Patti Cotton

Executive Coach & Career Strategist

employees

Five Hidden Factors Resulting in Meeting Stalemates

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Five Hidden Factors Resulting in Meeting Stalemates
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You’ve reached an impasse in the meeting. Emotions are high.

It’s another stalemate, and this is becoming habit on your team.

Why does this happen? And how do you break through this and reach consensus?

Meeting shutdowns happen for a variety of reasons. And all the tips in the world to facilitate meetings will not work unless you move past the five most common hidden roadblocks that impel people to leave the conversation.

When a meeting stalemates, it is often because team members leave the “window of tolerance,” a term coined by Dan Siegel in his book Mindsight. The window of tolerance is the zone in which people operate optimally, functioning, managing, and thriving. It is the space in which we can do our best critical thinking, exchanging, and considering ideas because when we are in this zone, we are able to use our executive brain – the part of the brain where functions such as creativity, reasoning, critical thinking, and more are centered.

When people leave the window of tolerance, they move to one of two states.

  1. Hyper-arousal

Here, a person will want to fight or flee. They may feel anxious or angry. Emotions run high, and any thinking is based on survival and safety.

  1. Hypo-arousal

Here, a person will shut down, and feel spacey or numb. The body might want to freeze or shut down, and it is difficult to think at all.

How does this work in meetings?

Team members may become heated and even irrational in their attempt to drive home opinions or resist those presented by others. Other team members can shut down and leave the conversation entirely.

When this happens, meeting effectiveness comes to a halt. Most often, the group will decide they need to meet at a later time to revisit the topic. Important decisions are placed on hold. Executives and areas of responsibility are held back. The organization is in limbo.

How do you handle this?

Here are five of the most common inhibitors and some ideas to help the team break through to move forward.

  1. A lack of clarity about the idea or concept presented.

Is the idea or concept being stated clear to others? Has the presenter explained this in a way that everyone understands? If you have a person who cannot state ideas succinctly, this is enough to cause others to discount their message. If you have someone on the team who takes too much space in explaining concepts, here is a “cheat sheet” to help them frame their message in a way that is more concise and convincing.

  1. A lack of understanding as to the business impact or benefits to the organization.

Do people understand how the topic at hand impacts the business? When exploring ideas to support decisions, it is important to connect the dots. How will the idea being presented benefit and impact the organization? What negative realities will need to be dealt with if the overall concept is of value? Asking these questions can help your team think beyond the immediate.

  1. Bias around the message bearer.

It is important for team members to check in on this. We all carry bias. The question is, how do we choose to handle it? Notice if you discount messages coming from any particular team member due to your personal bias about them. How can you give space and compassion to that person and consider the idea they are presenting? This is perhaps the toughest of the five roadblocks, and yet, the most beneficial when we begin to adopt a stance reflecting more empathy and compassion.

  1. Conflict with a personal agenda or conviction.

If a concept is presented that moves counter to the way your own area of responsibility operates, it is enough to cause internal conflict and an aversion to remain open to possibility. Most of us are inclined to respond with statements such as, “Well, that will never work because…” or “We just don’t do things that way…”

Consider replacing these kinds of statements with those such as, “How would that work? What might the benefits be?” This helps you and others stay in the conversation and play with possibilities that could be game changers for your business and the impact it has on the world.

  1. A lack of willingness to embrace change

Change is really tough, and it is not fun. Why? We are creatures of habit and love our comfort zones. Yet, change is when exciting things can happen, and we can take advantage of the opportunity to grow. Check yourself when you feel resistance to change. Recognize where you are in the change cycle on the particular issue being addressed. Then ask yourself what possible benefit you and the organization might enjoy if the change takes place. Awareness around your own resistance and how to manage it if you see benefit are empowering.

Only after these roadblocks have been addressed can you actually move forward to play well as a team and make good decisions together. I challenge you to discuss these factors with your team to begin a new way of approaching and implementing your decision-making together.

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© Patti Cotton and patticotton.com. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express written permission from the author is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that attribution is made to Patti Cotton and patticotton.com, with links thereto.

Do You Have an Absentee Leader on Your Team?

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Do You Have an Absentee Leader on Your Team?
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Absentee leadership is rarely discussed, but it is perhaps the most destructive of all poor leadership types. It can do more to compromise employee engagement, morale, and productivity than other faulty leadership styles.

Unfortunately, it is also the most difficult of the styles to detect, which means you may have one on your team right now.

