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Carrie Goucher: Can you really fix modern-day meeting gridlock?
117 Plays1 year ago
Carrie helps people transform meetings and meeting culture. She has redesigned how we meet for the collaborative era, crafting meetings that are honest, focused, supportive and energising. Carrie’s PhD created an evidence-based framework for what underpins meeting success (spoiler alert: it’s not having an agenda) and her research was described as 'game-changing for meeting science'.
Topics covered:
- Why it’s time for a new meeting philosophy
- Signs of a poor meeting culture that you might not spot
- ‘Best practice’ for meetings that’s just making things worse
- Carrie’s top tips you can action straightaway
Carrie is making her Mini e-course: Get your team out of meeting gridlock available for free to my listeners. Here is the discounted link:
https://www.fewerfasterbolder.com/offers/2xFzoooP?coupon_code=VISIBLYDIFFERENT
You shouldn’t need the code separately but if you do it’s: VISIBLYDIFFERENT
Connect with Carrie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carriebedingfield/
And check out her FewerFasterBolder website: https://www.fewerfasterbolder.com/
Edited by Steve Woodward at PodcastingEditor.com
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Transcript
Challenging Leadership & Empowerment
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome to The Visible Leader, the podcast that challenges conventional leadership and inspires you to create a workplace culture that empowers your team. Join me as I talk to thought leaders and changemakers about practical ways to apply new learning and rethink the status quo. Get ready to become a visible leader in your organization.
Who is Carrie Goucher?
00:00:30
Speaker
Welcome, Carrie Goucher. It's lovely to have you on the podcast. I discovered you on LinkedIn and I think you're saying something quite different about the subject that we're going to cover off today. And I believe you've got 20 years experience working in organizational culture change and a PhD in systems thinking. These are all good things.
00:00:58
Speaker
And you are trying to transform how we think about meetings. And that's a subject for, for this podcast today. So welcome.
00:01:10
Speaker
Thank you very much. Lovely to meet you. Yes. Yeah. We have not met before this. I just grabbed you from LinkedIn because I love what you're saying. And I think my listeners will really value taking a different approach to this subject.
Rethinking Meeting Systems
00:01:28
Speaker
So the music to my ears was, I mean, after you've done lots of research into this and
00:01:37
Speaker
You've seen other organizations try to improve meetings, but not get a great deal of traction with it. Your research shows you that we need to address the system and not just the meeting, which it resonated a lot with me. So my first question to you Carrie is, how did we get here to this point that people view meetings like they do?
00:02:01
Speaker
Well, let's take a very short counter through history. Let's go way back. In the Middle Ages, a meeting was actually a euphemism for a physical duel.
00:02:14
Speaker
to reach a decision through violence, but over time to restrain from violence and battle instead with words through meetings became a sign of power and social status and the meeting was born. So over the centuries meetings have gone hand in hand with the civilising of society. And it was in the industrial era where meetings really came to be the style and format that we see today. Now in that era,
00:02:43
Speaker
where we were producing lots of tangible products, physical products sourced and sold locally or at least compared with today's global economy.
Evolution of Meetings
00:02:54
Speaker
The manufacturing of these products might have been complicated so lots and lots of steps but all the steps would be known in advance and provided you did them right the end product would be right and that kind of work
00:03:07
Speaker
was best optimized through things like all the things we know about the industrial era, specialization, hierarchy, control, rules, compliance processes.
00:03:17
Speaker
And that's why we developed that format of meetings with a chair and an agenda and a kind of highly controlled space. But if I ask you about your job, Karine, so the idea that there are lots and lots and lots of steps, but you understand exactly what they all are in advance, they're all written down for you. And provided you do them in the right order, you've done your job this year. I mean, does that sound like your job now? I kind of wish it was.
00:03:44
Speaker
I'd love to have all the steps lined up for the next month and I just follow them. No, my life is much more fluid than that and a little bit more spontaneous by work. And that's true for most people.
The Meeting Overload Dilemma
00:03:57
Speaker
So when I ask that question, people kind of laugh and say, exactly as you said, if only, because
00:04:06
Speaker
Our economy doesn't work like that anymore. We don't make money the same way. Our economy is now based on production of knowledge, data, pixels. It is developed through relationships. Things are sold globally. And the rate of innovation is dramatically higher. So we need to make it or do a new thing or improve something every month, every week, not every decade.
00:04:31
Speaker
And this kind of product in inverted commas is optimized not through specialization and hierarchy and control, but through collaboration, rather than silos, through networks, rather than hierarchies, through
00:04:47
Speaker
experimenting and trying things and learning rather than trying to predict exactly what's going to work in advance. And in this kind of economy we are trying to give people power. I'm trying to avoid saying the word empowerment. I know. We're trying to give people the power. It's so difficult. Rather than controlling everything and locking it down and putting it all in a process.
00:05:11
Speaker
But meetings haven't really, truly changed since the industrial era. So there's all of that, coupled with the fact that if you want to do collaborative work, you have to meet together a lot.
Impact of Unproductive Meetings
00:05:23
Speaker
And if you want to work in flatter organizations, which many organizations are now, inevitably we need to cross paths with other people and coordinate with other people more. And all these things have contributed to this.
