How Facilitated Leadership Can Help You Overcome 7 Common Project Pitfalls

January 17, 2013 2 Comments


Facilitative leadership provides the best assurance that team leads/ project managers can overcome project pitfalls.  Borrowing from the PMBoK (ie, Project Management Institute Body of Knowledge) and other published sources, following are seven of the most common project pitfalls. A discussion about each follows below.

Using Facilitative LeadershipTo Overcome Project Management Pitfalls

Using Facilitative Leadership
To Overcome Project Management Pitfalls

7 Project Pitfalls

  1. Abandonment of Planning
  2. Feature (Scope) Creep
  3. Omitting Necessary Tasks
  4. Overly Optimistic Schedule
  5. Suboptimal Requirements Definition
  6. Underestimating Testing
  7. Weak Team

Abandonment of Planning 

Do not abandon your plan or the planning effort. No matter how proactive you are, some contributors will under perform, customers will request changes, and technical issues will prevent you from delivering some features on time. It’s not a question of “if” but “when”. As soon as you start to deviate from your plan, intelligently refactor, but stick to it. Never abandon your plan.

Feature (Scope) Creep

As time goes on, customers learn more about their needs and they come up with new features and ways of improving existing ones. Don’t let these changes throw your project plan out of control. Gather the feedback, analyze it, prioritize it, document it, and schedule the changes as mutually agreed upon. You’re not going to build the perfect product in one release. Deliver on your existing commitments, and try to facilitate deeper understanding about many the change requests. Omissions can be quite costly, so don’t immediately discount the value of understanding.

Omitting Necessary Tasks 

A project schedule should not simply comprise the tasks required to develop product and process features. It should also include other derivative activities, such as interacting with customers, writing detailed functional specifications, and receiving technical training. Team-support activities cannot be skipped and therefore should not be ignored when baselining a project schedule.

Overly Optimistic Schedule

Meeting schedules should be aggressive, yet realistic. Demanding an overly optimistic schedule greatly reduces your chance of completing a project on time. Be aggressive with your plan, but remain realistic.

“Even particularly smart people in extremely high-performing situations will consistently underestimate how much time it takes to complete certain tasks.”—Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize

Suboptimal Requirements Definition

While showing illusional progress, coding before requirements gathering actually delays project completions. Spending time early refining requirements can save weeks later on.

Underestimating Testing 

Project tend to underestimate how much effort is required to test a major release. As a rule of thumb, one-third of the entire project should be spent testing and fixing defects for major releases. Consensual understanding of test results and implications is key to stakeholder ownership.

Weak Team

Various resources claim that there is as much as a ten-to-one efficiency ratio between top performers and mediocre ones. Second-rate members contribute to project failures in many ways. They deliver late, do stuff that doesn’t support the project, and allow defects in their work that lacks the level of quality deemed acceptable by you and other stakeholders. Select your team members carefully. At the end of the day, even the best project manager can’t succeed with a weak team.

Facilitation Skills

The FAST curriculum on Professional Facilitation Skills details the responsibilities and dynamics mentioned above. Remember friends, nobody is smarter than everybody, so consult your FAST Facilitator Reference Manual or attend a FAST professional facilitative leadership training workshop offered around the world (see MG Rush for a current schedule — an excellent way to earn 40 PDUs from PMI, CDUs from IIBA, or CEUs).

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Four Activities to Efficiently and Effectively Wrap-up a Meeting

December 27, 2012 7 Comments


Here is how to facilitate the four most important activities to properly wrap-up a meeting or workshop: 1-Review, 2-Next Steps, 3-Communications, and 4-Assessment. None of the following should ever be skipped entirely, so expand and contract based on your situation and constraints.

1-Review

Wrap-up

Do not relive the meeting; simply review the outputs, decisions, assignments, etc. Focus on the results and deliverable of each agenda step and not on how you got there. Participants do not need a transcription, they need to be reminded about the takeaways, and be offered the opportunity to ask for additional information or clarification before the meeting ends.

2-Next Steps

There are various methods and treatments of open items and formal assignments, such as roles and responsibilities. For additional and detailed support see How to Transform Your Responsibility Matrix Into a GANTT Chart for help building a RASI matrix and How to Manage the Parking Lot and Wrap-up Meetings for helping to manage the Parking Lot or Refrigerator. Once the next steps and assignments are clear, the meeting is nearly over.

