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Book review: Standing in the Fire: Leading High-Heat Meetings with Calm, Clarity and Courage10/2/2017
I am a big reader and will occasionally share reflections on the books I have recently read. “Fire is often the best indicator that people care about the issue with which they are struggling” (Dressler, 2010, p. 10). Meeting leaders often shy away from conflict, controversy, emotion or other human items that are not on their neatly organized agenda. Dressler describes how all of these messy parts of human interaction can add to a greater whole if a meeting leader has developed the capacity to hold the moment in order to be able to facilitate the group finding common ground. His book, Standing in the Fire: Leading High-Heat Meetings with Calm, Clarity and Courage, describes how meeting leaders, facilitators and conveners can cultivate greater capacity to regain their balance when surprises knock them off their equilibrium. Six Ways of Standing Dressler describes six “ways of standing” that are key to leading high-heat meetings. These include standing with self-awareness; standing in the here and now; standing with an open mind; knowing what you stand for; dancing with surprises; standing with compassion. He then describes ongoing practices to help cultivate one’s capacity to embody these “ways of standing.” These include physical centering, mindfulness meditation, compassion journaling and breathing, affirmations. He describes practices for day of readiness, in the moment practices and culminating practices to leave the meeting behind and harvest the learning from it. Increasing Your Capacity to Choose Your Reaction By using mindfulness and reflective practices regularly, meeting conveners can increase their capacity to choose their own reaction to high heat situations during the meetings they lead and participate in. Dressler describes in useful detail the essential elements of being a “nonanxious presence” for a group and how to cultivate that aptitude within yourself. He does not shy away from describing times from his own personal experience when he was emotionally “hooked” or handled a situation with less than grace. He also makes it clear that you do not simply come to the state of being able to embody these “stands” and stay there but rather continue to grow into you capacity to stand in the fire this way. He provides tools for analyzing instances where you are triggered emotionally and to learn from these instances; describes how the brain habitually reacts to stressful situations by escaping into worries about the past or future and how to use attention and stillness to bring yourself back into the here and now; how increasing your open-mindedness includes embodying humility, suspending judgment, and inviting curiosity. Accessible and Straightforward The book is very accessible, provides useful examples and lays out in a very thorough and logical fashion how to enhance one’s capacity to create and hold the emotional space for a high-heat meeting. By describing both the ideal and “how we burn ourselves,” Dressler makes the concepts he is discussing straightforward. Dressler’s reflective exercises help bring what he is writing about to life. I would recommend this book to anyone who regularly convenes meetings where important issues are being discussed.
Simon Sinek has made the concept of starting with why popular. Through first his TED talk and then his book, he shows how starting with ‘why’ instead of ‘how’ or ‘what’ connects you with your audience more quickly. This concept has wide applicability from the large questions of why you do your work to the more focused one of why you are calling together a group of people for a particular task (otherwise known as a meeting). What’s your goal? In planning a meeting, starting with the why is key. Why am I have this meeting? Why am I bringing this group together? What can this group do together that another could not do? What is my goal and what outcome do I hope to have by having this meeting? Opening and Closing With your goal and intended outcome clear, you can then move to the “what” and the “how.” The ‘what’ will flow from the why. It is helpful to think about another concept. How many ‘what’s’ or agenda items can you reasonably open and bring to closure during the time you have available? Cycle of experience
Taking time for closing Groups often dive into a topic without allowing time for coming to some resolution. This resolution does not necessarily have to be a decision about the issue. It could simply be to outline next steps, such as further study, or delegation to a subgroup to come back with a proposal. You may feel awkward when you interject and pull the group back before someone jumps to another topic. It may feel like it is slowing progress. Yet this pause actually saves time and energy in the long run because you take the time to clearly delineate your next steps. Your brain will thank you too because the majority of the energy your brain expends is in shifting gears. Did you get it in writing? To be most effective, designating someone to capture notes from the discussion and especially on the next steps for each item is key. Without this, too often groups discuss a multitude of topics and walk away without a clear notion of whether there is agreement on how to proceed. This saves on confusion on roles and responsibilities as well as checking for understanding.
