High Performance Teams Having Efficient and Effective Meetingsm

EFFECTIVE EXECUTIVE AUG.2009

Building High Performance Teams

High Performance Teams Having Efficient and Effective Meetingsm How to Get as Little Done as You Do Now in Half the Time

-- John E Tropman

Team performance – successful team performance – is built around a core of excellent meeting structure and process. The current world system is deeply flawed, and correlatively wasteful of financial and human resources. We can definitely be better, and techniques are available to improve the system markedly. And there are some early adopters. But by and large, we remain deeply committed to rotten practices because they are the practices with which we are familiar.

Business team performance is in- creasingly coming under scru- tiny, as complex problems require combinations of inputs rarely found in a single person. Corporations, NGO's and governments increasingly have "teams" addressing every problem from A to Z. Historically, the classic work of Goodman and Associates (1986) addressed the issue of "Designing Effective Work Groups." Shortly thereafter, Hackman (1990) considered the conditions of "Groups that Work (and Those That Don't).

"Successful" teams seem to be dependent on an interrelationship of many factors. One typical list of high performance team factors is as follows:

Commitment

Team members see themselves belonging to the team. They are committed to group goals above and beyond their personal goals and agendas.

Trust

Team members have faith in each other to honor commitments, maintain confidences, support each other and generally behave predictably and consistently.

Purpose

The team understands how it fits into the overall business of the organization. Team members know their roles, feel a sense of ownership, and can see how they personally, and as a team, make a difference.

Communication

Effective teams communicate effectively and frequently with each other and also communicate clearly and consistently with people outside the team about team activities. Effective internal communication allows these teams to make balanced decisions, handle conflict constructively and provide each other valuable feedback.

Involvement

Everyone has a role on the team. Despite differences in roles, perspectives and experience, team members feel a sense of partnership with each other. Contributions are respected and expected. True consensus is reached when appropriate.

Process Orientation

High performing teams have a large number of process tools they can use when needed. Process tools would include: problem solving tools, planning techniques, regular meetings, agendas, and successful ways of dealing with problems, behavioral agreements, and ways to improve those processes within the team.

Continuous Improvement

The team understands the importance of continuous improvement, has the tools, knowledge and time at their disposal to make continuous improvement really happen. All improvement efforts are done in support of the organization's goals and objectives.

Google lists almost 48 million (!) other entries on this subject. The list above, however, does not include having effective meetings, something true of most lists. This lacuna is odd, because it is in meetings that much, if not most, of the team's work is actually done.

Meetings are essentially information processing mechanisms the outcome of which is a decision stream. Teams are successful if they routinely produce exceptional outcomes – that is, high quality decisions. A crucial part of what makes the "successful teams" really successful is that they have excellent meetings. Such meetings are a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for decision excellence. One can get a high quality outcome from a sloppy process, but it is a chance occurrence. Successful teams produce excellence on a regular, rather than an episodic, basis. Excellence here means efficiency and effectiveness. Being efficient means that the team is doing the right thing – has the correct processes in place and is using those processes. Being effective means that the team is focusing on the right subject.

There is a second requisite for high quality decisions. Having great meetings is not enough, any more than having a proper kitchen and proper ingredients to produce a great meal. There needs to be great cooking as well, and for team decisions, that means decision management processes.

The Meeting Masters. . . And More

Fortunately, we have information about producing excellent meetings and building high quality decisions. Based on work at the meeting masters project at the University of Michigan, I can share a set of best practices that research uncovered. That project observed hundreds of meetings and extracted the processes that "meeting masters" used to regularly produce excellent meetings. (Tropman, 2003) However, all who produced such meetings did not always achieve high quality decisions with any regularity. But some did that as well – hence the decision maestros – a subset of the masters – were skilful not only themselves, but had additional skills in bringing the "meeting orchestra" together. The persons we sought to observe were the meeting masters and the decision maestros. Maestros produced masterful meetings but also built high quality decisions.

The Competnece Staircase

The meetings my team observed fit well into the competence staircase developed by the Dreyfus brothers in Mind over Machine (1986.) They argue that the acquisition of competence involves five steps, to which I have added a 6^th. The revised staircase, with a descriptions by me, is as follows:

Novice

• Performance slow and jerky

• Attention to rules/facts

• Works with the book in hand

• Heavy learner.