3-Communications

Here you lead the participants to agree on what they will tell other stakeholders was accomplished during the meetings.  It is a good idea if the participants sound as if they were in the same meeting, so take a few moments to homogenize the rhetoric and help them agree on what they will tell people who ask. Minimally consider two audiences, and record the bullets or sound bites for each, namely: their superiors and other stakeholders (eg, peers or customers). See How to Communicate Meeting and Workshop Results for detailed support.

4-Assessment

Get feedback on how you did. Set up or mark a white board by the exit door and create two columns, typically PLUS and DELTA (ie, the Greek symbol ∆ or “change”) but also known as Benefits & Concerns and other cultural specific labels. Have each participant write down on a small Post-it® note, at least one thing they liked about the meeting (+) and one thing they would change (∆). Ask them to mount each note in its respective column as they exit. Again see  How to Manage the Parking Lot and Wrap-up Meetings for detailed support.

Effective leaders will not disband their meetings until participants have been offered a final opportunity to comment or question, action steps have been discussed, messaging has been agreed to, and feedback for continuous improvement has been solicited. Until next week, continue to fortify your skill set with tools and improvement suggestions available in many of our prior postings.

Become Part of the Solution, Improve Your Facilitation Skills

The FAST curriculum on Professional Facilitation Skills details the responsibilities and dynamics mentioned above. Remember friends, nobody is smarter than everybody, so consult your FAST Facilitator Reference Manual or attend a FAST professional facilitative leadership training workshop offered around the world (see MG Rush for a current schedule — an excellent way to earn 40 PDUs from PMI, CDUs from IIBA, or CEUs).

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How to Build a Roles and Responsibility Matrix for Multiple Sites

December 20, 2012 3 Comments


 

Here is a roles and responsibilities matrix that can help you manage more complicated situations than the traditional RACI model (or its equivalent) discussed in How to Transform Your Responsibility Matrix Into a GANTT Chart.

Roles and Responsibilities for Multiple Sites

Using the table above as an illustrative template, following is the content suggested by this method that need to be developed and facilitated. The suggested content is coupled with additional explanations of the column headings.

The first section provides details about the Activity or Task that need to be assigned and completed. Since the details will not fit comfortably into a spreadsheet cell, the cell could be coded and refer to another document with additional details. As the details may or may not be complete at the time of the assignment, there may be a separate individual or group who takes on the role to author and provide the details. When initially logged, the details are either complete (y for yes) or not (n for not).

Since identical tasks may be carried out in multiple facilities, code the facilities in the Location section. There could be more than two facilities of course. If more than two, you might substitute “A” for all instead of “B” for both.

The WHO section captures who will be responsible for the activity or task at each respective location. If necessary, you can add an additional column indicating their backup or who may be supporting them.

The Frequency section refers to how often the activity or task needs to be performed. The due date captures WHEN the activity or task should be completed. For repetitive activities or tasks, the coding shown suggests the following:

  • W = weekly
  • M = monthly
  • Q = quarterly
  • A = annually
  • V = variable or ad hoc

The last section captures the intensity or concentration of effort required to complete the task. While frequently shown as hours per month, you could substitute FTE (ie, full-time equivalent) or whatever measurement works best in your culture.

Finally, you could append the table with a resource column that estimates how much financial capital or currency is required to support the activity or task. Clearly this is a tool that you can modify to your own situation, cultural expectations, and terms—so experiment freely.

Become Part of the Solution, Improve Your Facilitation Skills

The FAST curriculum on Professional Facilitation Skills details the responsibilities and dynamics mentioned above. Remember friends, nobody is smarter than everybody, so consult your FAST Facilitator Reference Manual or attend a FAST professional facilitative leadership training workshop offered around the world (see MG Rush for a current schedule — an excellent way to earn 40 PDUs from PMI, CDUs from IIBA, or CEUs).

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Taking Charge of Poorly Led Meetings When You are Not the Leader

December 13, 2012 10 Comments


We are not suggesting that you take over lame meetings but there are some things you can do to improve the meeting without stepping on the toes of the meeting leader.

