Death by Meeting

by Don Harkey

I was about to lead a church council retreat and I had arrived early to get everything set up. It was about 5:30PM on a Friday. We were to hold the meeting at the local Council of Churches office and I noticed one of the staff members was still at work. I stuck my head and we had a casual conversation. I mentioned that I wrote articles for the Springfield Business Journal and we discussed a few of the topics I have written about. He then handed me a book from his shelf for me to borrow. It was called "Death by Meeting" by Patrick Lencioni.

I still had time before the meeting was to start, so I began to read. The book is written as a fiction story, and is an extremely easy read. The plot centers on a management team trying to get over the hump. Many of you know what I mean when I say "the hump", but I will explain.

Have you ever worked within an organization or with a team that seemed to have all of the right people to succeed, but just wasn't quite performing as well as you hoped? You go to meeting after meeting, starting with high expectations and ending with doodles on a scratch piece of paper. This is particularly brutal when it happens in a regular meeting. The team pulls together regularly, but no one is really sure what the purpose of the meeting is and no one is sure if anything ever really gets done. The team might even touch on some important topics or even come up with brilliant ideas. Yet, it always seems to end there.

I participated in a staff meeting a few years ago where various staff members were updating the other staff members on what they were up to. In the middle of the meeting, it was the administrative assistant's turn. She broke into an emotional plea to the group saying how she just can't seem to keep up with her job and that didn't know how much longer she could take it. The staff dutifully offered several suggestions like "we might purchase some new software to make the job easier" or "maybe we could get someone to help". After each suggestion was made, it was dropped. Once all of the suggestions were made, the meeting went on. The assistant was completely deflated. There was no help on the horizon, only a set of vague suggestions. She quit within a couple of months.

This is truly "Death by Meeting". What is the problem? The issue is often times "conflict". However, the problem is not the presence of conflict, but the lack of conflict in the meetings.

Many people and company cultures abhor conflict. They avoid it at all costs. One engineer I know was sitting in a meeting discussing a pump that had recently failed. He was debating with another engineer over the mechanism for the failure. The two mechanisms were very different and would require completely different resolutions. The discussion was pointed, but technical in nature (not personal). The manager became increasingly uncomfortable and finally offered, "maybe your both right!". This was not only impossible, it also ended the discussion and the opportunity to prevent the pump from failing again.

The point is that conflict, when handled productively, is actually very healthy within an organization. It actually exists in every organization, but it is how conflict is managed that makes a difference. The administrative assistant in my example above had a conflict that the rest of the staff was unwilling to acknowledge or address. As a leader, how do you correct this problem?

When facilitating a team, it is often your job to mine conflict. As the old saying goes, if there is an elephant in the room, introduce the elephant. Don't let it get personal. Allow participants to "save face" on arguments they "lose". Keep the purpose of the meeting in front of everyone and show that the difficult discussions are necessary to not waste everyone's time.

If your organization's culture is very anti-conflict, it will take time to change. It is well worth the effort, however. Can you imagine? PRODUCTIVE meetings?!?!

To read more by Patrick Lencioni, you can check out his blog at:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/A38429OVSLI05I/ref=cm_blog_dp_artist_blog