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Effective Meetings: To Align, You Need to Design
Excerpt from Lead Conversations that Count: How Busy Managers Run Great Meetings
(Rowntree Press, 2021)
As a tall person prone to occasional flare-ups of lower back and neck pain, I make regular trips to my chiropractor to adjust my spine. It always amazes me that the source of a particular pain is often not adjacent to where I experience the knot of tension. One little spot of misalignment creates ripple effects throughout my body. My foot out of alignment puts pressure on other parts to compensate for not balancing properly, and before you know it, I have a knot in my shoulder. Maintenance visits keep me flexible and pain-free. But getting out of alignment can happen so easily, staying mobile and pain-free requires regular attention and care.
Teams get out of alignment when they lack clarity about the decision they are asked to make. It’s essential to be upfront about whether their input is for information-sharing, brainstorming, or actual decision- making. Part of your role as the Conversation Leader is to share your expectations with the group. Don’t confuse people’s attendance with acceptance. Silence doesn’t mean people agree with what is being discussed. When you treat group discussions about important issues as an activity to simply check the box on, you’ll run into problems in implementing and executing your objectives.
I worked with a company that had experienced huge growth through acquisition, resulting in a mosaic of different subcultures within the company. They wanted to create more alignment and shared understanding of their mission and values to create a unified and cohesive culture. They expended a lot of time and energy in senior leadership off sites to talk about the importance of using their values of respect, learning and continuous improvement to navigate some of the integration issues and business challenges they faced. It all sounded very inspirational, coming from the stage at the annual leadership retreat. Yet as I worked with that client over a number of years, I kept hearing the same messages shared repeatedly. “Work together as one.” “Respect each other and leverage our strengths,” and “Together, we deliver great value to our customers.” But year after year, these messages just weren’t taking hold. People weren’t “walking the talk” and there was a lack of alignment. I wondered if those leaders felt like Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog Day, where the main character keeps waking up and reliving the same day over and over again until he finally gets it right in the end.
The Conversation Leader must design for and address alignment upfront in the meeting. As organizational psychologist and author, Roger Schwartz, says, “If even one person in your meeting doesn’t know how they are supposed to contribute to the meeting, you increase the risk that they will get the meeting off track.” Help participants get clear about their role in the meeting. You can indicate this before the meeting starts through the agenda and any pre-meeting work you ask them to do. As Schwartz says, “If it’s your meeting, and you don’t tell people the roles you expect them to play, and then they act at odds with your expectations, you’ve helped create the problem.”
Alignment is something you need to design for as part of leading an effective discussion. As you prepare for your next meeting, ask yourself some important questions. How do you embed lofty ideals and values into tangible, gritty, step- by-step actions on a day-to-day basis? How do you walk your talk with each other? What agreements can you create to support building alignment in the trenches of the daily work, and not just in the retreat center at your offsite? Alignment is a continual process of awareness, adjustment and communication.
Take Action
On a scale of 1-10, how much alignment is there within your team now, with 1 being “None at all” and 10 being “We’re in total alignment.” What is one specific action you could take to improve your rating, even if it’s by just 1 point.
Take stock of your latest couple of meetings. How much did you design for alignment? What could you do differently to ensure better alignment when it comes to implementation and execution?
Resources
Nufer Yasin Ates, et al, “Why Visionary Leadership Fails” Harvard Business Review, February 28, 2019.
Author Information: This is an excerpt from Lead Conversations that Count: How Busy Managers Run Great Meetings by Carolyn Ellis (Rowntree Press, 2021). For more information on the book, please visit www.LeadConversationsThatCount.com. This article may be shared provided the author information is included.
Photo by Julia Craice on Unsplash