Situation

The situation is this: You are attending a meeting. It is failing because the leader has neglected some or many of the rules of good meeting management. What can you do?

Everyone is Sitting

Taking Charge

If all participants, including the leader, are sitting down, take a marker and stand up. Suggest to the leader that you can help by assisting in recording what is happening. Try to summarize what seems to be the purpose and direction (for lack of an agenda) of the meeting. You may even propose an agenda to finish the meeting. At that point, unless you are told to sit down and shut up, you become a facilitator. When appropriate, you may introduce your opinions, violating neutrality, but by standing up, recording on flip charts, and using facilitation skills to keep the discussion focused, you have effectively taken over using a consultative leadership style.

Leader is Standing

If the meeting leader is standing up, start by using facilitator skills, such as active listening, to get the group focused. If the leader is not effective in leading, this will not be a problem. Once you gain a role as a “focuser”, you may suggest to the leader that an agenda would help you understand the direction better (playing “dumb” is very effective in getting people to set direction without feeling threatened by you). You may suggest to the leader that he or she has so much to contribute, that you would be willing to stand up and do the flip chart recording.  Once you are up with a marker in your hand, you become the facilitator.

In both cases, talk to the meeting leader after the meeting, in a non-threatening way, about how the next meeting can be made more effective.  You will begin to change the culture in your organization.

Summary

If you can get to be the only person standing and have a marker in your hand, you can take over a meeting by using facilitator skills. Keep these rules in mind though:

  • NEVER embarrass the leader
  • NEVER challenge the leader’s capabilities
  • It is NOT your meeting, you are only trying to help
  • If the leader resists your efforts, stop

For You

If meetings are run well, you will enjoy the meetings that you attend more.  This is important because your attitude about your job will improve—even if it is good now. You should find:

  • Your time in meetings will not be wasted or unproductive—you will feel like you are accomplishing something.
  • People will look to you as a model of meeting management—and management in general. Senior executives find future executives in meetings—those who contribute and manage the meetings best.

For Your Company

Even if you don’t change your entire company, changing one organization within the company benefits a great deal. In organizations where productive meetings are a way of life, they are able to do things others have not been able to do, such as:

  • Assure higher team participation and ownership
  • Better align planning practices with strategic goals
  • Complete projects/ programs correctly, on-time, and within budget
  • Implement teams that generate high-impact

Revolution or Evolution

Look at your meeting culture and obstacles. Have poor meetings become an epidemic and people are openly complaining? If so, revolution may be the answer. Change the next meeting and let everyone know about it. Publish the fact that you are running the meeting in a totally new way. Publish the results of the meeting. Ask the attendees to answer—how was it better, how was it more productive? Publish results and suggest that such results can be achieved on a consistent basis if more meetings were conducted properly.

If your organization is not having major problems follow an evolutionary approach. Change the next meeting you run—even a short staff meeting.  Talk to your peers and subordinates about the meeting approach. Suggest changes to the ways meetings can be held. See if there is an interest in getting more people trained to run better meetings. Publish the benefits of better meeting leadership.

Example is Best

People see you succeeding at meetings and they want to try what you have been doing. The more people that do better, the more others will want to follow suit, and follow you. Set the example and expect others to follow.

Until next week, continue to fortify your skill set with tools and improvement suggestions available in many of our prior postings.

Become Part of the Solution, Improve Your Facilitation Skills

The FAST curriculum on Professional Facilitation Skills details the responsibilities and dynamics mentioned above. Remember friends, nobody is smarter than everybody, so consult your FAST Facilitator Reference Manual or attend a FAST professional facilitative leadership training workshop offered around the world (see MG Rush for a current schedule — an excellent way to earn 40 PDUs from PMI, CDUs from IIBA, or CEUs).

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Leadership Style Depends on Source of Ideas & Solution Ownership

December 6, 2012 7 Comments


Leadership style depends largely on the flow of content: Directive—one-way, Consultative—equal partner in content, and Exploratory—facilitative, not adding content.

Directive

A leader who predominantly gives direction and guidance with little participation or content added by the group characterizes this leadership style. Directive leadership is appropriate when the purpose is to share information quickly and clearly, such as briefings, staff meetings, symposiums, etc.