00:05:38
Speaker
I don't know the right word, is it a confetti of meetings, a rash of meetings, an abundance of meetings? A clog. A clog of meetings. When I ask people about their diaries, not everyone, but for most people I speak to, meetings take up more than 50% of their working week. That is huge and that's not just managers as it would have been 30, 40, 50 years ago, that's everyone in some organisations.
00:06:06
Speaker
And now we're here. There's no check and balance. So there's no one who's saying this is my budget in the same way they might with another resource. You know, this is the inventory I've got. This is the budget we have for this year. You can't just come and take that budget without talking to me about it. You can just book Pete Time and everybody else's calendar.
00:06:23
Speaker
and there's not a lot anyone can do about it, that has to change. And there are lots of elements to how we change that, not just one thing, like cancel all meetings, plenty of people say that to me, and working on that whole system, like how do we get back out of this and back into balance? That's what my job's all about.
00:06:42
Speaker
It's really interesting the thought that there's a cost because I don't think people in any way evaluate that cost of gathering those people and what that actually means, do they?
00:06:56
Speaker
They don't. Very famously, Shopify quite recently have put a price tag on all their meetings. And I think I saw that. Yeah, that created a lot of interest across my world and my community. We can come back to that later. But whether it's helpful to put a price tag on meetings permanently,
00:07:16
Speaker
different question but the research is broadly consistent so whoever you survey whether that was 50 years ago 40, 30, 20, 10 today, broadly speaking people consider 50% of the time they spend in meetings to be wasted or ineffective.
00:07:35
Speaker
And if you start to kind of put some numbers around that, it gets terrifying really fast. So for example, if you have a 500 people in your company, say, and they're each spending 12 hours a week in meetings, which is quite a conservative estimate. Most people I speak to speak to, but let's stick with 12. And let's take that value that 50% of that time is ineffective.
00:07:59
Speaker
So in a year, across your organization, you're looking at 141,000 hours of wasted time in meetings. And that's the full, so that big number, but let's make that more meaningful. That's the full-time equivalent of 82 people tied up in Pointless meetings. That's in a company of 500.
00:08:18
Speaker
And if we assume that the average salary is 35k in a knowledge business, that's about 3.5 million pounds worth of time. Now, I sort of love and hate those numbers. I find them incredible and terrifying, but equally completely meaningless because you can't get three and a half million pounds worth of time back.
00:08:39
Speaker
but it does serve to highlight the cost. But of course, wasted time is just one dimension. So while people are in all those meetings, and while their day is fragmented, or some people have described it as shattered, their thinking time in the day is shattered by meetings, they're not getting deep work done. Now that's the focused, highly skilled work that they were hired to do in the first place.
00:09:06
Speaker
That's why it's difficult to hit project deadlines, to ship products on time. And more than that, back-to-back meetings all day are frustrating people. They're burning people out. The frustrating interactions of meetings are driving people to quit jobs. My friend who's a coach, very much like you, she says 80% of the frustrating scenarios that people bring to coaching with her come from meetings.
00:09:36
Speaker
So there's a whole package of cost and this great big white space, but as you say, most companies are really not doing a lot about this. And we spend so much time optimizing products and quality control, but we're not looking at these many, many, many wasted hours and all the knock on effects of people spending time in meetings.
00:09:57
Speaker
Yeah, that's so great to be focusing fully on that today because I think most people would agree that they feel that meetings are a bit of a necessary evil, but I don't think anyone's really clear about what to do about it and that deeper level, the systems piece, not just here are some meeting hygiene factors that we can put up on the wall.
00:10:21
Speaker
that actually there's some structural things that might need to change, but we can get to that in a minute. So when I think about quality meetings and poor quality meetings, what are the insidious symptoms of a poor meeting or a poor meeting culture that we might not be noticing that are under our nose, but we can't see?
00:10:46
Speaker
I think there are a whole range of symptoms that people are definitely noticing. For example, when I work with an organization, I quite often do a series of discovery interviews at the very start of this program to understand how people experience meetings. And when I put the link up to allow people to book in a 20, 30 minute slot, I typically find that gets booked up within 30 minutes or an hour of that email going out. I used to worry, how will we get people engaged in this work?
00:11:16
Speaker
I did not need to worry. People are already noticing. I think most nice bright people want to get on with other people and they want to get work done and meetings are not serving them. Some of the things that I think might be under the surface might be
00:11:36
Speaker
For example, the relationship cost of frustrating interactions and meetings. So a meeting is a very public theatre. It's not just you and I talking right now. I'm sure lots of people will listen to this, but right now it's just you and I talking. There's no one listening in. In a meeting, everything you say to another person has an audience.
00:11:58
Speaker
And that can unpick things like culture. So we learn how to behave. We learn what matters, what gets air time, what gets cut off or cut down or dismissed. We learn about all of that through what we observe in meetings. And we need trust with people in our organization without it. We don't need to like them. That's completely different.