Beginner: Thumbnail

• Performance faster and smoother

• Begins rule fade (acting automatically)

• Patterns not mentioned in rules

• Uses book less frequently

• Learner

Journeyperson: Thumbnail (where most of us are for most things)

• Performance average in terms of speed and smoothness

• Rule fade mostly complete

• Selecting most important cues

• Calculated, educated risk taking

• Uses book only for exceptions

• Learner/teacher

Expert: Thumbnail (some of us are experts in one area; a signature area)

• Performance becomes fluid

• Rule fade complete

• Calculation and rationality diminish

• No plan is permanent

• Attention shifts with cues

• Holistic, intuitive grasp

• Can write book chapters

• Teacher

Master: Thumbnail

• Performance is seamless

• Exactly the right speed; appears effortless

• Understands the deep structure of the effort

• Holistic recognition of cues

• Performance is solid, confident and sure

• Deeply understands

• Can write book

• Educator

Maestro: Thumbnail

• Orchestrates team performance

• Trust self and the process; let process flow; enter as needed

• Guides the process indirectly; enables team achievement

• Submerges self to result

• Beyond the book /writing new book

• Guru.

The Meeting Masters Research Project classifies meetings along the dimensions of the staircase, as seen below. Note that a majority of meetings (about 65%) are in the "awful" category, serious times consumers, both in the actual meeting and, because of that, in rework time. I will comment on the reasons for such malperformance shortly.

Novice Meetings (Failing Grade: F)

• About 40% of meetings

• Usually no agenda, no plan, "lets get together"

• The weekly meeting

• Attendance low; lots of side work and many interruptions

• Almost always starts late and finishes late

• No materials prepared; participants rush out to get them; reading materials during meeting

• Much discussion on who will take the minutes

• Much discussion of the last meeting

• Chaotic discussion

• Avoids decision making

Beginner: Thumbnail (Poor Grade: D.)

• About 25% of meetings

• Formulaic agenda

• Old business, new business

• Starts late or ends late usually

• Much chaotic discussion

• Makes episodic and partial decisions

Journeyperson: Thumbnail (Commonly accepted competence; Good Grade C)

• About 20% of meetings

• Moderately good agenda – usually without times for items

• No thought about the flow of items at the agenda

• Some material sent out; most usually handed out at the meeting

• Usually starts a bit late but ends on time

• Discussion mostly focused

• Makes some decisions

Expert: Thumbnail (some of us are experts in one area; a signature area. Good/Better Grade: C+/B-)

• About 8% of meetings

• Much like Journeyperson except has particular areas of substantive or procedural excellence

• Makes high quality decisions in areas of expertise

Master: Thumbnail (Better Grade B)

• About 5% of meetings

• Excellent procedures

i. Agenda planned with input from participants

ii. Agenda and materials sent out about ¾ of the time between meetings

iii. Agenda organized strategically

– Uses the agenda bell (discussion coming up)

– Uses the "menu" style agenda

iv. Uses executive summary rather than reports

v. Good discussion

vi. Makes decisions.

Maestro: Thumbnail (Excellent Grade A- to A+)

• About 2% of meetings

• Uses all of the Master techniques but "kicks it up a notch" to decision orchestration

• Uses decision rules

i. Breadth of preference

ii. Depth of preference

iii. Who implements

iv. Expert views

v. Wishes of the powerful

• Uses decision metronome

i. Round of discussion

ii. Summative reflection

iii. Action suggestion

iv. Suggestion legitimation using decision rules

v. Refocuses discussion

vi. Decision sculpting

How Bad Are Meetings? And Why?

As project staff began systematically coding and attending meetings with an analytic frame in mind it became clear that the generally accepted scuttlebutt that meetings were awful had an empirical base. They were so bad that meetings had become a sort of code word for non-work. (I have done no work today; I spent the whole day in meetings!"

How bad are meetings? They were/are worse than we ever imagined. What was depressing was the reality of how bad they really were. The little subtitle to this paper – "how to get as little done as you do now in half the time"– seems roughly accurate. Indeed, it seems a conservative estimate. Most of our informants felt they spent twice the amount of time in meetings as they "needed" to. Most could not recall any exceptional meetings.

