I have been led to create a blog series centered on being able to use meetings to collaborate effectively. I personally use meetings to help my businesses and clients collaborate as a team to evolve and grow. I really want to help others be able to use the tools I have developed over the course of my career as a consultant and business owner. It may help you be less frustrated in meetings because you may gain some insights as to why participants behave a certain way.
Many people have negative feelings towards meetings. To be completely candid, in the past, I did not always like meetings. I found that many meetings I participated were a frustrating waste of time and often did not produce any results. I used to be annoyed when I had to go to meetings for work because I felt my time could be spent more productively actually doing work instead of being stuck in a room or conference call discussing work.
If meetings were such a nuisance to me, you may wonder why I use meetings to promote collaboration. When working on anything with a group of people, it is necessary to get the group together in some way, whether it be in person, over the phone, over email, etc, so they can get aligned around a goal and communicate with each other as they work towards a common goal. A meeting can be used to make an informed decision on a specific topic. For a project, a series of regularly occurring meetings may need to take place to keep a group aligned and focused as they work together. If a problem comes up, it may take a series of undetermined follow-up meetings to work together.
There are predictable and common behavioral patterns that are found in meetings and there are conscious psychological methods to effectively work with these behavioral patterns to create a fun and collaborative meeting environment that can get results. Meetings can actually be short, decisive, productive, and even enjoyable. I am going to share some high level tools to be able to create this productive meeting environment.
Although these tools are meant to empower the meeting facilitators that are responsible for the overall success and momentum of the meeting, these tools will be also be helpful to anyone who attends meetings. Even if you are not running the meeting, you can add value consciously and become a leader in the meeting that helps to change and set the tone of the meeting.
SO, WHY ARE MEETINGS OFTEN INEFFECTIVE?
Below are three reasons I have found to be the root causes behind ineffective meetings:
Change is scary
One of the main reasons why meetings foster certain behavioral patterns is rooted in the primary purpose of meetings. The purpose of a meeting is to typically shepherd in a change or to decide not to change. The purpose of the meeting can be to obtain a simple yes/no decision. The purpose of the meeting can be to have a group make a decision on a larger issue or question that has far reaching impact.
Regardless of the magnitude of the change, people often find change to be scary or at least undesirable. As a result, people are often resistant to change and will subconsciously do things to prevent change. Change disrupts the status quo. Change threatens people’s comfort zones.
There are many theories as to why people react negatively to change. Theories such as Maslow’s theory points to the fact that people’s basic needs are being threatened. Maslow identified 5 types of needs:
- Physiological needs – Psychological needs relate to the needs of the human body such as air, water, food.
- Safety needs – Safety needs relate to personal safety, financial security, health and overall well-being, and vulnerability to negative events such as accidents and illness.
- Love and Belonging needs- Love and Belonging relate to the feeling of belonging in the form of friendship, intimacy, and family. It relates to our tribal nature.
- Esteem needs – Esteem needs relate to the need to feel respected by others as well as to have self-esteem, and self-respect. are for a higher position within a group. Maslow noted two versions of esteem needs: The “lower” version is the need for respect from others. The “higher” version is self-respect.
- Self-actualization – Self-actualization needs relate to our potential to become what we are capable of becoming, which would be our greatest achievement.
If any of these needs are perceived to be threatened, defense mechanisms kick in. People aren’t even aware they feel threatened. They experience a form of emotional dysregulation. Emotional dysregulation is a term typically associated with very strong emotional responses, but they actually can apply to subtle responses such as passive aggressive behavior, shutting down, subtle bullying, etc. Emotional dysregulation is usually linked to an early childhood traumatic experience. The word, “trauma” typically associated with very traumatic experiences like physical and emotional abuse, but trauma can also be associated with a parent’s preference for one sibling over another, or a parent dismissing a child’s perspective, or a child not getting what he wanted growing up. These events become traumatic to a child because the child perceives the events as a threat to their needs. The parent’s intention may not have been to make the child feel unsafe. It is the perception of the childhood events that create the potential for adult emotional dysregulation.
As adults, we sometimes project our childhood experiences onto our present day experiences. We often attribute motivations we perceived in our parents, siblings, childhood friends, etc onto other people. We often attribute our own motives for doing something onto other people’s actions.
I will also outline some common archetypes that you will notice in meetings and helpful ways to respond to them. You may even fall into some of these archetypes.
In addition to being able to understand other people’s behavior, you will also be able to look inward and understand your own behavior. It will be important for you to be able look at yourself and truly take stock of your strengths and weaknesses. Are you making meetings difficult for others? Do you engage in some of the predictable behaviors?
Everyone has their own dysregulated emotional behaviors whether they are large or small. This blog series will hopefully help you not judge these behaviors in a negative light, but view them consciously and compassionately. We can choose to act more consciously as we react to change and we can choose to respond more consciously to people as they react to change.
Differing Agendas
Another reason why meetings are sometimes ineffective is because meeting participants may have their own agenda. These agendas may not have anything to do with the higher purpose of the meeting. As you engage and interact with the various meeting participants you will be able to gauge their agenda(s) and motivation(s) to be in the meeting. You will be provided tools to help bring focus back to the meeting goals and away from disparate goals of the meeting participants.
Poor Communication
Meetings are often ineffective due to poor communication before, during, and after the meeting. I will provide suggested communication protocols and tools to help engage the right people and reach the meeting objective.
A CONSCIOUS AND COMPASSIONATE APPROACH TO MEETINGS:
It takes a lifetime of experiences with different people to truly learn and understand others and also learn and understand ourselves. We are all more alike than we often realize. We are all sentient human beings who experience the same emotions, although we may not even be conscious of these emotions, and may also express them differently. If we can understand that, it is much easier to get along with each other and collaborate together even if on the surface level we seem to be so very different. We all want to feel safe, loved, and respected. We all just have different ways to obtain the love and respect we desire. Some people feel that being “right” is the way to get respect. Some people feel that bullying is a way to feel safe. Some people feel that not saying anything at all so they can stay hidden is a way to feel safe. I will try to quickly help you identify the different archetypes of behavior and ways to quickly engage with them in a compassionate and effective way. This helps engage as many meeting participants as possible to be able to make an informed and comprehensive decision as a cohesive group.