00:12:25
Speaker
but we need to feel that we share a common goal and that we've got each other's best interests at heart. Without that, everything takes a very, very, very long time and it's difficult to do difficult things. And I think meetings, one of the symptoms of poor meetings is it chips away at those relationships and it chips away hard. And that's one of the reasons, one of the kind of hidden reasons I think it's so important to look at not just at how many meetings we're having and how long they're taking and did we cover everything
00:12:54
Speaker
but what is the quality of the interaction while we're there?
00:12:59
Speaker
Yeah, so it's very much what people pay attention to, what they measure, what they're looking at, and it's all showing up in that meeting.
Meetings as a Cultural Reflection
00:13:10
Speaker
And I don't think people really consider it, really, do they? They don't. So meetings are the place where culture is demonstrated. So if you want to change culture, and this is what got me into meetings in the first place, somebody from a really, really brilliant, interesting company that you will definitely have heard of.
00:13:27
Speaker
said if you want to work on our Culture Carry, which we were about to embark on a project, you have to look at our meetings. They are a disaster. So meetings are when culture shows up, like is it okay to have that idea? What am I rewarded for and what am I punished for? Even if those rewards and punishments are very mild and dealt
00:13:49
Speaker
You know, micro punishments given out of meetings. But the other thing that is seen and experienced in meetings is your leadership. So if you're a leader, a manager aspiring to develop your leadership capabilities, it's meetings where people will sip your call aid. It is your one-to-ones, but if you're not consistent, if you can do a fantastic high trust, brilliant one-to-one and have a really good one-to-one relationship with somebody, but if you
00:14:20
Speaker
give them a microaggression or give someone else a microaggression or mismanage a meeting, all that is gone in a moment because it's this public forum, it's public shame and public display.
00:14:34
Speaker
I think it's interesting when I work with teams and I get them to start thinking about how they want things to be and things like psychological safety and things like that, always meetings. Sometimes it's hard to think what a team is if it's not a meeting. They really struggle to think about beyond the meeting and it shows how important it is.
00:14:55
Speaker
Exactly. So we learn loads about leadership. There is no shortage of people talking about telling you how to be a better leader in many different ways. No shortage of information and development on becoming a manager. But I think there's a big gap to how you express that in meetings.
What are Best Practices for Meetings?
00:15:16
Speaker
I think it's also just thinking about observing a meeting and seeing a meeting looking like it's running well because it's running on time. Because meetings so often get crammed agendas and everybody's chatting over each other and it can look quite unruly and people are unsatisfied potentially with that, but actually a meeting that's really being chaired within an inch of its life might not be a good meeting.
00:15:46
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah. On the money there. So I think it's mistaking rapport for relationships. It's mistaking a good meeting process for a good meeting product or actual performance. And
00:16:07
Speaker
Exactly as you say, an agenda. If I asked 100 people to say, what's the one thing that would improve your meetings? I think 95 of them would say they should have an agenda.
00:16:21
Speaker
Now, there are agendas and agendas. So a meeting plan, having a design for the meeting, having thought through how to create the most helpful and engaging interaction, yes. But an agenda as a list of items to be powered through is not actually that helpful or it certainly masks the qualities of a great meeting under the guidance of a good process. As you said, it can be controlling,
00:16:48
Speaker
It's all about following a plan. It doesn't encourage a kind of response to what an understanding and awareness and a response to what's actually happening in the room. And it's got all the hallmarks of a good meeting. Like we are making progress down this list, but it doesn't necessarily provide any kind of helpful dialogue. Well, what actually might need to happen is the plan for the meeting might need to shift a bit, but actually meetings are about
00:17:16
Speaker
creating helpful, healthy conflict. And a gender is often a way to avoid conflict. Let's just work our way through it. And people are right, we don't want relationship conflict, we don't want people being disrespectful to each other, dismissing each other.
00:17:36
Speaker
criticizing each other, undermining each other, but we absolutely, definitely want task or work conflict. We want people disagreeing about what will and won't work, people giving views on risks, even if they're unpopular or inconvenient. We want to get to the heart of what matters. That is what meetings are all about. Otherwise, we might as well just send an email.
00:18:00
Speaker
I love that. Yeah, that's such a great answer to a question that I didn't quite ask, but what kind of conflict do we want in a meeting? I love that. Because I think people, oh gosh, you know, it's so easy to pull back from conflict and think it's unhelpful. And even though
00:18:18
Speaker
You read about how conflict is good and this is, you know, a certain level of conflict in a trusted team is what we're actually looking for. It's really good to hear it described really clearly what piece of the conflict is what we're aiming for. Exactly. And a lot of the work I do, so I do work big culture, meeting culture change work with organisations, but I also do
00:18:40
Speaker
micro-meeting work. So I work with, particularly with senior leaders, like how are you going to handle the situation? And we talk about how can you, when, if there is relationship conflict in the room, what actual words can you use to start to translate that back into task conflict or switch it away from relationship conflict?
00:19:01
Speaker
conflict and inter-task conflict and learning to do that is a really powerful skill because it tells people they're safe. It says I won't let that, my boundary is I won't let relationship conflict happen here. I will address it and I'll address it in a really helpful way and enable everybody really to say what they really meant to say which is I disagree with the task
00:19:22
Speaker
even if the way they expressed it in their frustration or their disappointment or their anxiety is they expressed it as relationship conflict. So great skill to learn. Absolutely.
