Meetings are essential to making progress, reporting information, holding people accountable and engaging a way forward. Meetings are effective if they are well conceived, considerate of diverse thinking and behavioral attributes and purposeful regarding critical communication and vital decision making.
Leveraging Diverse Thinking and Behavioral Attributes
Ineffective and useless meetings are amongst the biggest productivity-sapping activities that organizations engage in. What if it was possible to help teams in this area by empowering and teaching teams how to move from “staff meetings” to “team work sessions”. Think for a moment about how you approach a meeting. Consider that everyone sitting in the room has underlying, core, innate connection to how they want to do their job and even to how they listen in a meeting.
Geil Browning, founder of Emergenetics describes, “Effective collaboration doesn’t just happen. The key to a high-performance team is brain science.
I don’t have a problem with meetings. Teamwork and collaboration are critical to success, and research has determined that the collective intelligence of a group is greater than the intelligence of any member of the group. But I do have a problem with the way people handle meetings.
I’ve attended meetings all over the world, and in my experience they are largely the same whether I am in Singapore or Sioux Falls. At an assigned hour, people drop their work, gather in a conference room, and exchange pleasantries. Except for the chairperson, every face in the room shows the same expression: “Why am I here, and what am I expected to contribute?” An agenda is passed out, a scribe is selected, and the most important person in the room outlines the challenge at hand.
COMING IN THIS MEETING EFFECTIVENESS SERIES: VitalTalks, Leadership Styles & Decision Making
Many people are in attendance simply because they always have been. Division meetings are generally composed of all the individuals at or above a certain level. Company meetings are usually made up of representatives from each division–say, finance, product development, marketing, human resources, and sales. But where is it written that ideal groups are determined by job title?
The real key to assembling a high performance team is brain science. In my work, we cultivate a “meeting of the minds” and, as a result, we see teams experience higher creativity and greater productivity. Using a concept we developed, called the Whole Emergenetics Team (WEteam™ for short), you can quickly put together a successful team by selecting the team members according to their thinking and behavioral attributes, not their job title, formal role, or even recognized skills and competencies. A team built with all seven of the brain attributes for effective management will outperform a team in which one or more is missing. Meetings can become a time to walk a challenge through all the attributes, guaranteeing that you will generate new ideas, and workable solutions.