MC37 The multiple aspects of meetings

i mean just meetings it's such a play for everybody everybody has had some bad experiences with meetings nobody who's just had like every i've never had that meeting yeah and also because it's not just something that happens in a professional context also like any kind of volunteering and committee meetings and anyone who's who has a management position or who aspires to a management position will have been in some kind of committee meeting because that's you know that you do that you're attracted to that kind of way of doing business and getting things done and at one point it was the only way of getting any conversations in a group through meetings for a lot of people still is i think yeah that's a i think everyone's had that feeling of i really don't need to be in this yeah so oh hello listener how are you we are again we're kicking off talking about one of the topics that's uh well that's i suppose people who are interested in my whole management and leadership topic talk about which is of course meetings so tim and i are going to be here for about 20 minutes so you're very welcome to to join us yeah so tim um let's start with the nice stuff what do you like about meetings or what are some of the nicest experiences in a meeting you've had well it's a great opportunity to collaborate and you can learn things you know when you're in a discussion with people uh it could be great to learn things to have ideas bouncing around to feel like you're coming to consensus you know you can get that great feeling of being part of a group and that sense of getting to a place that you couldn't have gotten to without having those people in that discussion or in that context at that time what do i do yeah well to me that that's you can get into a real high i find with those conversations i mean it doesn't even have to be a formal meeting in our conversation sometimes i get like really high through talking or with uh with friends sometimes so for me i've realized that that for me is a problem now that i'm detecting so i'll put some context around this uh i'm a real i dream i love dreaming but i don't mind dreaming on my own so i would dream on my own of businesses and stuff that can happen and blah blah as soon as i start having a conversation with someone about doing something for me it starts to become real and i step into let's get this started let's do this how are we going to do this and i go into that thinking mode and because i'm prone i don't know just maybe the company i keep and i've kept i'm prone to having these kinds of conversations i find that this conversation will happen in the meeting and this feeling that you're saying you know oh yeah this is going to be possible because we can do this because i'm with other people and what happens i feel like people get high on that and they start to over commit and they start to over plan and then nothing gets done after the meeting because that high disappears after nothing and then people's commitment disappears tasks if their tasks to be done don't get done and so i've come to really think about what can replace that um of course we talk about some asynchronous kind of thing and some other way of committing committing and coordinating so i'm talking mainly though in things where there is an option to then not commit so i'm not talking like core work stuff i think i'm probably going more around either stuff that's a volunteer thing or the kind of things we commit to at work which are not part of our work which are the ones we drop first you know the extra role stuff so i don't know what you think of of that is that something i certainly understand like i've had that same sensation you know particularly brainstorming or when you're coming up with new concepts ideation sort of discussions in my mind it it's more of a function of the dynamic within the meeting itself than the than the fact that it's a meeting you know if there's someone there who pulls things back a little bit you know in fact that's a role that i feel like i play a bit where uh one of my focuses sometimes in meetings is you know i don't want to walk out with too much stuff to do ah that's a very good focus to have sometimes i want to walk out of meetings with less stuff than i walked in with and so if people start getting too excited then i'm like well hold on a second we're going to walk out of here with a whole lot of plans and i'm going to end up with more and more to do this which i can't cope with then um i think that there can be that balance there but it's tricky isn't it it's very seductive that excitement and it's a yeah it's very positive it's very positive energy so channeling it is quite important i never thought of it that way that the difference between being in a position of leadership running thinking well actually i want to leave having less to do or you know manageable sorry that's maybe a strange way of paraphrasing what you said whereas i think a lot of people maybe team members are going and thinking well i want to leave knowing what i'm going to do that i didn't know before or feeling like okay now i know i think that's very interesting the expectation of how we come out of the meeting is very important and i started to work with someone with my friend judy who like many people ask at the beginning of the meeting what do you want to get out of this meeting and making sure that everyone knows what they want and actually even sharing those expectations and i think that that is missing a lot of the time even when you ask the question you know some people might say something and you know whatever and sometimes we ask the question and then we don't address the fact that it's been answered but i think that that expectation of what needs to come out is really important we often miss it if we have a meeting culture i think yeah yeah for sure and when there's misalignment there you know when someone's idea of what a good outcome is going to be you know that we agree on the principles of what we're doing and someone else's idea of what the good outcome is going to be is that you know we've got a task list of 100 tasks on it that's going to end up uh in a clash but that's really that's part of the function of a meeting is to surface those sort of those issues well and also it's their one fortune is to build relationships and to reinforce culture i remember at one point i became conscious of the fact that uh i was talking too