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Go Through the Finish Line:
Translating Intention into Action
Excerpt from Lead Conversations that Count: How Busy Managers Run Great Meetings
(Rowntree Press, 2021)
I learned an important life lesson when I joined a self-defense class for women early in my career. As a single professional woman who occasionally had to work late at night in a large city, I decided I would feel more peace of mind if I knew some self-defense basics. Over the one-day workshop, I learned the best stance to keep my balance if confronted, how to break the grip of someone trying to grab me, and the vulnerable points to aim for if faced with an attacker.
The final task of the workshop was to break a wooden board with my bare fist. As my fellow participants and I dubiously handed out the boards to each other, we all looked skeptical. These boards were solid and heavy. I didn’t want to break a bone.
The instructor shared a key tip on how to break the board successfully, without injuring your hand in the process. “To break the board, you’ll need to use a lot of force as you bring your hand down. But don’t make the mistake of stopping the force when you contact the surface of the board, otherwise, you will hurt your hand,” she cautioned. “Instead, visualize a point an inch or two below the board and bring your force down to that point. If you do that, you’ll be able to break the board easily, and you won’t feel a thing.”
After psyching myself up, I followed her instructions and was amazed that not only did I break the board in my first attempt, but that my hand didn’t hurt at all. You might think, sure, that’s easy enough to do with a regular 2×4 board. But years later, I witnessed my son-in-law, a Black Belt in Tae Kwan Do, apply the same principle (with considerably more skill and confidence) in breaking three concrete blocks stacked on top of each other – with his bare hand, in a single blow. It was an incredible feat to witness, and my palms still sweat just thinking about it.
Breaking a board and running a successful meeting have something in common. To break the board, you need to direct your energy and momentum past the surface to a point behind it. You focus on a goal beyond what is visible and direct your energy through to that place.
The same is true in a meeting. The purpose of a meeting isn’t just to have one. It’s about taking the energy from the meeting conversation and bringing it out into the workplace in some tangible and measurable way. The meeting is a means to an end for accomplishing a set of specific objectives. Whether the work is solving a problem, launching a product, or setting new priorities, the conversation is in service of something being different from the status quo. Leading a Conversation that Counts includes the crucial step of considering how you support the group to transfer the collective decisions and momentum of the meetings into tangible next steps.
The meeting isn’t over when the meeting is over. It’s over when the work gets done.
Bringing a group of people together in one room for an important discussion is a significant investment for your organization. If you add up the billable hours of people’s time, travel, accommodation, room charges, food and beverages, you’re looking at a hefty price tag. Even though meeting virtually does remove some of the hard costs from the equation, the virtual room is costly because your battle for your attendee’s attention and participation is different in an environment rich with distractions, like the temptation to multi-task, handle barking dogs or hungry children, or the siren call of one’s email inbox.
Consider the risk if all the insights and momentum about the next steps fizzle as soon as people leave. What is the cost when your people click out of the virtual meeting in a haze, suffering from Zoom fatigue? How costly is ineffective action? How much goodwill, commitment, and innovation do you lose when your teams suffer from change fatigue?
In 1885, the scientist Hermann Ebbinghaus described the ability of the brain to retain memory over time. Known as the “Forgetting Curve,” the speed with which we forget learned knowledge over time is astonishing. Cognitive science expert Art Kohn says we forget approximately 50 percent of new information within an hour and an average of 70 percent within a day. After a week, the average loss goes up to 90 percent.
Of course, some moments are seared into our memories forever, like the birth of a child or remembering exactly where you were when you heard about the 9/11 attacks, what you did the first week that the pandemic affected you and your loved ones. Nonetheless, if you think about the content of the meetings we attend, who said what when, and what we committed to do at the end, it can all become a big blur.
Solving big problems and making great plans is one thing, but we must carry through on that commitment and allow time to make it specific, actionable and memorable. A big part of our job, as Conversations Leaders, is to design strategies and structures for translating the goodwill, momentum and positive intention you’ve created in your conversation into intentional, purposeful, effective action.
Take Action
Before your next meeting, write down 1-3 outcomes you want to achieve from it. Share those outcomes in the beginning of the meeting and take a moment to invite feedback on it. What needs to be added? What is most important to the team as a whole? Review the outcomes at the end of the session and identify some clear next steps on how to take actions to realize those outcomes.
Build buy-in and clarity with your team by asking them to identify next steps. Who is working on what, and with whom? When will the tasks be done and how will progress or questions be noted? Build in time to make sure everyone is clear and capture those actions in some visual form that can be updated and monitored over time, like a Kanban board, RACI matrix, or other tool that designates accountability and responsibility for execution.
Resources
Carolyn Ellis, Lead Conversations that Count: How Busy Managers Run Great Meetings, (Rowntree Press, 2021).
Donna McGeorge, The 25 Minute Meeting: Half the Time, Double the Impact, (Wiley Press, 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.