Consultative

This leadership style is characterized by consulting with colleagues and subordinates in an open and respectful, not manipulative manner, during the meeting. Consultative leadership is appropriate when the purpose is to have the group make decisions with contributions and equal participation from the leader.

Exploratory

This pure and optimal facilitation style should be the predominant approach used for task-building and assignment meetings. In an exploratory approach, the leader is neutral in terms of contributing content to the meeting, but is responsible for providing and managing the technique and agenda. In many task-related meetings, an outside facilitator is used to provide the exploratory leadership while the business owner participates with a consultative leadership style.

No One Style

There is neither single ‘right’ answer nor one right leadership style.  The appropriate style is dependent on the particular type of meeting situation and nature of the group. Leaders of teams that work well together can use the exploratory style more frequently. Leaders with contentious groups either need to be directive or employ a neutral facilitator for their meetings. Managing meetings is much like managing people—be flexible and use the most appropriate style depending on the situation.

Guidelines

The same skills are required to lead a meeting as are required to facilitate a meeting.  Keep the following guidelines in mind, especially when leading:

  • Plan and choose use the most appropriate leadership style before you get into the meeting. For leading without facilitation, you will probably by either directive or consultative. If you are a facilitator, be consistent at being exploratory.
  • Let the group know at the outset of the meeting which style of leadership you intend to use. They will respond positively if they know how to work with the style and role that you have chosen.
  • If you are being consultative, use facilitation skills to get the group to participate as much as possible.
  • Be aware of the influence you and your ideas have on the group. When you are not neutral, as when you are voicing an opinion about content, the members listen to your ideas. If they are dropping out, back off and become more exploratory.
  • A good meeting leader may be a good facilitator with an opinion, but be careful. When leading content is appropriate, follow the guidelines above as well as general guidelines for managing people. Lead, but never continually remind the group that you are the leader.

Until next week, continue to fortify your skill set with tools and improvement suggestions available in many of our prior postings.

Become Part of the Solution, Improve Your Facilitation Skills

The FAST curriculum on Professional Facilitation Skills details the responsibilities and dynamics mentioned above. Remember friends, nobody is smarter than everybody, so consult your FAST Facilitator Reference Manual or attend a FAST professional facilitative leadership training workshop offered around the world (see MG Rush for a current schedule — an excellent way to earn 40 PDUs from PMI, CDUs from IIBA, or CEUs).

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Some of the Challenges and Costs Associated with Hosting Meetings

November 15, 2012 3 Comments


 

Meetings are frequently a fix for poor leadership. Most would rather go to a movie than sit in a two-hour meeting. Even poor movies have a beginning, middle, and end.

Meetings are very expensive. Today’s business world is asymmetric, and holding meetings to share information is a poor use of precious resources. Information updates are better conducted through dashboard devices than staff meetings.

Meeting Challenges

The best reason to pull people together is to build something that we cannot do apart, to arrive at consensus, to decide on something. For most session leaders (aka facilitators), weekly meetings are best replaced by full day(s) workshops. We focus on improving facilitation because we know the use of facilitators greatly improves meetings.

Role of Meetings

We live in a meeting society. Along with billions of people, our world also contains more than 200 nation-states, 4 million local communities, 20 million economic organizations, 200 million extended families, and hundreds of millions of other formal and informal groups. In order for groups to exist, individuals that make up these groups must meet and interact.

Current Trends

The increased growth in the number and length of meetings is due to the accelerated rate of change that now rules today’s business environment. The rapid and constant change in technology, particularly information technology and business process management, has dramatically increased the volatility of the global market place. As technology takes over more routine functions, and allows faster access to data, managerial skills shift, calling for increased communications clarity and small group skills.

Flatter Structures

Another trend emerging as a result of an accelerated environment is the growth of more efficient and flatter organization structures. These organizations have fewer management layers and, therefore fewer levels of decision-making. Flatter structures result in more group decision-making by specialists from disparate areas within the organization. Consequently, the ability to effectively communicate ideas in meetings has taken on increased importance.

Participative 
Management

A byproduct from replacing hierarchy with holarchy is an increasing emphasis on participative employee ownership. This movement is based on the premise that:

  • The quality of decisions are improved if all employee expertise is considered, and
  • The act of employee participation leads to better acceptance of the decisions.