You probably already know all this. And it is too easy to miss implementing these simple steps in practice. This meeting planning tool can help put these simple steps into action. Let's talk. I work with teams and organizations to improve their effectiveness, by identifying challenges that impede progress and helping the group create processes that will work for them. Today’s workplace is rampant with badly designed and facilitated meetings. Whether face-to-face or held via conference call or web cam, the badly designed meeting is a waste of everyone’s time. Even worse is the enervating impact it can have on a chunk of your work day afterwards as well you waste time complaining about the boring and pointless meeting with your co-workers. Is there a better way? Meetings can be productive and useful – even invigorating – if they are designed well. A good first move is to step back and consider why you are calling the meeting. Especially for a regular meeting – what is its purpose? Do those who regularly attend the meeting know what the purpose is? Clarify what your goal is for the meeting. An easy what to define your goal is the complete the sentence, “By the end of the meeting, we will have…” And once you define your goal, if you discover that your primary objective is to deliver information, consider other delivery mechanisms such as an email, memo or a video or audio announcement. Why did I get invited to this meeting?Make sure that each person at the meeting can readily answer this question. Given your goal, who needs to be there? Who knows about the topic? Who needs to be consulted or give input? Who will be impacted by what will be discussed? People checking their phones in the middle of your meeting is a good sign that you did not do a good enough job articulating why they needed to be there and what they have to offer. Getting connected Let me state the obvious: your meetings include people. Yet when calling a meeting, people often forget the obvious. How do you help the group get to know each other – beyond a rapid fire round of names and titles? How do you help people get grounded and focused on your topic? A check in at the beginning of the meeting helps people connect to each other and to the task at hand. Some facilitators ask the question, ‘what do you need to put aside to be fully present at this meeting?’ Oh I missed that email Help your meeting participants be prepared to tackle the task at hand. Give them enough time to consider any materials ahead of time. To even the playing field, Jeff Bezos of Amazon sets time at the beginning of the meeting for a period of silence during which everyone reads the preparatory material. This allows those who are behind to catch up and it allows those who have read the material to review it again. Everyone then has it fresh in mind. Timing Given your goals for the meeting, how long will take to achieve each item? Be realistic and allow enough time for the discussion you need. An overstuffed agenda with no space for the conversation you need to have often means the group often leaves the meeting with multiple loose ends. Then it will end up having to circle back to the item again. You don’t have to do everything yourself If you are facilitating the meeting, involve others in the meeting to play useful roles, such as a time-keeper and note-taker. If your meeting will involve splitting into small groups, ask each group to self-select people to play those three key roles. What’s next? Allow enough time to open, consider options and close each item during the space of the meeting. Leave time at the end to wrap up, review what was decided and what the next steps are. Do this out loud, to check for agreement, and then in writing – on a whiteboard or using a project management system or a simple email follow up with next steps and assignments.
Download the meetings worksheet to plan a better meeting. Let's talk. I work with teams and organizations to improve their effectiveness, by identifying challenges that impede progress and helping the group create processes that will work for them. Teams, boards, task forces and other working groups often stumble over decision-making. It is often not actually about making decisions. Rather it is that the group has never had a conversation about how they make decisions – what is their process? Are they working on consensus? Majority rule? The boss decides? Often the group has a practice. Yet if that practice is not made explicit, then misunderstandings frequently occur. Have we decided or are we still discussing?A very useful model for understanding what often happens comes from Sam Kaner’s book, Facilitators Guide to Participatory Decision Making. When a group is considering an issue, ideally there is a discussion that considers a wide range of options. Then the discussion comes to a clear end point with a decision. Once a decision is made the group moves to action. This image illustrates this ideal. What happens more frequently is that those who are more action oriented believe a decision has been made. At the same time those who want to consider more options believe the item is still under discussion. This image shows this too frequent reality of group process The value of separating the how from the what I was once on a large cross-functional team working together on an enterprise wide IT project. In doing some work with the team, I uncovered that one of the team members’ biggest fears was that each person, representing their department, would have wish list items. They feared the group would end up in conflict over priorities. And feared that a political process would override considering options on their merits. We took time before we had to make any specific decisions to talk through how we were going to make the decision. We framed overarching project goals and then agreed to prioritize the options/wish list items based on how they aligned with the goals. We then created a decision tree out of the criteria the group had jointly discussed. When it ultimately came time to prioritize our features list, the group was able to make the decision is just one meeting. The time we had spent up front saved the group time when it was decision making time and spared the group the conflict it feared. Discuss Decision Making Taking the time to have a discussion about how your group makes decisions helps take the guess work out of the equation. For each decision the team needs to be clear what issue is being decided. In the course of the discussion, multiple issues may have been raised making it a bit cloudy what is actually being discussed and decided. Then clarifying who is deciding this particular issue – is it a team decision? Would it be helpful to have a subset work on the issue and bring back a recommendation? Is the discussion serving as an input while the decision ultimately lies with the person in charge? Groups often want to jump to action and resist taking time on ‘process’ issues. Yet taking the time can actually save time in the long run.
I work with teams and organizations to improve their effectiveness, by identifying challenges that impede progress and helping the group create processes that will work for them. Have a team or group that needs help? Let's talk. |
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Grace Social Sector Consulting, LLC, owns the copyright in and to all content in, including transcripts and audio of the Mission: Impact podcast and all content on this website, with all rights reserved, including right of publicity.
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