How can you detect whether you have this element in the executive circle? And what can you do about it?

Also called an emotionally disengaged leader, an Absentee leads in title only. They are people who are perhaps promoted into management because they did great work in their previous position, and they enjoy the perks and rewards of their current elevated status. However, they do not put in the hard work of engaging with their team to provide direction and support. You might say that they deplete the organization’s value because they are taking from it, but not investing back into it.

This affects the teams and individuals in their area of responsibility in a much more insidious way because absentee leadership behaviors can cause confusion in roles, conflict between staff, and increased stress leading to work and health problems.

Symptoms that you have an Absentee on your team can include:

  1. End runs for answers.

Do you have employees from a specific area within the organization that continue to come to you for answers? Ask yourself why. Allowing or even supporting this disempowers their leader and crowds your calendar. If you have not encouraged this dynamic, it may be that these employees are not getting answers from the person who should be supporting them. Don’t fall into the trap of giving a quick and easy response to these queries; instead, make time to sit with the leader who should be supplying answers and share what you are noticing. The goal of this exercise is not to punish the employees, but to explore why they are not getting answers. Deep dive on this one.

  1. Increased conflict or interpersonal problems.

Do you have employees or an area within the organization that cyclically erupts? This is a reflection of unmanaged emotions and a lack of ability to negotiate relationships. If this is a trend, it is a reflection of someone allowing this to continue. I would call this an Absentee leader, since the leader is either aware of the situation but steps back from confronting, or they are unaware, which is worse. Again, this requires a conversation and some coaching around expectations. You’ll need to stick closely to the Absentee during a corrective period to monitor their progress. Absentees can disappear easily in the company crowd. They are generally nice people who don’t make noise, which allows them to hide behind other more evident company challenges.

  1. Team grumbling or low performance.

When conducting employee forums or interdepartmental meetings, do you notice that dissatisfaction is expressed from the same corners every time? Is there a team that is known for its compromised performance? A chronic poor attitude or behavior in either individuals or team is a clear sign that someone is not present for their team, providing coaching, corrective feedback, and upholding expectations. Again, your approach would be the same – to sit with your Absentee and outline what you are observing, how it is impacting others and the company, and to define clearly what you want to see. Monitor, monitor, monitor.

This topic is worth careful study if you want highest ROI from your executive team.

The impact of absentee leadership on job satisfaction outlasts the impact of both constructive and overtly destructive forms of leadership. This costs your company not only now, but in future, since best efforts to turn this around take time.

And at a time when your focus needs to be on leading the organization into the future, you can’t afford to compromise.

HOW MUCH

DO OTHERS REALLY TRUST YOU?

​Learn the two vital parts to trust and how they can help you become a more highly effective leader.

GET THE INFOGRAPHIC

© Patti Cotton and patticotton.com. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express written permission from the author is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that attribution is made to Patti Cotton and patticotton.com, with links thereto.

5 Ways to Cut Your Meeting Time in Half

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5 Ways to Cut Your Meeting Time in Half
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Ask anyone in management about how much they love meetings, and I can guarantee you will hear a loud groan. Chief complaints are that there are too many, they waste time, and little gets accomplished during these. A top upset is when meetings rehash the same agenda items without any move forward.

How can you minimize the time spent on your meetings, maximize the focus and outcomes, and get back to work quickly?

Here are 5 ways you can make sure your meetings are effective, stay on track, and keep the organization moving forward:

1. Prepare your attendees for the meeting.

Make sure your meeting has a clear purpose, an agenda, and any background information to brief people. Send this out ahead of time and alert attendees that they need to review the info before the meeting is held. This one move can eliminate a lot of time in your meeting wasted on bringing people up to speed and risking conversations around things that have already been decided.

2. Clarify what you want from your attendees.

Is this meeting informational, for consideration, or for action?

a. If the meeting is for information only, make it clear that you are sharing for awareness, and decide during your meeting what information from your time together needs to be shared with the larger employee base or select management.

b. If the meeting is for consideration, make sure you define what is up for consideration and what outcomes you would like for the meeting. This kind of meeting is most likely to be typed as a time-waster unless you facilitate for the outcomes you request, identify next steps with deadlines, and share this with all involved to pull things forward. It is important especially for this type of meeting that you as leader facilitate and allow other team members to speak and weigh in. Your job is to conduct the meeting and keep it on track to desired outcomes – not to dictate opinion by reason of your position.

c. If the meeting is for action, be sure that you have identified and have present all decision-makers who need to be in the room. This avoids having to chase down and reintegrate any new views or opinions coming from those who were absent (and which can often cause another new meeting on the same subject, rehashing the same agenda). As with the meeting for consideration, articulate clearly the decisions that were made, the actions you have determined, who will follow up on each, and a deadline for reporting back.