50 Percent Productive

Studies have estimated that meetings are at most 50 percent productive. Thus the typical manager wastes approximately 240 hours per year (about 30 days) at a cost to the average Fortune 500 Company of greater than one billion USD per year. By using proper meeting management, a company could recover 25 to 35 percent of these costs, or hundreds of millions per year.

Intangible Costs

The intangible costs associated with poor meeting management are overlooked at all levels of management. Meetings serve as opportunities for senior management to appraise and search out potential leaders within an organization. As lower level managers take on more responsibilities, they spend more of their time in meetings with executives at higher levels. Their success as executives is tied to their ability to make the most out of meetings.

Psychological Costs

Participating in a poorly run meeting is frustrating, resulting in apathy, resentment, and a lack of commitment toward the meeting’s outcome. This attitude carries over to the workplace, in many cases, subverting good ideas that come from the meetings.

Meeting Dementia

Poorly run meetings have been around so long and are so prevalent that people and organizations have developed what can be called “meeting dementia.” This is the view that poorly run and unproductive meetings are the norm, and that’s just the way it is. This viewpoint seems to have been inherited by observing others who have lead poorly run meetings, who in turn learned from others making the same mistakes, and so on.

The Problems

The major problems with meetings, surprisingly, don’t have to do with personalities or the inability of group members to get along with one another. The problems are typically task-related—ie, people do not know the mechanics of HOW TO lead effective meetings.   The following list highlights 14 of the most frequently mentioned problems by over 1,000 managers:

  1. Getting off subject
  2. No goals or agenda
  3. Too long
  4. Poor preparation
  5. Inconclusive
  6. Disorganized
  7. Ineffective leader/ lack of control
  8. Irrelevant information discussed
  9. Time wasted
  10. Started late
  11. Ineffective for making decisions
  12. Interruptions (inside and out)
  13. Dominators
  14. Rambling discussion

Become Part of the Solution, Improve Your Facilitation Skills

The FAST curriculum on Professional Facilitation Skills details the responsibilities and dynamics mentioned above. Remember friends, nobody is smarter than everybody, so consult your FAST Facilitator Reference Manual or attend a FAST professional facilitative leadership training workshop offered around the world (see MG Rush for a current schedule — an excellent way to earn 40 PDUs from PMI, CDUs from IIBA, or CEUs)

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How to Manage Breakout Sessions (or, 3 Minute Sub Team Productivity WOW)

July 12, 2012 12 Comments


Purpose

Breakout sessions or sub team efforts enable teams to capture more information in less time and to also overcome the monotony of relying too much on narrative Brainstorming.  With strong active listening, the session leader (aka, facilitator) may take up to one-half of the total talk time by setting up context and providing thorough reflection of participant input. With ten participants in an eight-hour session, each participant probably contributes less than thirty minutes of individual airtime, unless you spice up your meetings with breakout sessions.

Rationale

Breakout Sessions

Additionally, and a very strong benefit of breakout session, all members (especially quiet ones) are given permission to speak freely as their voice now defends their sub team’s position, not necessarily their lone voice.

Here are important considerations for managing face-to-face breakout sessions:

  • In advance, have sub team assignments predetermined or at least determine the method for determining who is in which group.
    • Do something more creative and appropriate than the seating arrangements (ie, “this half of the room”).
    • Consider quick yet creative methods such as alpha sorting their names, birthplaces, birth dates, favorite ice cream, etc.
    • Consider cutting Sunday comics into three strips and have everyone that draws the same comic form a team together or drawing from a basket of playing cards.
  • Appoint a CEO for each sub team, namely the Chief Easel Operator.  Assign their workspace and have it already provisioned with an easel, paper, markers, etc. The CEO is not responsible for scribing but for administering the supplies and providing a single point of contact for the facilitator when they check-in for a status update:
    • Remind scribesto capture verbatim inputs, more is better.
    • Remind scribes to capture content in black or dark blue marker that will be visible for presentation to the other sub teams.
    • Remind scribes to be neutral, only contributing their own ideas at the end if those ideas have not been volunteered.
  • Publish your assignment or questions to be discussed on a screen or in a handout. Be crystal clear with your instructions and the format you expect each sub team to complete or build.
  • Keep the question or instructions posted (eg, on easel or with a projector) or print out and distribute to each sub team since teams frequently gather outside the main workshop room.
  • Give them a precise amount of time or deadline and monitor them closely for progress and questions. Three minutes is optimal. It is truly amazing what a group of people can accomplish in three minutes with clear instructions.