00:19:37
Speaker
wondering if there are any other meeting practices that people do because they think it's best practice. A little bit like having that agenda being the be all and end all. Are there any other things that we're sort of sleepwalking into doing that we think is really good but maybe not?
00:19:55
Speaker
I think there are a couple of other things that, so agenda's definitely the main one because in all honesty, that is really the only thing that people are doing in meetings anyway. There aren't many other techniques that people are actually using for me to kind of dissect. But there are a couple of other things. One is a bit of an obsession with starting and finishing on time. So again, that is back to process.
00:20:21
Speaker
controlling, treating a meeting as a sort of machine, which we need to press a button on and to turn it on and turn it off again. So I completely understand that in an organisation with many different meetings, it is helpful to start on time. And it's certainly helpful to finish before people need to go to their next meeting. Absolutely agree. But I think there is an association with starting and finishing on time and also lateness as being
00:20:48
Speaker
a kind of moral dimension applied to it. It's bad, it's disrespectful to be late, for example, it's disorganized, start late. So I think there are a few structural things we can do, like really basic stuff like scheduling meetings for 50 minutes or 25 minutes to give people that buffer and just our little bit of run over a number of different variations of that that I use. But also, for example, if a meeting starts, if somebody's late,
00:21:19
Speaker
There are lots of different ways to view that, not just that that's been really bad for the meeting and it's disrespectful to the person and believing that will impact the quality of the whole conversation while you're there and impact your relationship. So it's probably a bigger conversation to unpick that, but I just want to
00:21:35
Speaker
flag that as something that, again, is a very industrial era, high control mindset. It's a school thing. We start on time and the bell doesn't dismiss you, I dismiss you, that kind of thing. Yeah. It's interesting, isn't it? Because it might press up against someone's values.
00:21:55
Speaker
I must admit, lateness is something that I judge a bit. So I'm not listening to that thinking, yeah, that's interesting. How do I react and respond to it? And do I have a little bit of a controlling bit in me that comes out that's like, lock the door. If they're late, then they're going to miss out now. So let's explore that for one minute. And it's not wrong to judge lateness, and it's certainly not wrong to have
00:22:24
Speaker
punctuality as a value. The problem is not everyone will share that. So then we have to say, okay, how do we handle those value clashes? So when somebody's late, what thoughts come up from you? If they were up on the stand in the dock, acute lateness, and you're the prosecuting counsel, what are you going to say? I think the thoughts were going through my head and that I would put up there are
00:22:55
Speaker
you're not valuing this time, you're not valuing my time or our time in this room. If I don't do anything about it now, then people will, around me, if I'm chairing the meeting or whatever, whatever my role is, if I'm the one that's gonna kind of have the boundaries around it, then other people will not value it either and they'll think that it's okay. And so if I don't,
00:23:21
Speaker
jump on it, then other people will value this meeting less because these are all the thoughts that would immediately come to my mind. I suppose there is something about respect and just feeling like we can't start without you or if we do start, you're going to miss something important and that means we might have to go back over it again and that's disrespecting all the people's time that are sat here. That's probably where my head would go.
00:23:49
Speaker
Yeah, and and all completely normal human you know you I think you and 99 out of 100 other people might, you know, we don't we don't like people being late for our meetings but we are sometimes late for other people, there are plenty of people who don't like lateness but are themselves late for other people meetings. So, we won't unpick all of those, but I think
00:24:12
Speaker
what I just want to open the door a chink there just to just get that door ajar is the is that and as you well know those there is some element of truth in those thoughts it is it isn't ideal to have to go back over something that somebody missed because they were they were late but that
00:24:32
Speaker
It may not be factually correct that they don't value your time or the time of the people in the meeting or that they are being disrespectful. It's a story I've told myself. It's a story. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And we're all picking up those stories all the time. The thing about meeting stories
00:24:49
Speaker
is they've become ingrained into our corporate psyche. So people find it really difficult to hold any possibility that somebody isn't disrespectful when they're late. And that doesn't mean you can't talk to them about it. And it doesn't mean you can't solve that problem. But the starting point for that is not necessarily that you want to correct it so they respect you. You want to correct it to get a better or recalibrate yourselves as a group.
00:25:19
Speaker
in a way that builds more trust that gets a better product out of the meeting.
00:25:24
Speaker
One other thing I'd flag up because it's so helpful in thinking about meetings is improv.
Meetings and Improv: A New Approach
00:25:30
Speaker
So meetings are one big improv show. But we try and treat them like a highly scripted performance. Curtain down, curtain up. This is what you're supposed to say. This is what you're not supposed to say. If we just hold in mind that they are free flowing, essentially, improv performances, then we can
00:25:53
Speaker
we can employ a few other techniques. So things like good and proper technique or mindset, everything's an offer, use everything. So I remember once I was leading a sort of internal webinar for five other people, it was a sort of tutorial and I could not get my internet to work. So I couldn't even tell them that I was late. They were a client.
00:26:17
Speaker
They were really senior and I knew that they were sitting there waiting for me. The horror, the horror. The blood was raining out of my body. Each minute ticked past. Finally, 12 minutes late, I get in a flurry of apologies.