much in meetings but i mean it's something i still do now so it's not like i've cured myself but i became conscious of it and i also became conscious that some people weren't talking yeah and so every time i would remember you know in a meeting i'd remember and i would then try and bring someone in who had contributed or ask them for their thoughts if i saw someone else like talking over the type of people i'd try and i'd try and sort of you know bring back to the person who was originally talking that sort of interaction is difficult to do outside of like outside of being in a group a real-time group can i ask you sorry i have to ask you why why do you think you you wear or you tend to talk too much as you said what is going on in why is that do you think uh i feel like i should be i should be moved from the coffee table to the couch for this okay i think you're breathing space for that because i'll have to do it no let me tell you why i'm asking but i don't want to hear what you have to say um and it doesn't have to be bad you know i love talking as well and actually i have to pull myself back especially if i'm leading a meeting i behave very differently to if i'm letting someone else leave the meeting or if someone else is leading it but the reason why i'm asking is because an example comes to mind of a meeting i was at at one point where i was working with a group and the business leader was there and she's very visible and as soon as there was a one second silence she'd jump in so that's an example come to mind i never asked her why she was doing that but why do you think that then why do you have the sense that you talk too much you are talking too much why do you think that is well look i think when i was younger a lot of it was around confidence you know uh i think you talk more when you're trying to establish yourself because you know you feel like you have to be an active participant and so you're trying to get recognition or just be noticed i guess i think when you become more senior you don't you don't need to do that particularly as you have more power in the organization you should be able to shift from that not everybody does but that was something that i noticed was i was dominating meetings a lot you know i get feedback about it a bit sometimes it was also because i was trying to because i felt very strongly about my point of view and what i started to realize was if i wanted something to happen i didn't necessarily have to put my point of view forward i could wait and then if someone else put it forward i could i could back them yes uh or not you just let them do it but and if nobody put it forward i could wait till the end and then i could put it forward and actually uh it's more it's more powerful it's more powerful if you do it if you do it after everyone else has spoken well and also it's wonderful to hear that you're not that far off because if other people are coming up with what you are hoping happens or what you're thinking should happen and other people are coming up with it then you know you've got alignment as well and you know that you're in tune with the group as well uh so that's a way of knowing that yeah you're right and it's actually much more satisfying i think as a leader to feel instead of thinking oh i'm going to say this that's the direction people are going to agree with it to go oh people here think in the way that i agree with and i can see them doing that of their own volition that's really satisfying and really gives you a lot of confidence in the team and the group you have you have to give them the space in order to be able to demonstrate it yes yes what you're saying is so much stuff's coming to my mind because one i remember i used to love meetings when i was running a theater company i have to say because of course it was very rare to bring lots of people together in that setup to just talk about the work and and also the meetings were very functional um sometimes they went well sometimes they didn't i love board meetings because i just got to sit with a few people and tell them that was when i spoke a lot because it was mainly me reporting and i'm asking the questions i go oh yeah sounds good oh well okay can you not do that again he's putting us in a very difficult financial position okay so it always it was nice and then the production meetings were great because it really was about bringing all the whole production team together and that was a kind of i wonder how we would have done it if we had an online space because of course i'm talking we had email but not much more then and it was just a real sense of things coming together and for me as the person who was bringing people together it was so nice to have everyone around um and so so i get that and when you're calling the meeting and when you want driving something through i wonder sometimes if i if that had so much importance that i don't know maybe i didn't notice that it was so much more important to me than it was to anyone else maybe in some in some instances well they're not necessarily a bad thing right and and because there is a performance element to to leading a meeting or participating in it like i enjoy that uh you know not always not always but i do like stepping into that role when i get the opportunity to your question before is it more important to you than it is for other people i think the test of a good meeting is how many people are engaged like if you're really into it and nobody else is then it's only a good meeting for one person which is probably not a good meeting yeah you've just said something i was also going to come back to which is you mentioned someone being an active participant and this is something i've been thinking about as well especially with larger groups larger teams that what is active participation because sometimes active participation could be listening that would be me sometimes just sitting and in a way doing a lot of what we're saying now absorbing the group absorbing the team absorbing ideas around us and stuff and that person can be more feeling more of a participant than someone who's coming in and butting in and saying lots of stuff but they're not really engaged with the group and i think that's an interesting thing to be thinking about is that we always see i think we always see talking as a measure of engagement maybe not always but it's the easiest thing and actually there's there's there's more than that and that's sometimes