John E Tropman got his BA degree in sociology and government from Oberlin College, his Masters Degree from the University of Chicago, and his PhD in sociology from the University of Michigan. He has spent his career at the University of Michigan, teaching non-profit management courses at the School of Social Work, Organizational Behavior and Human Resources Management courses at the Ross School of Business, effective decision making and creativity in the executive education program at the UM, and leadership and other material at the executive education program at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He has worked on many Executive Education Programs including Executive Blue (The Athletic Department at the University of Michigan), LSSM-U (Lutheran Social Services of Michigan [University]) and the United Way of America, and the Alliance for Children and Families, The Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit, among others. He has been affiliated with and was Acting Head of the Saul Drachler Program in Jewish Communal Leadership at the School of Social Work, University of Michigan. He has also spent time as a Visiting Scholar at Oxford University, and has Fulbright support for work in Australia and Japan. John has written and edited many books. Among the more recent are The Total Compensation Solution, The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Community, Enhancing Physician Performance,(with Ransom and Pinsky), Making Meetings Work, Managing Ideas in the Creating Organization, Does America Hate the Poor?, Nonprofit Boards, What to Do and How to Do It, The total Compensation Solution, and Supervision and Management in Nonprofits and the Human Services. John is currently researching Executive Calamity (executives who go down and take the whole organization with them), the relationships between the role of leadership and the position of management, and issues of recruitment, retention and motivation in the workplace. John has his own consultancy, High Quality Decisions, through which he puts on programs on effective meetings and team decision making throughout the country. He has worked with human service organizations such as the United Way (of America and in several cities), the Jewish Federation of Metro Detroit, Lutheran Social Services of Michigan and other non profits. He has also worked with companies such as Abbott Labs (Pasadena, Dallas), Dupont, General Motors (Cadillac), and Ford, as well as government organizations such as the GAO and the Air Force. John (and associates) also work with organizations and boards on their strategic planning process, assisting in environmental scans, developing product/service profiles, and establishing and implementing the plans.

A Microsoft Survey
[http://www.leadingedgealliance.com/issues–old/2005/summer /productiv ity/] reports the following:

Time spent in meetings each week

Worldwide: 5.6 hours

(69% say meetings unproductive)

United States: 5.5 hours

(71% say meetings unproductive)

Robert Herring of the New York Times (June 18, 2006) has similar number from a different survey.

[http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/18/business/yourmoney /18count.html]

Of workers who attend meetings each week, fully 75% say that those gatherings could be more effective, That means a lot of unproductive time, because 91 million workers spend time in meetings each week. For most, it's one to eight hours, but a hardly 11% of men (men are far more meeting-prone than women) somehow survive 13 or more hours of meetings a week.

Cost wise, let's say that half of the time is wasted – 2.5 hours per week, for 50 weeks. That is 125 hours per year. Let's then use the Independent Sector value for volunteer time – $20. That generates $2500/year. According to the 2009 US Census estimates, there are 52,196, 000 Management, Professional and Related Occupations workers in the US in February, 2009. There were 34,161,000 Sales and Office Occupations workers. [http://ww.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t10.htm ] We can do the math:

$2,500.00 52,196,000 $130,490,000,000.00

$2,500.00 34,161,000 $85,402,500,000.00

$Total $215,892,500,000.00

Based on the assumption that each worker is wasting on average, $2500/year in meetings (a conservative estimate I think) we waste a total of just under $216 bn. And my guess is that it is double that, actually.

There is a second depressing element. The higher one goes in the organization the more meetings one attends. Thus, those at the "top" of the organization are virtually always in meetings. The 5.6 hour number may well be true for the average white collar worker, but is untrue of the executive cadre.

Thirdly, our tolerance for this malperformance seems inexhaustible. In many areas, when things go wrong, we seek to find out what the problems are and fix them. The "after action report" and the US Army's "lessons learned" center are examples. (http://usacac.army.mil/cac2/call/index.asp] But in the area of meetings, we seem to use humor tolerance as a coping mechanism. The New Yorker magazine has at least 264 cartoons in their Cartoon Bank on meetings of various sorts, all of which reveal some sort of "ineptitude in the meeting world". [http://www.cartoonbank.comsearch_results_category. asp?sitetype=1&section=all& keyword=meetings&advanced=0]

Google identifies 12, 500,000 sites for "meeting jokes". Bad meetings are like the weather. "Everyone talks about it and no one does anything about it." (Charles Dudley Warner)

Why Things Go Wrong

Why do things go so badly? One of the big reasons is that many people, particularly those in the US fail to understand that meetings are work, and that their work is information processing, organizing, and decision making. Doing that work well requires effort as well as an understanding of how to make that effort pay off.

