainstorm, dream for the future and create strategic plans.  NO day-to-day stuff. OK, now that is clear.  Let’s go back to drama

Drama is what stops meetings from being boring.

And when meetings are more interesting, even exciting, people get more involved.  More involvement means more ideas, discussions and improved engagement.  High engagement has been shown to improve productivity and profit.

So why doesn’t everyone bring some drama in to their meetings?

Because, drama involves uncertainty, it involves possible conflict and definitely differences of opinion.  It involves emotional expression.  And for most managers that’s too hard.

It’s easier to keep the meetings boring and keep the output to a low, but consistently predictable level.  For most their internal anxiety thermometer goes way up when they think about running a meeting where people strongly disagree and want to talk the differences of opinion.  Yet this is exactly the ‘Gold’ that takes meetings from boring to brilliant and creates enormous increases in effectiveness.

How do you create this drama?

Firstly you set the framework up front.  The meeting participants need to know that they have permission, even encouragement to get in to conflict.  You want to hear different points of view and the argument that goes with them – like a full-on debate.  Everyone at the meeting agrees to, and understands that there will be conflicting arguments discussed -- and that’s OK.

The framework also includes an agreement that a unified decision & direction will be made at the end of the meeting.  EVERYONE will support & follow the decision 100% regardless of their point of view during the discussion.  Again this is agreed to upfront when setting the framework.

Next you introduce the hook.  Start the meeting by throwing out a hook.  Jolt them.  Emphasise the huge importance or potential disaster of the topic.  The aim is to get them interested and/or personally connected to what is being discussed.

As the discussion start you mine for conflict.  You look for tone and body language that indicates disagreement or uncertainty and you ask the person to say what they are thinking and feeling.  Prompt people to take a view opposite to one that has just been communicated.

A valuable tip for managers in these situations is to reinforce the agreed permission in ‘real time’.  So when someone starts communicating an opposing view or challenges someone you can interrupt and reinforce that this is good and this is what your are looking for in these meetings.  Real time positive feedback has a huge impact on increasing the behaviour that gets positive recognition.

Wrap up the meeting by summarising how you saw things and you, as the manager, need to make a decision about what to do.  Make that decision and confirm, as per the framework, that everyone will follow and support the decision 100%.

Turn you team and your organisation in to highly productive peak performers through effective meetings, rather than having boring meetings that drag your team down!

To get a simple example of how this might work email us at time@timecreationcoaching.com.au