why i struggle sometimes with meetings because i feel like oh maybe you're supposed to say something and i have seen people i'm not very good at that i don't talk because i think i should talk only if someone asks me then i'll say whatever's on my mind but i have seen people talking because they think that's because they should i just find it well if you do a meeting for example with uh someone from sales and someone from pretty much any other area of the company like sales people will not you know they're paid to talk yeah and they're paid to to fill in gaps and and keep talking because uh you know something that they do on a day-to-day basis and so when you bring them into uh into a different dynamic uh i don't want to pay on sales people they perform a great function uh but if you're in a group full of sales people like it's very noisy you're going to be quite strong to get through generally whereas if you're for example you know if you've got sales sales people in the meeting and you've also got people from finance or something you can get into a situation where the sales people like you talked about before you know there's a little gap uh they'll jump into that gap and just they're not necessarily adding any value they're just feeling the air they don't give the room for other people to respond yeah that's the tricky part i think of balancing it i suppose when you're leading a meeting you start to become much more aware of those group dynamics it's not that everyone doesn't notice what is going on but i think that the group dynamics become really important as well and sometimes i find maybe sometimes i find that distracting actually to have to manage that as well as making sure that we get somewhere wherever it is that we want the meeting to go to plus that i'm getting what i need to be getting from that so i mean there's lots of stuff is what i'm saying that you're when you're leading a meeting like that you're operating on lots of different levels it doesn't matter where you get to it matters how you get there like i think there's lots of subtle reinforcement that happens in meetings that as managers particularly you know it's important to be aware of like you know if the female members of the meeting uh get talked over all the time or people take their take their ideas and claim them as their own and no one says anything about it then that's an important cultural market that's happening and as someone leading the meeting you know you can not notice it or you can do it yourself i guess you know or you can not notice it or you can let go you know you can notice it let go or you can try and do something about it and all of those decisions have ramifications you know they all have consequences so i think it's important to to be you know to have that meta understanding of not just what we're doing in this particular meeting but also how are we interacting with each other and is it in line with our values and how we want to be doing it yeah so in a way even though culture does not just get built in a meeting it plays a very important part especially if we do them often it's a really interesting bit the culture of the meeting so in a team or an organization where there are not many meetings there'll be well they could be less important or more important towards culture and i think that there's that aspect of it which is you have to be on your best behavior i think if you're meeting that meeting as well well everybody's watching and particularly the people who aren't you know you talked about people who are actively engaged but not necessarily speaking yeah so how are they engaged they're listening they're watching they're you know they're observing and actually i had an anecdote recently about my dad where uh i was talking to someone who had worked with my dad and he was explaining a trait that neither i or my brother or anyone family had noticed about apparently when like if he was in a meeting and he was getting agitated he had a watch with like an expandable band on it apparently everyone at his work knew this stage one he would start to pull on the band stage two he would take the watch off and then he would stretch the band stage three he would put the watch on the table and start tapping on the face of the watch and if he got to that point uh anyone who was paying attention would be trying to leave the room right and as this guy was telling me the story i was thinking well i remember him having a watch like that i might have even remembered him playing on the band but i didn't put it all together yeah and it was really it was a peculiar feeling that as his child i i did not know his attributes as well as these people who were studying them day in day out because they were in meetings with him and they were observing his behavior and what it meant yeah yeah wow fascinating yeah you are you are you can be under a microscope i think that's on that point about the people who are saying less who actually are more likely to be thank you watching uh this will get picked up so much i remember my uh one of my collaborators say p they used to call me p in the theater company p what was not working no it's okay no you're frowning they knew me better than i do myself oh well well tim i don't know if we decided what today's chat was what we wanted to get from our meeting today in the cafe but it's probably um i don't know if you want to come back we can come back in another another time and continue this conversation but i think that's uh i don't know i'd love to hear listeners thoughts on this because everyone has something to say on meetings let's face it yeah we didn't agree at the beginning what we wanted to get out of this particular meeting oh hello we wanted it to be well my coffee's uh my coffee's finished now so uh that's it meetings over when the coffee's over uh listeners managementcafepodcast at gmail.com for your thoughts in audio or writing we would like to we'd love to hear from you so well tim thank you for that thank you for the meeting i declare the meeting closed now uh listeners that has been our conversation now it's over to you thank you for joining us at the management cafe remember you can subscribe to the show on whatever podcast app you use to make sure you get your weekly dose of reflection our website is management.caf and on twitter we are at management app that's all for this episode from myself kilar orti and our fellow co-host team thank you for listening