3. Go lean on your attendee list.

Do you have tourists in your meetings? People who have climbed “on the bus” by virtue of association, but who really don’t need to be in there? Review your agenda carefully and decide who from your regular attendee list no longer needs to be involved. This can be touchy as you may send the wrong message by simply disinviting them. Be sure to explain why – that the agenda isn’t something to which they need to devote time, and you are revamping in order to minimize meetings and time spent on these so that they can do the work at hand.

4. Avoid highjacking.

Three major ways this can happen to your meeting are when Parkinson’s Law of Triviality is activated, when side-barring occurs, and if you have a personality who tends grandstand or hold court.

a. Parkinson’s Law of Triviality is where people spend a relatively large amount of time, energy, and focus dealing with relatively minor issues. How does this work in a meeting? People will stay with trivia inside of a more major decision because they are more comfortable with that. They may not understand the larger issue at hand, or they may not be fully engaged with it. When this happens, and they begin to “major in minors,” the more important issue being neglected, and a whole team diverted to a side conversation. If you notice this happening, be quick to call people back to the larger focus at hand.

b. Stopping your own meeting to side-bar means that the rest of your team has to wait while you do take care of things that should be cared for in a 1:1 meeting or other forum. It sends a poor message about your own leadership abilities and causes people to lose their focus and engagement during your time together. That’s a hard thing to recapture – so don’t do it!

c. Do you have a grandstander? A personality who considers meetings the place where they can make sure everyone else is impressed with their opinion? This person tends to takes up all the air in the room so that others aren’t able or willing to participate, or interrupts loudly to show expertise. If so, you need to have a critical conversation with this person to help them to understand the behavior you are noticing, how it is adversely impacting the team, and the desired behaviors you want to see instead.

5. Recap of your meeting.

Send out a recap of your meeting notes with appropriate action steps, designated people in charge of them, and deadlines. These notes should be taken by someone other than you to allow you to focus on leading and facilitating. If you have an assistant, this is optimal. If you have a leaner team in attendance for this one, ask one of your members to capture what you want on the agenda so that you can have your assistant type these up later for distribution.

What are your pet-peeve time-wasters in meetings? I’d love to hear more about it.

For more about making your meetings more effective to promote better decisions and outcomes, see McKinsey’s May 2019 article “Want a Better Decision? Plan a Better Meeting” by Aaron De Smet, Gregor Jost, and Leigh Weiss.

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© Patti Cotton and patticotton.com. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express written permission from the author is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that attribution is made to Patti Cotton and patticotton.com, with links thereto.

Why Human Experience Trumps Employee Engagement

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Why Human Experience Trumps Employee Engagement
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What’s so important about human experience in the workplace? Well, everything.

If you are looking to retain great talent, to reinforce healthy and positive culture, and to rise above the competition, then helping your employees find meaning in their work is non-negotiable.

But aren’t you doing this this through providing a great employee experience? No.

Employee engagement initiatives continue to take main stage to respond to and encourage employee motivation, commitment, and the quality of contribution at work. A lot of money and energy have been poured into these endeavors, but we aren’t seeing the results we had hoped for. Why is this?

The truth is, employee engagement initiatives aren’t working, because we feel we can elevate employee engagement by providing attractive perks and rewards. And these don’t respond to the real need.

Recent research findings from Deloitte’s 2019 Global Human Capital Trends examines this challenge. The writers show that employee motivation is driven by career, purpose, and meaning from work.

This means we need to enhance the human experience for each and every employee. Impossible task? Not really.

We simply need to help the employee answer the following questions:

  1. Do I belong to the team, to the organization?

Who are we and why do we belong together? As leader, you can work with your team members to answer these questions through the way you define and live your mission and shared values. See the article “Does Your Team Live Up to Its Values” for a great way to make this come alive.

  1. Am I safe?

Do I work in a trusting environment with individuals whom I respect and who respect me? Every employee must feel they can work together with their team without doubt or reservation, and to know team members can count on each other. This means ensuring a culture of high trust. How well do you and your company measure up? Take the time to examine the components of trust and see where your energy and efforts need to focus – this one thing changes everything at the individual, team, and organizational levels.