Notes

  • When they return with their contributions, you have already built consensus.  Now you need to reconcile the voice of a few sub teams rather than the voice of many individuals.
  • Other approaches to appointing sub teams may include birth dates (eg, months or days); birth position (eg, last child); latitude or longitude of home, office, or birthplace; mountain peaks, constellations, cutup cartoon strips (eg, Dilbert® . . . ), etc. Thematically strive to align with the project naming conventions.

Facilitation Skills

The FAST curriculum on Professional Facilitation Skills details the responsibilities and dynamics mentioned above. Remember friends, nobody is smarter than everybody, so consult your FAST Facilitator Reference Manual or attend a FAST professional facilitative leadership training workshop offered around the world (see MG Rush for a current schedule — an excellent way to earn 40 PDUs from PMI, CDUs from IIBA, or CEUs).

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Meeting Participation Tips (Part 3 of 3—The Wrap)

July 5, 2012 12 Comments


Great meetings include some repetitive characteristics.  A high level of participation frequently indicates the opportunity for a great meeting.  What encourages participation?

We share select characteristics with you through the sequence they would occur in a well-conducted meeting; namely the beginning, the middle, and the end (ie, The Wrap).  The following is not meant to be exhaustive, as substantial detail is also found in other blogs.  However, we find the following to rank among the most important items for inciting high levels of meeting participation, collaboration, and today’s focus—ownership.

Ending (aka The Wrap) Phase

While meeting participation concludes with the wrap-up or close of each meeting, participation and ownership need to extend back to the project or the other reasons for holding the meeting in the first place.  For example, the term ‘plan’ can minimally be defined with four words—who does what, when.  Ownership of results is clearly important to truly call a meeting, successful.

Review Results

Encouraging Participation — The Wrap

As session leader (ie, frequently referred to as facilitator), conduct a thorough review of the agreed upon outputs.  Do not relive the meeting nor provide a transcription.  SImply focus on the final items of agreement, and not necessarily the rationale behind them.  Ensure that all can support them be enforcing that this is their last chance to speak up, they need to now agree to support the outputs, even if not their favorite, in the hallways and meeting rooms when they leave.  As professionals, you have every reason to expect them to either walk the talk or speak up.  It’s not your responsibility to reach down their throat and pull it out of them.  Ensure that they will both support the output, and not lose any sleep over it.

Assignments

Based on the expectations and culture of the participants, modify your roles and responsibilities tool to ensure accountability, responsibility, and support for action items that need to be assigned.  Demand that one and only one role accept responsibility since you do not want to allow for the pointing of fingers at the ‘other person.’  If you have followed the suggestions of the first two blogs in this series, assignments comes as no surprise and your participants have already considered whom they feel would be optimal for each of the action items. If necessary, remind them of the holarchial value of their assignments and how completion of the action items will impact their quality of life, income, workload, etc.  If no one steps up, assign it as on ‘open issue’ and escalate it back to the executive sponsor or his or her equivalent.

Refrigerator

Relevant items captured, typically beyond stop of the meeting, may also be assigned.  North Americans frequently refer to this category as the ‘Parking Lot.’  We prefer the term ‘Refrigerator’ to connote a sense of value, something that can be cooked up into a new meal, rather than a place where stuff goes to rust.  While covered in created detail in BLOG, do NOT ask, “Who will be responsible for this (ie, open item)?”  Rather, ask “Who will take the point of communications and report back to this group on the status of this (ie, open item)?” Again, if no one steps up, assign it as on ‘open issue’ and escalate it back to the executive sponsor or their equivalent.

Communications Plan

Ensure that your participants now sensibly and similarly communicate with others the results of the meeting.  Make sure it sounds like they were in the same meeting together.  Build consensus around “If you encounter your superior at lunch, and they ask you for an update, what will you tell them we accomplished in this meeting?”  Secondarily consider other stakeholders that may be affected by the meeting outputs, “If you encounter a stakeholder in the hallway, and they ask you for an update, what will you tell them we accomplished in this meeting?”  Do not underestimate the value of this activity.  Groups that claim to have consensus may discover based on their interpretation that significant difference remain.  The best time to resolve these differences is right now, before the meeting adjourns.

