How an organisation’s culture affects your meeting habits
Over the last few weeks I’ve been asked by a few colleagues to give some of my tips for running good workshops and meetings. As I was dredging my brain for good ideas I was thinking “oh maybe this could make a good blog”, which you can read here.
As I was drafting all my top tips, the service designer inside me started thinking about systems. As much as you can learn skills and techniques as an individual, you’re always going to be sitting within an organisation. Culture and norms are just as important in determining how meetings happen as the skills of the individuals leading the meeting.
In this blog post I’m going to borrow heavily from Frederic Laloux and the movement behind “Reinventing Organisations”. He talks a lot about different organisational systems and how they affect how people and teams do work. The concepts in Reinventing Organisations are a good anchor for thinking through how an organisation’s culture and structure influence its meetings.
Ultimately, I think before you arrange any kind of meeting you need to be able to say to yourself:
We want to achieve this thing. We can’t achieve this thing without meeting. We need these specific people there and we need them to be able to contribute these things. Then when it’s over, this is how we’ll remember what we learned and agreed.
I’m going to go through each point in turn and explain how your organisation’s culture can produce default behaviours and habits around meetings and workshops.
1. Does your meeting have a point?
This was my first tip in my top tips for meetings blog. It might be the goal-obsessed millenial in me, but I love to have an objective to align all my work behind; even meetings.
When I talk about a purpose or goal, I mean one or two specific things you want to be able to achieve. In the language of Theories of Change: what’s the output you want to deliver, how does that output help deliver an objective, and how does that objective help achieve your team’s outcomes.
But what does that have to do with an organisation’s culture? Well there’s a few things that might help:
Is there a clear strategy or roadmap? These key statements should exist for staff to hang every decision from: “I’m doing this work to help the organisation achieve this”. These are the kinds of thing you should be able to tie in with your meeting objectives. If you struggle with writing meeting objectives, think about how actionable, understandable and discoverable the strategy and roadmap are.
Are staff working at/ above capacity? When you’re very busy and someone asks to speak with you, it can be easy to default to a response of “put some time in my calendar, let’s talk about this separately”. (I know I’m guilty of having done this many times in my career!) But when you’re very busy, you don’t always have the brainspace to actually prepare the meeting, which can lead to it being a bit unstructured. No doubt you’ll spend the first 10 minutes remembering why you’re meeting in the first place! If you’re noticing people talking about time pressure, and you feel like that’s affecting how meetings are run, you might want to raise that with someone senior who can help resolve your capacity issues.
2. Does it have to be a meeting?
A linked question I’ve learned to ask myself before asking for people’s time is “what are all the ways we can achieve this goal”. Do you necessarily need a meeting to do what you need to do?
Whether this question is asked, and how it’s answered, can be determined by a few organisational systems.
How do you make decisions? If you find yourself feeling frustrated at the amount of meetings you have, you may want to think about your team’s decision-making process. Quite often people have already arrived at a good course of action, but they call a meeting with their team-mates to double check because they feel like they can’t take decisions for the team. Thinking about and improving your decision-making process — what kinds of decision different people can take and how to take them without needing a meeting — may just help resolve that frustration.
How do you communicate? I’ve also heard people talk about a “meeting culture” in an organisation, where the default response to many issues is to arrange a meeting. As well as showing some issues with the decision-making system, I think this could also be explained by what Laloux calls the communication system. People create meetings because they see that as the optimal way to communicate information or broadcast a decision that’s been taken. Especially in an asynchronous or remote working environment, this isn’t always necessarily the best option. In previous teams I’ve found that team charters and user manuals make it much easier to optimise your communications systems and also decide whether “it needs to be a meeting”.
Hierarchy can compound both these things. In some cases hierarchy may be baked into the decision-making process (everything has to be approved by discussing with line manager) or the communication process (think about if all-staff briefings or steering group meetings are the most common means of engaging senior stakeholders). These examples produce a culture of briefings and asking for permission in everyone, making it easier for staff to say “yes it has to be a meeting” more often than they potentially need. If you sense this happening and you’re frustrated by it, it may be worth taking a step back to examine the strength of hierarchy and how it affects communications or decision-making. If you get the chance to feedback, you may want to look at some of the tips in the Reinventing Organisations wiki around Information Flow, Decision Making and meetings in different types of organisation.
3. Are the right people there, why are they there?
A classic! Ever been to a meeting and wondered why you were there or what’s expected of you? And how has that made you feel? As someone that loves coming to meetings prepared I know my personal preference is “tell me everything”, though I know the organiser might not always have time to share that with me!
While some of this is down to you as an individual (I mention this in my top tips blog), following Frederic Laloux you could also relate this to 2 different organisational systems.
Communications. To repeat a point from a previous section, sometimes meetings are called because that’s seen as the optimal way to share communication. So everyone is always invited to every meeting, and many people usually come, because of a fear of missing out. Especially if you’re in a disperse, part-remote team you can’t guarantee that everyone you want to talk to will be available at the same time. If you notice you’re being invited to a lot of meetings where you don’t think you’re needed or useful, think about the team’s communication systems and potentially propose some asynchronous means of catching up with what’s going on, of answering people’s questions, of offering your opinion, and contributing to decisions.