00:26:36
Speaker
And they were completely relaxed and they said, oh, don't worry about that. We've just had the most fantastic, you know, we very rarely get the chance to, it was a call, very rarely get the chance to speak together. And we've just solved a problem that's been niggling away for months. We didn't even really know we needed to have a session about it, but we've had it now and it was fantastic. So now we're ready for you. And I realized that if you're open to it, there is possibility in lateness.
00:27:05
Speaker
I know no one will hear that. But if we can believe that, we can believe that in all the sort of things, unhelpful things or crazy things people do in meetings, there is possibility. Everything's an offer. Everything has the opportunity to take us closer to our goal. I don't mean that in a kind of woo-woo way. I mean, let's talk about tools that help us.
00:27:31
Speaker
Once we've got a bit of that mindset, we've opened our minds to possibility that might help us get more out of meetings for how they really are, not how we wish they were in a perfect world. Yeah. I mean, it really does fit with my desire. Some of my clients are like, I know you really don't like working like this, Corinne, because they know I really, I like to just have an agenda and stick to it in all reality. But that isn't what my team coaching is like, because that would be
00:27:58
Speaker
we need a creativity in that. There'd be no new thinking. We'd all just sit there and work through Corinne's agenda. And so my clients laugh at me where I'm like, no, I love that we're doing this. Inside I'm dying. But it's exactly what my role does not fit how I actually like to work. And I love the fact that I have to step out of that so frequently. And isn't that wonderful? And isn't it that
00:28:22
Speaker
There is no one way to work and it's not that your client's way is right and your way is wrong or vice versa, but it's the overlapping and interlapping of those styles that where there's a good relationship creates that helpful friction that allows us all to question how we think about things, to explore new options. We all grow, learn and create in that interaction between our different styles. And that's what we're trying to do really effectively in meetings.
00:28:50
Speaker
And it's so often the meeting is just seen as an information sharing platform. I need these messages to be given over, or maybe there is some decision making in lots of meetings, but that co-creation is sometimes not present. That's right. And if it's an information sharing session,
00:29:15
Speaker
In my view, that should probably be something that's done asynchronously, or the information sharing part is done very concisely at the beginning, and the rest of the session is given over to what humans do really well, which is interact in a complex space to draw out ideas, clarity, alignment, et cetera.
00:29:48
Speaker
And I wonder if at this point we should get practical because I think I've thrown open a Pandora's box of, you know, possibility and lateness. I want to give people some stuff to, like, how do we actually start handling this in, if you like the sound of it, what are you actually going to say and do in your meeting later today? I love that we've moved to practical because that is always a place I want to, as you know, now I like a bit of structure, like a bit of practical, so.
Improving Meeting Dynamics
00:30:17
Speaker
Go for it. Top tips for making a difference straight away. I think there are two things to think about, two tips before you get into the meeting itself. So one is we need to go to fewer. Not everyone. Most people need to go to fewer meetings. So there are lots of different ways to do this. A style I prefer is consult wide, meet small.
00:30:44
Speaker
So smaller meetings are better. They just are. We can't always have them, but that doesn't mean that we can't consult with or interact with a whole load of people about something that matters to them and something they need to contribute to without bringing them all into a meeting.
00:31:00
Speaker
How best can that be done? So usually you'd need some kind of asynchronous format for doing that, like Teams Chat. And ideally, you'd have a bit of, so I'm not anti-structure, I am fully pro-structure, I'm anti-control.
00:31:17
Speaker
So having a structured way that in your organization, this is how we tell people something we're thinking about doing or talk to people about something we want them to contribute to and allow them to contribute really efficiently without dragging them into a 90 minute meeting of which only part might be relevant to them.
00:31:39
Speaker
Having a way of doing that probably on Teams chat or whatever group type chat you use is going to be the way to do that. There are systems that do that like Lumio, which are
00:31:52
Speaker
platforms deliberately designed to allow employees to or team members or whoever to give feedback on, contribute to thinking, vote things up, vote things down. I don't think you necessarily need that, just simple ways of consulting with people. Meetings need to be shorter, not all of them. Some meetings need to be four hours.
00:32:15
Speaker
Most meetings need to be 30 minutes or 50 minutes at a push. And reducing the duration provides a creative constraint that encourages us to redesign them better. So most meetings have no design to them whatsoever. They might have an agenda, but it's just a list of items that need covering. I want people to design meetings and design interactions, and I'll give you a really simple tip of that in a moment.
00:32:41
Speaker
So that's, that's the first thing. Go to fewits. It's in my company name. Fewer, faster, bolder. Yes. The second thing before the meeting is get good at sending really good invitations. This is your social contracting phase where you get, you allow people to think about things before they meet. You get people arriving, clear, precise, understanding what their role is, tell people exactly why you need them.
00:33:07
Speaker
what you're trying to achieve, what you want them to do, and what a good outcome looks like. And then they will co-moderate with you. You won't have to drive it through because somebody will say, oh, hang on a minute. I don't think that's actually an area we want to talk about today because they've already read and engaged and given some feedback on your invitation. And if you go to fewer meetings, you can write a proper invitation rather than just slamming something in the diary.
