The Leading Question Article Series

There is an "I" in "Team"

How Individualized Effort Leads to Better Teams, Better Meetings, and Better Work

“Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

Few business staples generate as much strong, almost universally negative opinions as the ever-ubiquitous meeting.  Yet, day after day we continue to sit in unproductive meetings, knowing that we are wasting ever more time out of days that already have too little time to accomplish our goals.

More than time, unproductive meetings also cost money – lots of it.  It is not unusual for a meeting of six to eight senior executives to cost over $1000 per hour.  Multiply that by the number of meetings you attend in a day, a week, a month, plus factor in the psychological consequences of bad meetings. Add to that the costs of lost opportunities and the expense of “accepting unproductive meetings” as the norm, and it can quickly add up to serious money.

Yet, it is not the meeting itself that is so unproductive, it is what we do as executives and teams within the meeting that causes frustration, wasted time and serious breakdowns.  Ineffective meetings are only the most visible, and measurable, evidence of flaws within the team itself.

When you decode the most common complaints that surface surrounding meetings – “we always revisit the same issues, we avoid making the tough decisions, we don’t say what’s really on our minds, or we spend more time viewing PowerPoint’s than we do discussing business problems,” — they really have more to do with a lack of individual effort and trust in the team than they do with actual meeting logistics or agenda.

Last month's Fortune Magazine cover story on teamwork reinforces the point that I have always believed – teamwork is an individual skill – one that is teachable and requires effort and practice; “becoming skilled at doing more with others may be the single most important thing you can do to increase your value.” 

This is why the O’Brien Group works with executives both individually and in the team environment to achieve their optimal performance level.  The nexus of individual and team performance becomes apparent in the productivity level of a senior team meeting.

But in this era of back-to-back-to-back meetings too many executives have begun to confuse attendance with effort; they think that because their calendar is full of meetings all day long, they are getting work done.  In reality, teams (and therefore meetings) that lack individual accountability, trust, and the ability to dialogue and make firm decisions, are little more than sinkholes of time, energy, and money.

There Is No Team Without The Me

We all know the saying, “there is no ‘I’ in team.”  True, but only in spelling bees.  High performing teams cannot exist in any meaningful way without the commitment and accountability that individuals take for the success of the team.  This isn’t to suggest that teams need to be stocked with superstars; you need to look no further than recent Olympic hockey, baseball, and basketball teams to find evidence that a mere collection of stars who don’t take personal responsibility for team success rarely succeed.  This is even truer for teams.

We teach our clients that their level of personal commitment to team success is directly proportional the team’s ability to get good work done.  And nowhere does this dynamic manifest itself better than in a meeting.

Lead The Process, Don’t Be Led By It

We teach clients two behaviors that can have a significant impact on returning meetings to greater productivity.

Focus meetings on decisions not presentations.  How many times have you been in a succession of PowerPoint presentations that masqueraded as a meeting?  How much work got accomplished?  Meetings should be active, not passive.

Create a clear agenda of topics that includes why the topic is important to the company and what outcome will be achieved by raising it before the team (i.e. inform, endorsement to proceed, approval for expenditure of resources). 

Identify the problem to be solved - as opposed to a polarity to be managed (Leading Question May 2005), presenting decision choices for the group to constructively dialogue, and reaching a specific conclusion and/or actions to be taken.

Make clear requests, offers, and promises.  Good meetings are composed mainly of constructive dialogue – where participants say what is on their mind, address and resolve conflicts, and make tough decisions that result in many requests and offers and promises for action.  By contrast, poor meetings have no clear outcome, no commitment to action, and generate a form of deja vu where the same issues appear at every meeting without progress or resolution.

The only way off of the "meeting merry-go-round" is to create an environment where decisions are made and implemented and the team moves on to the next issue.  The foundation of this accountability and action starts with making concrete decisions at meetings that result in clear requests - “I request that you do X by Y time, utilizing Z resources” and sound promises “I promise I will do X by Y”.  It is in this environment of making requests and promises and completing them as individuals that trust increases among the team and more gets accomplished.

Meetings are a fact of business life.  But they don’t have to be aimless wastes of time.  Leaders who recognize their personal accountability impacts the team’s productivity and consistently work to ‘own’ responsibility for team success will find the level of trust rising, the substance of dialogue expanding, the identification and resolutions of conflicts increasing, and the amount of work getting accomplished as a team and as individuals growing substantially.

One of our clients, the CEO of a large health system, found that by instilling better team leadership skills in his executives, the time they were spending together became more productive than the time they spent apart.  In fact, he found that they were able to accomplish 40 percent more work, in far less time, and with better participation across the organization.

Think about what you could do in an environment where meetings were opportunities to accomplish work rather than be distracted from it.  How would you feel if you could make meetings better; ones that your senior leaders looked forward to attending and participating?  How much money would you save?  More importantly, what new ideas or opportunities could you unlock that would take your organization in news directions of growth and performance?

For more ideas on how to increase the pace, success, and sustainability of change in your organization, please call 513-821-9580 or email me at michael@obriengroup.us.

Dr. Michael O’Brien
Founder & CEO
O’Brien Group