The first part of the work that did not get done was planning for the meeting. But many – really most – with whom we talked said they did not have time to plan meetings because they were in too many meetings! This is basically a self-fulfilling prophecy. They cannot plan, so the meeting goes badly, which confirms it would have been a waste of time to plan anyway, etc.

The meeting masters took a different view. They argue that most of how the meting would go was determined beforehand, in terms of proper structure, just like preparing food in the kitchen. And they argued that every hour spent in advance of the meeting to set it up saved 4-6 hours after the meeting through better results and minimal rework. That is a good ROI by any measure.

In terms of an understanding of how the "meeting system" works, the most common explanation is that it is individual personalities who cause bad things to happen. This personalistic explanation is handy, because it can operate all the time and means that "there is not much one can do anyway." Meeting fatalism through personal assignment of blame is simply wrong. But producing high quality requires application and effort, and an understanding of the "root cause" of the problem at hand, and the development of "better and best" practices to help things go right.

Helping Things Go Right

The meeting masters had some perspectives that would help. These are discussed in detail in Making Meetings Work (2^nd) (Tropman, 2003)

Different Mindframe

• The meeting masters thought about their responsibilities differently than most, and had a different vocabulary. They say themselves as "putting" on a meeting (as in a play) or "giving" a meeting (as in a party). Those different verbs reflect a different orientation – the planning that plays and parties require is different from the usual approach to meetings. Masters viewed the meeting participants as their customers.

A Three Part Approach

• Masters say that there are three activities that happen at meetings – announcements, decisions/actions, and brainstorming for the next and future meeting.

Batch Processing

• The agenda was built by taking all similar items at the same time in the meeting. It is batch processing. Team members work better when they take the same kinds of items together. So all the announcements are in one place, all the decision /action items are together and all the brainstorming items are together.

Strategic Sequencing

• In addition to grouping, the ORDER of the batches is vital.

– Masters began with the Announcements – there were only a few of them.

– Decision items followed.

– Finally, the last 1/3 of the meeting was brainstorming for future items.

– The strategy here is "warm-up", work, and cool down.

– It is used in other venues as well, so has high generality

i. Exercising/working out

ii. Meals

• Antipasti, the meal, the dessert

Use of the Agenda Bell

• See Exhibit

The agenda bell is the way the Masters organized their meetings always. It is the flow of energy over time, using the bell-curve model. You can see the 7 item categories that begin with minutes (1) then proceed to announcements (2) (See Exhibit). The third category (3) is "easy items." This allows the group to get into the decision making mode. Some boards call this the "consent agenda portion." Masters then proceeded to schedule moderately difficult items (4). In each of 3 and 4 there could be 3a,3b.3i , and 4a.4i depending upon time. Item 5 is the toughest item, and it stands alone. It is in the middle because there is the greatest attendance and energy there. Item 5 is also likely to tear at the fabric of group cohesion. Thus, after 5, come brainstorming items, where the whole group works together and there is no fatefulness or criticism.

The Menu Agenda

• Masters wrote their agenda like a restaurant menu. It conveys lots of information and has, instead of prices, a running clock.

1. Minutes 2:00-2:05

2. Announcements 2:05-2:10 New Desks Ordered

$1000 each to your account

3. Retreat Location 2:10-2:15

(Action)

Key West seems Best

4a. Vendor Selection 2:15-2:25

A new vendor for

gaskets would like

some business

4b. Disposal of Broken 2:25-2:35 Gaskets (Action)

trash? Sell abroad/fix?

5. Permission to Ship 2:35-3:00

(Action)

Ship part with scratch?

Give Discount?

6. Improving Quality 3:00-3:38

(Brains)

7. Adjourn 3:38-3:40

No More Reports

• Masters had no reports. All items were announcements, action/decision, or brainstorming.

Conclusion

Team performance – successful team performance – is built around a core of excellent meeting structure and process. The current world system is deeply flawed, and correlatively wasteful of financial and human resources. We can definitely be better, and techniques are available to improve the system markedly. And there are some early adopters. But by and large, we remain deeply committed to rotten practices because they are the practices with which we are familiar. This overview addresses an important element in holding meetings in organizations. Using these techniques will increase efficiency.

But it is also true that having an efficient meeting will not, in and of itself, produce an effective outcome. There is a second part – decision management.