Self-Assessment

Ask them how you did and obtain their ownership over the fact that their input can help make you a better session leader.  To allow for anonymity, ask them to jot down on separate Post-it Notes, at least one aspect they liked and one aspect they would have changed for the meeting.  Have them mount their notes in a Plus/ Delta format as they exit the meeting, either using easel(s) or white board to label your titles.

=======

Encouraging meeting participation begins long before the meeting begins, and it extends beyond the meeting closure if you are concerned about culture, change management, or participation in your next meeting.  Their is no ‘silver bullet’ if you show up ill-prepared.  Consider the suggestions made over the past three blogs to help you secure higher levels of meeting participation.  We see these suggestions work and so will you.

Facilitation Skills

The FAST curriculum on Professional Facilitation Skills details the responsibilities and dynamics mentioned above. Remember friends, nobody is smarter than everybody, so consult your FAST Facilitator Reference Manual or attend a FAST professional facilitative leadership training workshop offered around the world (see MG Rush for a current schedule — an excellent way to earn 40 PDUs from PMI, CDUs from IIBA, or CEUs).

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Meeting Participation Tips (Part 1 of 3—The Beginning)

June 21, 2012 4 Comments


Great meetings include certain, repeatable characteristics.  A high level of participation frequently indicates the opportunity for a great meeting.  What encourages participation?

We share select characteristics with you through the sequence they would occur in a well-conducted meeting; namely the beginning, the middle, and the end.  The following is not meant to be exhaustive, as supporting detail is found in other blogs.  However, we find the following to rank among the most important items for inciting high levels of meeting participation and collaboration.

 Beginning (aka Preparation) Phase

Meeting results and ownership need to be transferred to the participants from the very beginning.  Optimally, meting participants should review the purpose, scope, and objectives (ie, deliverables) before the meeting begins.  They need to verify that they understand and find them acceptable, or have an opportunity to provide their input to changes something before the meeting begins.  They should also review the method and tools that will be used to ensure that they find the approach sound.  Remember, they will be held responsible for the outcome.

Meeting Participation (Preparation)

A glossary or lexicon should be included in the pre-read or handout so that individuals can refer back to the operational definitions of terms as challenges arise.  People within groups frequently find themselves in violent agreement with each other, and it’s imperative that all the participants agree on what is meant by the terms being used in the purpose, scope, and objectives.  Typically, the glossary should be maintained by the project team, project management office, program office, or strategic center of excellence.  Teams do not normally have time to argue about the difference between a vendor and a contractor or a bill and an invoice.   Unless the definitions are part of the deliverable, they should be determined in advance.

When meetings or workshops are held to support projects, it’s invaluable for participants to know and understand the purpose and objectives of the project, the reason the project was approved (ie, program goals), and the goals and objectives of the mandating organization (ie, the strategic plan of the business unit and/ or enterprise).  Ultimately, all arguments should be resolved by which position best supports reaching the enterprise objectives. Optimally, the meeting room should have large, visible copies of enterprise mission, values, and vision.  Handout material should include the more detailed goals (ie, fuzzy and directional) objectives (ie, specific and SMART).

Biographic sketches of other meeting members can inspire empathy and understanding. With virtual meetings, be certain to include photographs that show the face behind the voice.  If you provide supplemental reading material, strive to customize a cover letter for each participant highlighting the pages or sections upon which they should focus, rather than suggesting they give their entire and equal attention to everything in the handout. Prompt each subject matter expert in advance with the questions that will be raised during the meeting most pertinent to them or their role.  Ask them to focus on those questions since you will turn to them for the first response when the question is raised.

Ultimately the session leader (aka facilitator) is responsible for tying together the relevancy of the issues mentioned above, known as managing the context.  The session leader needs to emphasize the importance of the meeting output to the organization, hopefully expressed in terms of how many financial assets or labor hours (eg, FTE) are at risk if the meting fails.

