How to conduct team discussions on complex topics
How many times have you attended team meetings/discussions and left feeling super productive? I’m guessing that meetings being productive is a rare phenomenon at most workplaces. Most team meetings and discussions drain out productive time and mental energy. Without actually contributing to progress, they might make one feel that they’ve done ‘something’.
This becomes even more important and difficult to handle, in situations when discussions are about big decisions/complex topics. Specially for start-ups, when you have to make a lot of important decisions on a regular basis, if you let your meetings slow you down by letting them be energy-sapping and inconclusive, it’ll hurt you.
Over time, I’ve experimented with multiple approaches of reducing the size of team in the discussion, by breaking it down into parts, and by fixing a time duration for each part. Before we come to a recommended approach, let’s see what are we doing while trying to conduct better team discussions (these are the rules that I try to follow):
- Improve signal and reduce noise
- Give everyone time to reflect and process information
- Keep people together, specially when moving forward
Now, let’s come to how can we achieve this in practice. I read about Jeff Bezos’s way of running meetings through memos and found it to be really effective (I’ve tried it!). It’s easy to see that by keeping team size small, you’re reducing the noise and making it easy for people to stay and move together. Also, preparing the memo makes it easier for people to cancel out noises in their own head, and starting with reading the memo makes it easier to reflect & process information. I’m going to stick with this method and carry out a few experiments on top of it. Meanwhile, I’m leaving this note with a small list of don’ts to continuously remind myself of the potential pitfalls:
- Don’t let anyone be unprepared: Don’t start by setting up a meeting and blocking time. Instead, prefer to start by setting up an agenda listing out the aspects that are to be discussed. In case there’s a note/presentation/list of questions that everyone needs to see, share it with everyone and ask them to come prepared.
- Let new people observe: Watch out for new people as it’s easiest for them to add a lot of noise to the meetings. They are likely to have the least understanding of context and the most willingness to show their worth. A good way to help is to ease their anxiety by telling them it’s ok even if they simply observe. In case you are the leader who wants to bring new people in the discussion, you should do it by asking specific questions where they can add most value.
- Clarify the nature of expected outcome: A lot of times, complex decisions cannot be taken in one go because there are many interdependencies. This makes it important to break the flow into parts and clarify the agenda before the start of the meeting. For example, the meeting can be to simply introduce the concept of a new product flow without having to create a project plan on how different teams will go about it.
- Know when to move on and lead the way: If you’re leading a discussion, it is important to keep the group moving forward at a balanced pace. Too slow movement or too fast movement will disengage few participants and the quality of outcome will drop. If you feel someone has been repeating the same point, or that the group is stuck at some place, let them park it and move on.
- Don’t catch people out of energy: Final word is to not have important and high intensity discussions immediately post heavy lunches and extremely late in the day. If you want to plan a tough discussion, keep it as early in the day as possible. This will make sure that people have enough cognitive energy available to give their best in the discussion.
For any suggestion/advise, please feel free to leave your comment.