Resource allocation. If you feel like you need to invite a tonne of people to a meeting, or are not sure who the right people to invite are, you might also want to think about how well defined the roles and responsibilities are in your team/ organisation. Is it clear what everyone does, and how they might be impacted by a decision you make or a discussion you want to have? Read more here on the reinventing organisations wiki on defining and allocating roles. Clarity around roles, responsibilities and relationships can help work out who to invite and how they can help you (and hopefully how you can help them too!).
4. Who talks, who’s silent?
Inviting people to a meeting can be an exercise of power. It’s you saying “I need your time, please give it to me”. So what happens when you invite a bunch of people to a meeting but not everyone speaks or has a chance to contribute?
The people behind Liberating Structures (read more on this website) have captured some techniques for improving how groups interact and work together. If you’ve not used any liberating structures, definitely check them out; it’s really changed how I approach all my work!
Behind all of the structures is a simple premise; make it easy for many people to contribute to a discussion in ways that suit them.
Conventional structures are either too inhibiting (presentations, status reports and managed discussions) or too loose and disorganized (open discussions and brainstorms) to creatively engage people in shaping their own future. They frequently generate feelings of frustration and/or exclusion and fail to provide space for good ideas to emerge and germinate. (from liberatingstructures.com)
If you’re frustrated about how contributions in meetings are managed (as a participant or facilitator), you can pick up these techniques. But I think there’s two parts of organisational culture you might also want to consider, that may influence habits around contributing in meetings.
Hierarchy. Think about who talks first, how long they speak for, and how they pass the discussion along. If you notice the first person to speak is ‘higher up’ or that people ‘lower down’ don’t speak up so much, you might want to look at how your organisation is set up. There’s a stronger power dynamic in more hierarchical organisations (towards the red end of Laloux’s spectrum of organisations, read more at this link). In the absence of alternative meeting structures, that power dynamic empowers some people (at the top) to speak up and disempowers others (at the bottom). Liberating structures might solve this to some extent, but if this is a source of frustration you may also want to look at who holds power in your team.
The Feedback System. This is another of Laloux’s organisational systems. He thinks people benefit from a structured way to share comments with each other, as it helps resolve conflicts and helps everyone learn and grow. My feeling is that if your feedback system is working well, and staff are used to raising things with each other, then they’re more likely to feel empowered to talk and give their opinions. So it may be worth having a look at how team members feedback to each other, as enhancing that may improve your meetings (as well as many other benefits!).
5. Who will remember or know what happened?
And finally... If a tree falls in the wood and no-one’s there to hear it, does it make a sound? If a meeting happens but there’s no record of it, did it even happen?
There’s three components of how this affects the functioning of a team.
- Fear Of Missing Out. People start asking to come to meetings they maybe don’t need to be at, just in order to be involved and to hear what’s happening. That’s a huge time sink for your team.
- Potential duplication. If you don’t share the outcome of your work, it stops other people from factoring it into their own work; potentially leading to duplicated effort.
- No backup if your memory fails. What’s stopping you forgetting what you discussed or decided if you don’t write some notes, and store them somewhere safe? You might end up having to have the same meeting again because you’ve forgotten what you discussed!
A lot of this relates to the communication system, which I’ve talked about a lot already. I think there’s two other organisational traits that may influence how meetings are recorded.
Transparency and collaboration. An open and transparent information flow is key to collaboration. In a culture founded on transparency and collaboration, you would always make sure the people that weren’t in a meeting could find out what happened in the discussion. So if you notice this doesn’t happen and you feel frustrated about it, you may want to go a little deeper to look at your organisation’s expectations and methods for transparency and collaboration.
Workload. Writing up notes and sharing them around takes time. If at some point you ask if anyone’s happy to take notes and no-one says yes, is it possible that they’re overly busy and worried about the implications of putting their hand up to take on more responsibility? Think about the distribution of work and make sure you’re not asking too much of your team-mates or of yourself.
Remember above all that documentation is there to empower: think about a medium which is accessible, understandable, and that can be engaged with or questioned by everyone in your team. How can your notes and playbacks help and support others?
Wrapping up
I’ve got two main takeaways for you from this post
First of all, remember that you are just an individual. The way meetings are run can be as much about organisational culture as it is about your individual skills as a facilitator or contributor. So if you’re feeling frustrated about the meetings you’re part of, look also at organisational culture, in particular:
- how purpose and objectives are communicated
- the decision-making system
- the information flow
- feedback systems
- resource allocation
- the strength of hierarchy
Second, talk yourself through this paragraph to help work out if you need to meet, why, who should come, and what you want to get from your participants.
We want to achieve this thing
We can’t achieve this thing without meeting.
We need these specific people to help and we need them to be able to contribute these things.
When it’s over, this is how we’ll help others use and build from what we learned and agreed