00:33:35
Speaker
I love you say co-moderate, so the word chairing a meeting, you're not using that. I'm not using that. So I think about hosting meetings, leading meetings, owning meetings.
00:33:51
Speaker
Chairing to me, it's interesting because I have been to some very formal meetings here locally in my area as part of town council, district council, which have been extremely well-chaired. And it is appropriate to chair a more formal meeting. And there are lots of organisations and types of meetings where it is appropriate to have a formal meeting.
00:34:19
Speaker
but most of the meetings we go to day to day are not that formal. And what chairing does is says, I'm in control and you just need to sit there and consume this meeting.
00:34:30
Speaker
That's the opposite of what most companies are trying to do as a culture. They want to empower people. Let's go there. Say the word. Come on, Carrie. Own it. All those things we're trying to do with our culture, the first place to reflect them in is your meetings. If you want to empower people, empower them in meetings first. Give them the tools and leave enough space for them to help co-moderate that, to self-organize a little bit. And as much as anything,
00:35:00
Speaker
If I asked 100 people what their second thing that could be improved about meetings was, it would be just to know why I'm there. Sending a good invitation, I think, if we're talking about respect, I think is a deeply valuing and respectful thing to do that says, I'm asking for an hour of your time and here's how I want to use it. And here's how I'm going to help you do the best job you can while you're there. That is a respectful, supportive thing to do.
00:35:26
Speaker
Lovely. Yeah. And not done very often. Not done very often. No, no. And I like to think that in my, the last, I did a lot of work with one organization, not on their meetings, working with them in their organization over about four years. And if there's one thing I think I was known for there, it was for sending a cracking meeting invitation. Well, this is part of it, isn't it? This is part of the culture. You're, you're showing what good looks like and then people in that meeting will know how to do it.
00:35:56
Speaker
It doesn't necessarily need to be that broader, does it? If you start doing it in the meetings, people will see how to do it themselves. Exactly, exactly. And that's the lovely thing about meetings is changes you make, where they work well, they can get a really nice ripple effect. The reason agendas don't have a good ripple effect is because they don't help as much as we want them to.
00:36:20
Speaker
but absolutely meeting culture is court not taught. So why don't we look at what you can do in the meeting? Yes, yeah. I love that meeting culture is court not taught. That's beautiful.
00:36:35
Speaker
I don't think I invented that, I think I actually got it from something else that's caught not taught. I don't care Carrie, I'm going to attribute it to you. Thank you, thank you very much. So there are a whole range of things you can do in meetings and I've just picked out something you can do, something simple for the beginning, something simple for the middle and something simple for the end.
00:36:58
Speaker
So beginning, people get in the room, get them contributing straight away. So as early and equally as possible. And one way to do that would be to use a round to open the meeting. So everybody answers a question in turn, no questions, no kind of discussion, no chatting, it just flows around the room and everybody gives a concise answer to the question.
00:37:23
Speaker
The question could be something, dare I say it, a fun icebreaker question. I said it. I hate the word icebreaker, but a kind of a light-hearted connection question.
00:37:41
Speaker
it could be a data question like this could be a really short important meeting about um uh sales or an event you're running so you could ask everybody to go around and share um their figures or their numbers or something that then allows you to have a conversation about those
00:37:59
Speaker
It could be a question that allows people to tell you what they're either leaving out of the room or bringing into the room or something that just allows people to start by being a bit human. So it can be as task or as relationship focused as you want. But what it does is it sets the tone and it says, we are all going to contribute to this meeting. You demonstrate that not by telling people we're all going to contribute to this meeting. Everybody's opinion is welcome, but by inviting them to contribute immediately.
00:38:29
Speaker
So that's something to think about.
Structuring Effective Meetings
00:38:32
Speaker
Then in the middle, there's tons of stuff you can do here, but this is the simplest thing for any meeting, however long, short, large, small. And that's to use some kind of structure and signpost the stages you want people to go through together. So rather than an agenda, which usually lists out the content,
00:38:58
Speaker
we're talking about stages. So for example, first we need to properly understand the problem and make sure everybody's completely understood what's gone wrong. Then we're going to look at some examples of other departments or companies or what they've done right. We're gonna get some inspiration for somewhere else. Then we're gonna do a stage where we look at what our options are. We're not gonna worry about whether any of them are right or wrong yet. We're just gonna get some options on the table and then we're going to evaluate them.
00:39:28
Speaker
So that's a way of structuring a session that like previously have been just a free form discussion. And if you have those four phases and say, okay, first we're going to do this, now we're going to move on to this part, okay, now we've done that, now we're going to move on to this part, then people know how to contribute. And what you don't end up with is that cross conversation where somebody says,
00:39:51
Speaker
Well, I think we should just do this and have done with it. That's what we did before and it worked before, and I think we should do it. And someone else is like, yeah, but we haven't even really understood whether that's going to solve the problem. I don't think we've got the same problem now. And somebody else is saying, well, in that company, they do it like this, and I've never liked that, but I think we should do this. And you can see how it's just a kind of circular conversation that never progresses. And in the end, it's those conversations where the loudest voices win.