If the session leader and the participants show up prepared, chances of success are highly amplified. The term ‘facilitate’ means to ‘make easy’ and if you embrace the suggestions above and in the next two blogs, you will see meeting participation substantially increase.  More importantly, you will have properly begun transfer of ownership and responsibility from the solo session leader to the group or team, as it should be.

 Facilitation Skills

The FAST curriculum on Professional Facilitation Skills details the responsibilities and dynamics mentioned above. Remember friends, nobody is smarter than everybody, so consult your FAST Facilitator Reference Manual or attend a FAST professional facilitative leadership training workshop offered around the world (see MG Rush for a current schedule — an excellent way to earn 40 PDUs from PMI, CDUs from IIBA, or CEUs).

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How to Help Resolve Business Arguments

June 14, 2012 5 Comments


Here is a powerful, three-step method to help you, help others, resolve business arguments. We will give you the three steps, and then discuss them further.

  1. Active listening
  2. Alignment
  3. Escalation

1. Active listening

So much material, here at this blog site and elsewhere, focuses on the skill and benefits of active listening, that we not delve into too much detail. As session leader (aka facilitator) you may find your participants at times, in violent agreement with each other. Occasionally you have subject matter experts (aka participants or SME) who do not listen to themselves and may be uncertain as to what they said. Frequently, since people can only concentrate six to eight minutes at a time, someone “wakes up” without hearing fully what was said.

With all the examples above, plus the more obvious disagreements, active listening is critical because the participants need a neutral and thorough reflection of what was said. With active listening, you make contact, absorb, provide reflection, and then confirm if your reflection is accurate.  Many issues get resolved when the arguments are properly shaped in the hands of a neutral party, the facilitator.  But what do you do when active listing fails?

2. Alignment

A Business or Organizational Holarchy

Alignment is a wonderful consulting term. It includes three syllables and remains abstract enough that it is never clear exactly how to do it. Frankly, it is easy, once you understand the holarchy.

We invest much more time elsewhere discussing the intricacies of the table illustrated below, so for now let us focus simply on alignment. Specifically, we seek to ask the participants to align each of the arguments with the objectives, and ask in sequence:

  • Which argument best supports the project objectives, and why?
  • Which argument best supports the program objectives, and why?
  • Which argument best supports the business unit (ie, organizational) objectives, and why?
  • Which argument best supports the enterprise objectives, and why?

As you can tell, we are working upwards in the objectives column. With each question, some portion of arguments will be resolved, and yet others will remain unresolved. Ultimately, the most important question is the last one, asking which argument best supports the enterprise objectives, and why. Yet some people and issues are very stubborn, and active listening and alignment will not necessarily resolve all arguments. Then what?

3. Escalation

We need to document the rationales from the questions above.  Ensure that each why is captured, understood, and illustrated with examples form the business. Take this document, in printed form (not hanging out in the aether as a verbal argument) back to the4 executive sponsor, or decision executive, or steering team, or decision review boards, or whomever you call it and ask them for their help.

Most sponsors will ask the project managers, analysts, and other team members at some time or another “Do you need my help for anything?” What they are asking you is NOT if you want them to do your job for you. They are asking, have you reached an impasses that you are unable to reconcile.  Now is the time for escalation.  This is the type of help they are asking about.

Guest what they do to arrive at an answer?  They use the holarchial questions mentioned above, typically with greater insight and understanding about the connectivity of various projects, than we might have in our own little box.  They look at the arguments and ask to what extent does each support the project objectives (ie, reason for the meeting), the program objectives (ie, reason for the project), the business unit objectives (ie, reason for the program or initiative), and the enterprise objectives (ie, reason for the business units).  The holarchy is indispensable for resolving arguments, and to help facilitators prevent scope creep during their meetings.

Facilitation Skills

The FAST curriculum on Professional Facilitation Skills details the responsibilities and dynamics mentioned above. Remember friends, nobody is smarter than everybody, so consult your FAST Facilitator Reference Manual or attend a FAST professional facilitative leadership training workshop offered around the world (see MG Rush for a current schedule — an excellent way to earn 40 PDUs from PMI, CDUs from IIBA, or CEUs).

Related articles

Filed under Meeting Controls, Methodology, Participants, Technique, Theory Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , ,

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