Leadership Communication Chapter VII

Chapter Seven: Leading Productive Management Meetings

Summary:

This chapter focuses on how to plan and conduct productive meeting. We should primarily determine when a meeting is the best forum. The next step is completing the essential planning by (1) clarifying purpose and expected outcome, (2) determining topics for the agenda, (3) selecting attendees, (4) considering the setting, (5) determining when to meet, and (6) establishing needed meeting information. When the meeting is conducting, we should consider the decision-making approach, the roles and responsibilities, the meeting ground rules, and common problem-solving approaches. There are different types of problem-solving meeting as follows:

1. Brainstorming – to generate a list of ideas quickly
2. Ranking or Rating – to be performed with a set of ideas, probably generated from a brainstorming session
3. Sorting by categories or logical groups – to classify the problems in the same group or same category
4. Edward de Bono’s Six thinking hats – to look and think at the problem in the same way, called “parallel thinking”
5. Opposition analysis – to look at both side of an issue
6. Decision trees – to break down a problem into its parts
7. From/To analysis – to be useful in diagnosing change situation
8. Force-field analysis – to explore the problems and determine approaches to facilitate change
9. The matrix – to evaluate or diagnose problems with the decision-making matrix which consists of four boxes with each axis assigned an evaluative label
10. Frameworks – to simplify a complex idea and make it manageable
    

One of the most important responsibilities is to manage the problem and conflicts. Negative thinking and resistance to the ideas of others or changes of any kind are two common problem we found in the meeting. We can stop negativity by setting a ground rule. There are some techniques to manage resistance; verify, clarify, align and probe technique. We can manage the conflict by applying different levels of assertiveness and cooperation. Culture differences concern should be realized to narrow and limit the potential conflict. The last step is ensuring meeting lead to action by assigning specific tasks to specific people, reviewing all actions and responsibilities at the end of the meeting, providing a meeting summary with assigned deliverables included, and following up on action items in a reasonable time.