00:40:19
Speaker
That's not what we want. So providing some structure helps people know exactly how to contribute their best, because no one's trying to be at cross purposes, but there's no other signpost that says what they should be contributing. And it equalizes voices and you're likely to get a much better outcome that people are much more bought into together.
00:40:45
Speaker
Yeah. So it's lovely because it's definitely, like you say, structured, but totally getting over some of the key problems that meetings, like decisions don't get made and there's no innovation. It's just, yeah, people feel frustration. And the easiest way to do that is just to think about what two, three, four stages do we need to go through in this session and give each one of them a question. And the question could be as simple as,
00:41:13
Speaker
How's it going? So if it's an update meeting, you want the team to come together and just kind of get their stuff on the table. First of all, the first question that the team might be answering is how's it going? Tell us A, B and C.
00:41:27
Speaker
So, or the question could be much more direct and specific, like having established the problem, what are our top three options for solving it or our top three ideas? Suddenly everybody's working towards, you're giving people a shared goal to work towards in that part of the meeting. People are really good at doing that.
00:41:48
Speaker
Lovely. So that's the middle. And then simple, simple technique for the end is to capture the outcomes of what's been discussed on a shared document. So something that's on screen, it's on a board, it's somewhere not just in one person's notebook or on one person's piece of paper, but something everybody can see and ideally everybody could edit. And not just to capture actions, but to capture decisions.
00:42:16
Speaker
So we decided we were dot, dot, dot. That is incredibly helpful when you come back to the next meeting and you can't remember what you decided. And it also provides a record where other people can see what was decided. And if somebody else who didn't go wants to say, oh, hang on a minute, you might want to think about that, then they can. Or great, now I know that's decided. That's unlocked me to do this bit. And the third thing to capture is a car park. So something that seemed
00:42:41
Speaker
important but was not for that meeting and so that has got an it's like an out tray of the meeting that can go out and be dealt with somewhere else.
00:42:53
Speaker
After that's done, share that, make that openly available so we have this kind of open, almost like open source meeting canvases. I call that a capture canvas. You can call it anything you want. But we're used to looking at other people's little grids of their meeting and saying, great, that's helpful. I can see what happened in that meeting. Yeah, I didn't need to go. Perfect.
00:43:14
Speaker
Lovely. So we're quite far away from minutes and chairs and agendas with this approach. It feels like there's more energy in that room. Yes. These are all more energetic approaches, exactly as you say, than an agenda. An agenda is low energy. It doesn't tell us what to do. It doesn't tell us how to contribute, how to behave. It doesn't give us a goal. The meeting plan and the meeting design gives us an energetic goal to move towards.
00:43:44
Speaker
And the capture canvas is a crisp, energetic way to capture the value of what happened and share back the value, take the value out of the meeting, put it back into the business where it belongs. It's lovely because there's so much in that. There's so much that you're doing that's different as far as people having in a meeting and using some tools from team coaching, you know, the types of things that I would do with a team in a team session.
00:44:14
Speaker
so much of the things you've said are in there so it's like they are taking themselves into a different kind of space that they're actually learning and engaging and thinking about things differently and reflecting on things just by improving how they come together. Absolutely and I think if there's one takeaway from all my work is
00:44:40
Speaker
to take what really good trainers do. So people who are fantastic at leading workshops and really engaging sessions to take some elements of those, strip them back a bit and make them work for you in meetings. That's a great direction of travel from brilliant workshops into brilliant regular everyday meetings.
00:45:04
Speaker
Yeah. I love that when I go back to see a client and they are stealing key things. They're doing the check-ins at the start. It's something they always do or they always do a reflection at the end or whatever it is. It's so nice to see and I love that that's your guidance to take it, strip it back and make it every day. Perfect. That's it.
00:45:27
Speaker
So there are things practically to do in the session. Now, was there anything that you could draw on which is more of the system issues? Is there anything underlying what's causing this poor mission culture? Have you got any tips about how people could look at that?
Systemic Meeting Culture Issues
00:45:47
Speaker
I do a lot of interviews with people in organisations and so often the first thing I do when I work with an organisation is I talk to people about their experiences of meetings and that is a piece of discovery work that I am not uniquely qualified to do, anyone can do that, is go and talk to people about their experience of meetings and dig a bit under the surface. So I'd really recommend people do that and
00:46:11
Speaker
Having said that, I think there are probably six things that they're going to uncover that I find abundant under the surface and sort of structural things that are keeping people in a large volume of poor quality meetings. So hierarchy and power is one.
00:46:32
Speaker
lack of strategic clarity so things chopping and changing and we were doing this and now we're doing that and hang on there's just three words they've just launched over there and I'm not quite sure how that affects us it's two poor role clarity so you might know what your job is but do you know what your role is in this project exactly in this programme in this meeting culture
00:46:55
Speaker
So people feeling unsafe to disagree that it's not okay really it's not really okay to experiment, unless it works. Basically it's not okay to step out of the normal path like I don't feel brave enough to set step out of the normal path of how people do things in this organization.
