How to be effective in meetings when everyone in the room is so different?
Most of the meetings are created because we need to get people involved or simply because we need someone else’s help. We might need to get approval or to present some findings or because we can’t move forward alone, we depend on others to move forward.
Explaining to others what you need might be quite a challenge. Especially when there’s an opportunity to work with a new concept or idea, sometimes it’s really hard to get somewhere as everyone’s head is a universe and everyone might have an opinion.
Understand the type of people in the room
There are 4 types of people according to this article
Dominants. They really like to be heard, are extroverts and they push if needed their own agenda and they have no problem talking with CAPS ON.
Expressives. This group likes to talk and talk a lot. They don’t follow so good the meeting protocol of one at a time and they can easily get emotional.
Analyticals. They need a bit more time to express their ideas, they think carefully what to say next and tend to be more introvert.
Amiables. Basically they avoid conflict and will try to agree whenever possible to be in good terms with everybody.
Engaging people
If you ever been in long meetings, with lots of people you know that most of the time not everyone speaks or says their opinion.
Those groups of people represent what happens in most meetings. One holds the microphone, the others listen, some will argue, some will give up and in the end, no one is really satisfied, well except most of the time for the dominants. If you missed the chance to say something you might try to do it via email with the risk of losing momentum.
Focus
People have limited time for focusing on a topic. It’s around 20min top when listening to someone else. If you have a 1-hour meeting most likely 40min will not be properly used.
When scheduling a meeting be sure to be prepared, always make an agenda. Don’t go to a meeting without a clear purpose or objective in mind. People don’t like to be invited to a meeting where there’s no clear structure or planned outcome.
It’s good to have roles and rules
A good way to prevent the personality issue is to give tasks during the meeting. Define who will be taking notes, who will moderate or facilitate the meeting and if applicable, who’s the decider.
Take your time to explain the agenda, ask if everyone agrees to stick with it as if to signing a contract. If you would like to moderate the agenda, ask for permission to be the moderator as this will give you some freedom and authority later on.
More drawings, less talking
Most of the time a meeting is like a performance contest. The better you’re articulating your ideas, most likely the better your ideas will succeed.
Unfortunately for some people, having good ideas doesn’t mean they are good at convincing people in a verbal way.
According to this Harvard study, most people are good at visual thinking and less prone to verbal thinking. That means, we tend to think with pictures in our head, not words. Some of us need to draw to express what we think, but not always have the courage to step in front of all of our colleagues and explain the way we “see it in our heads”. Below you can find a good exercise to overcome this issue.
Remove the spotlight
In order to get the best outcome in a meeting and include everybody, you can choose to remove the spotlight, especially for the “quiet ones” or shy people.
You can do this by switching from one person standing in front of the white board, to many pens-many papers. For this, you need a few post-its and pens for each participant.
There are 2 main benefits:
1. By doing this you can invite everyone to express themselves in a written form. By writing, you give the meeting attendees a fixed time to think and write down their ideas without the pressure of all the eyes looking at you.
2. After all ideas have been written in the post its, you can invite each participant to hang all their post its in the wall and one by one to present their ideas. Alternatively, if you want to avoid unnecessary discussions, you can suggest a silent critique. With this method, you can invite people to review all ideas in silence, take time to go through all of them and if needed you can invite them to vote using sticky dots.
After this will be very easy to recognize what’s the best possible idea in the room, regardless of your personality type. You can follow up from there into a more refined session, perhaps during another meeting.
This all depends on having a good moderator, providing the feeling of safe space and respect among the attendees.