If you’re a CEO, you have a choice about how much to engage your senior executives on issues beyond the immediate scope of their functional roles. It’s a spectrum, but let’s explore the edges of the spectrum: the bilateral and the collective approach.
The reason many CEOs stick with the bilateral approach is that they’re not the ones who experience the negative effects. Their meetings all feel sharp, focused and efficient. Their executives all walk out of the CEO’s office happy and clear on what’s next. It’s further down in the organization that these misalignments play out, leading to conflict, poor collaboration, duplication of work, gaps in processes, and other dysfunctions and inefficiencies.
Nothing drives team performance up (or down) more than the quality of its deep-dive meetings—the ones where the big strategic, commercial, operational and organizational decisions are made. These are also the meetings where the cohesion of the team is forged and where you transform your top executives from being a source of fragmentation and friction lower down the organization into a source of coherence that reduces friction.
Step 1: Plan in advance. A little advance planning goes a huge way toward making your deep-dive meetings more impactful and efficient. There are three things to do before the meeting starts:
• Determine the most important issues for your team to focus on right now. So much invaluable time is wasted going through updates or addressing necessary but low-value issues. Set your agenda so that the key strategic, commercial or operational issues are tackled first.
• Define the outcome you want from each agenda item. Is it a list of options? A decision? A detailed action plan to kick off a new project?
• Ensure that everyone has the critical information they need to engage effectively with the issue—ideally in memo form. This can be distributed in advance or read together in the meeting.
Step 2: Set up for success during the meeting. A few things will really help get everyone in the right frame of mind:
• Ask everyone to switch off any devices or apps that are likely to distract them and to give their full attention to the discussion.
• Don’t dive straight in. Instead, open the meeting with a warm-up round, using a mindset-shifting question like, “What’s going well for you at work right now?” Even better, ask everyone to close their eyes and take five deep breaths. They may roll their eyes, but they’ll notice how much more focus there is in the room just moments later.
Step 3: Align on the question. Fully agree on the specific question that needs to be answered today. Too often, team meetings have vague agenda items like “sales” or “financials.” Everyone has something to say about these topics, but no one is clear on what specific question you’re trying to answer. As a result, people end up talking past each other. Or they discuss questions that are important but that can’t be answered today. A good question does the following:
Highlights where you’re stuck, the problem at hand (e.g., falling sales this quarter).
Defines the outcome you hope to achieve in today’s meeting (e.g., a list of possible actions to reverse the trend). Once you’ve clarified the question, read the energy in the room. If it’s high and people are eager to dive in, you’re on the right question.
Step 4: Hold a round. In any group, there are some people who take up a lot of airtime and others who take up very little. These factors have no correlation with how valuable their respective contributions might be. To really get the collective thinking engine going, you have to give everyone the space to share their best ideas. This is where the round comes in. Restate the question you arrived at in step 3; then kick off the round. Here are the rules:
• Anyone can start. Go around clockwise or counterclockwise until everyone has spoken.
• Listeners should pay full attention to the speaker. Keep your eyes on them while they’re speaking. And focus on understanding the meaning of their message, not on what you want to say in response. You’ll get your turn in a minute.
• Under no circumstances should you interrupt or jump in. Even if you desperately want to ask a clarifying question or make a point—hold it!
Rounds are dead simple, but I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen them transform a team. That’s because a round is more than a mechanical device. It’s also a powerful social contract that both binds and liberates the people in the meeting. This is the implicit contract. As a member of this team:
• I know categorically that I will have a chance to speak to our biggest issues. I know that when I speak, I will not be interrupted and that others will be 100 percent focused on listening to me.
• I know I’ll be heard and have a chance to influence others.
• In exchange for this privilege, I will keep my remarks concise—and will give others my fullest attention when it’s their turn to speak.
Step 5: Use a talking stick. Once your opening round is finished, you’re all free to jump in and discuss the issues as you normally would, with one small change: use a talking stick. It’s simple—only the person holding the talking stick (a marker pen works perfectly) is allowed to speak.
This last tip is incredibly powerful because it eliminates the possibility of interruptions. When people know for sure that they won’t be interrupted, a huge amount of stress and pressure disappears. They can choose their words with care and pause, and they can think while they speak without worrying that someone will steal the floor from them. As a result, the quality of contributions skyrockets while the number of misunderstandings plummets.
Keep an eye on equality of participation. If two or three people are dominating the discussion, invite the others to say how they see things. Or you can hold another round to ask people what their latest thinking is, in light of what has been said so far. This is often enough to find that the group is ready to move toward a conclusion or decision—and if not, it highlights exactly where any outstanding issues still lie, enabling you to focus on those points.
Rob Bier
Rob Bier is a seasoned expert in building high-performance organizations, with over twenty years’ experience in the field. He has helped over 40 scale-ups, start-ups, and growth companies to scale successfully, including eight that became unicorns or decacorns while he worked with them. He is the author of Smooth Scaling: 20 Rituals to Build a Friction-Free Organization.