HOW MUCH

DO OTHERS REALLY TRUST YOU?

​Learn the two vital parts to trust and how they can help you become a more highly effective leader.

GET THE INFOGRAPHIC

  1. Do I make a difference to the larger picture?

Am I able to use my gifts and strengths in a role allowing me to contribute in a way that makes an impact? Ensuring right job fit and design is just part of this. Reinforcing the contributions of the individual means to teach your employees to recognize the efforts of others and to express this as part of your culture. When was the last time that you told a member of your executive team how they made a difference to the larger picture? Your culture must reflect this at all levels.

  1. Together, do we bring something of value to the world?

Do we as a team and company contribute something that makes a difference to the world? Ask yourself why your company exists. If the answer to your “why” is to make money or products, then you are in trouble. How does the service or product your business offers make a difference for your customers? What are they able to do, live, enjoy that they wouldn’t otherwise? The answers to this must be understood and communicated regularly to your entire employee base. For a refresher on how to define this, read Sinek’s book Start with Why, or see his TED talk “How Leaders Inspire Action.”

  1. Is there room for me to grow here?

One of the top concerns of a thriving CEO is to define and articulate clear career paths within the company to inspire and motivate your employees. These CEOs also make sure that their learning and development efforts include relevant personal and professional growth offerings. How do your L&D efforts measure up? And if you think your employees can’t take time for this, think again. Best companies are making sure their people have this available through regular face-to-face and virtual instruction with a coach approach to ensure that true learning occurs. The rewards are exponential.

What kind of human experience are you offering to your employees?

I suggest that as you start out on the path to providing something of great meaning and value, that you begin by personally answering the five questions above. Walking the talk will not only help you to integrate human experience as culture, it will also help you to personally become more motivated and engaged as you lead these efforts.

© Patti Cotton and patticotton.com. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express written permission from the author is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that attribution is made to Patti Cotton and patticotton.com, with links thereto.

How to Remedy Mediocre Team Trust

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How to Remedy Mediocre Team Trust
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How much is enough when it comes to trust on your team? You may feel it’s pretty good – and that it’s “good enough.”

But your organization is suffering if you feel this way. The company will be missing out on so many things that ultimately affect its profitability and the return on shareholder investment.

Truth be told, you are suffering, as well. It’s just subtle enough that you may not realize it.

Are you compromising your best leadership because of mediocre team trust? 

Following are some things that high trust can do for you, your team, and the organization.

1. Impact of Trust at the Individual Level

  • You bond with others to enjoy better relationships.
  • You feel personally and professionally protected, knowing others have your best interests in mind.
  • You are assured that you can count on others to inspire you to contribute your best and be a part of the larger picture.

2. Impact of Trust at the Team Level

  • You enjoy more collaboration. It feels safe to process challenges, solve problems, and reach goals together. Conflict is dealt with so that relationships are respected and issues are solved.
  • You reap enhanced creativity and innovation. You feel comfortable sharing new ideas and taking risks. You feel comfortable that your team members have your back, and you are willing to have theirs.
  • Team productivity soars, and morale is high.

3. Impact of Trust at the Organizational Level

  • Heightened employee engagement and satisfaction override decreased turnover.
  • There is increased productivity and profitability.
  • The company enjoys a higher return on shareholder investment.

How do you begin to build greater trust on your team?

1. Review with your team the anatomy of trust.

HOW MUCH

DO OTHERS REALLY TRUST YOU?

​Learn the two vital parts to trust and how they can help you become a more highly effective leader.

GET THE INFOGRAPHIC

Become well-acquainted with what makes up trust so that you can begin to identify where the team needs to grow.

2. Use this as an opportunity to begin building trust.

Have all team members rate the team as a whole (as if the team were one individual).

  • Where does the team do well?
  • Identify the top three areas where the team has a growth opportunity.

Then, brainstorm together on a plan to work on these.

  • What are first steps?
  • How will you measure success?
  • And how will you hold each other accountable?

The benefits of high trust on a team are many. I challenge you to get excited around this and to build additional trust on your team. Let me know how it works!

© Patti Cotton and patticotton.com. All rights reserved. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express written permission from the author is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that attribution is made to Patti Cotton and patticotton.com, with links thereto.