00:47:12
Speaker
And then the fifth and sixth are red tape, process, everything takes too long, goes through a committee. And then finally, poor decision making processes. So this is the thing, in a collaborative organisation, decisions need to be made all the time. But in most organisations, it's very unclear who makes it, who's responsible for making it, how it will get made,
00:47:34
Speaker
Is it going to get unmade later? How does it relate to other decisions? We have a sort of decision making crisis in a lot of organisations and they're my top six things. But the really good news is that meetings are a good place to work on all of those things. So when we look at something like hierarchy and power or red tape or decision making, that can feel totally overwhelming. Like how would we ever change any of that? How would I ever change that in my organisation?
00:48:03
Speaker
Now, you may not be able to change all of it and change all of it tomorrow, but you've probably got something like a 15% wiggle room. What's the 15% of that whole big thing that I can influence? And meetings are really responsive to changes like that.
00:48:22
Speaker
Even better news, meetings and culture are in a reciprocal relationship. So we behave as we do in meetings because of the culture, but meetings are one of the main places where we learn about culture. So once you start to make changes in meetings and give people a different set of experiences and show that they're safe when they have those experiences, you will start to create a ripple effect in the culture and a bit like all these mindset things. As soon as people's minds are open to the possibility that something could be different,
00:48:52
Speaker
say the possibility that it's okay to do X, Y, Z, then you can get a really nice ripple effect and they'll start to hammer down our doors for you. Like in this meeting I could do this or with this manager or this leader, it's like this. Why isn't it like this over the whole organisation? And that is when people come and work with me because they're ready, they've seen it's possible and they will no longer accept the status quo until they've seen the possibility. There's not a lot I can do to help.
00:49:22
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Lovely. Love those. They're very tangible, very pragmatic and start small. I love that. Carrie, is there anything that we haven't talked about that you think my listeners will benefit from? I mean, there's probably loads, but in the next couple of minutes, what would be anything? I think there's something to be said for having
00:49:49
Speaker
some real self-compassion for our organizations and how they've got here. So no one is to blame for meeting culture. We've inherited it. It's easy to feel frustrated with our organization, to feel frustrated with people who are running meetings, maybe frustrated with ourselves for the way we run them. The reality is these meeting patterns have worn a very deep groove into our psyche at work.
00:50:17
Speaker
And we have very little time. Our diaries are maxed out. It's very hard to think about meetings and how we're going to add another job to our to-do list, which is change all my meetings. Changing habits is hard. It's a very public change. Often there aren't very many role models or good examples to draw from. And often no one owns it. And there's not just like one fix. I don't have, you know,
00:50:41
Speaker
my one thing that will make all your meetings better, start and finish on time, have an agenda, that will do it. So I think let's acknowledge that it's taken a long time to get us into this place and there are a lot of things holding us there and that's why my recommendation is always to start by making space.
Creating Space & Learning Resources
00:51:00
Speaker
So while your diary is completely jammed with meetings you have neither the
00:51:06
Speaker
actual time nor the headspace to start to think about transforming some of those interactions or even making small changes to them. So the first step either individually or as an organisation is to make a bit of space somehow and actually on my
00:51:23
Speaker
website, I have a mini e-course on exactly that and I will share a code so any of your listeners can do that mini e-course for free if they would like to because that is the first step that allows you then a bit of time to think about making some really helpful, bigger changes. Lovely. That's very generous of you. I think that will be really, really valuable to my listeners. We will make that available in the show notes.
00:51:52
Speaker
Thank you. I really enjoyed our conversation. I'm really glad I discovered you and got you onto my podcast to talk about this subject, which is really interesting. And I think you're going to make a big difference and people that start taking action could really make a difference quite quickly, I think. It's one of those things that you could start today. Could start today. I mean, anyone got a meeting later today? Anyone?
00:52:22
Speaker
So many opportunities to practice. Thank you very much. So where can my listeners find you and is there a website or any products or anything that you have available at the moment? So I publish almost every day on LinkedIn, something that will help you today or help you in a meeting today or to think about a meeting differently.
00:52:50
Speaker
you can just follow me to receive something uplifting and encouraging and practical about meetings every single day. My website is fewerfasterbolder.com. And there are a couple of main ways to work with me. If you're thinking about this work as an organization, you could join my Meeting Pioneers program or work with me one-to-one on that. And that's where you're trying to shift all the meetings. Like how do we kickstart a shift in meeting culture
00:53:20
Speaker
that gives people time back, that encourages really helpful, healthy conflict that develops relationships rather than breaks them. And how can we use that meeting time to drive our business forward? If you just literally want to work on your meetings, I have a really comprehensive e-course. It's about four hours and that really is everything you need to know
00:53:48
Speaker
to be a brilliant leader and manager in meetings. So if you're a project manager or a team leader or the leader of a function, this is the place where you can figure out exactly what to say, what to do, what to write, what to prepare, all the most common challenges that people have in meetings I address over those four hours. And I'd love to welcome you on that. Brilliant.
00:54:14
Speaker
Carrie, it's been lovely catching up with you. Really enjoyed our conversation and it was super valuable and I know people are going to get a lot of benefit from it. Thank you so much for having me, Corin.
00:54:37
Speaker
Thanks for listening to the Visible Leader podcast. To stay up to date with the latest episode, hit the subscribe button. And I'd love to hear what you think, so please leave me a review. If you have any questions or comments, reach out to me. Cornhines on LinkedIn.