The next two examples are of controlled laboratory studies done on the topic of meetings.
Laboratory/Experimental Studies
Allen Bluedorn and his colleagues conducted an intriguing experiment on stand-up meetings, a popular, relatively new form of employee meeting without seating. They used this laboratory study to answer the question, “How are meeting outcomes affected by conducting a meeting standing in comparison to sitting?” The researchers brought students into a lab setting to form five-person groups with the task of solving a problem. Groups were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: (1) a “sitting around a meeting table” condition (fifty-six groups), or (2) a “standing-up meeting” condition (fifty-five groups). The group’s solution to the problem was scored. In order to address the research question, the researchers measured both the group’s performance and the amount of time the group spent working.
Sometimes in an experimental study, a researcher uses a confederate (a person who appears to be involved as a participant but, unbeknownst to others, is part of the research team). Sigal Barsade, a professor at Yale University, employed a confederate to examine the concept of emotional contagion—the transference of mood states among meeting attendees—and how that affects actual meeting processes associated with success. The research question that drove this study was as follows: “How are individual moods and emotions in meetings affected by the confederate and, if there is contagion, how does that affect group cooperation, conflict, and perceived task performance?” Twenty-nine teams of business school undergraduates were formed; each attendee took on the role of a department head in a simulated leaderless group discussion. Included in the meeting was a confederate. The confederate conveyed either positive types of emotional behaviors (e.g., cheerfulness) or negative types of emotional behaviors (e.g., irritability) throughout the meeting. The researchers coded whether the emotion spread; group performance was assessed, and participants then answered a survey about how they were feeling to see if it matched the behaviors displayed by the confederate.
Interested in what these research studies found? Keep reading; the answers will be revealed later. In fact, throughout the book, insights from meeting science will be integrated with the ultimate goal of fully realizing the potential of meetings. Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel, was passionate about seeking to improve meetings. He once wrote, “Just as you would not permit a fellow employee to steal a piece of office equipment worth $2,000, you shouldn’t let anyone walk away with the time of his fellow managers.” A poorly conducted and unnecessary meeting is indeed a form of time theft, a theft that can be prevented.
Takeaways
1. Although there is evidence that the number of meetings is increasing and there are plenty of bad meetings, doing away with meetings is not a good or viable alternative. Meetings help employees connect, voice their opinions, tackle problems, and create a shared understanding.
2. Instead of eliminating meetings, we need to improve them using what we know from meeting science, which is the study of meetings themselves and everything and everyone involved in meetings.
3. Meeting science can take many forms—from general one-time or daily surveys, to longitudinal surveys and even laboratory studies. These different, yet complementary approaches help researchers answer questions and generate knowledge about different aspects of meetings.
Section II
EVIDENCE-BASED STRATEGIES FOR LEADERS
Chapter 3
THE IMAGE IN THE MIRROR IS LIKELY WRONG
“Self-awareness gives you the capacity to learn from your mistakes as well as your successes. It enables you to keep growing.”
Larry Bossidy, former chairman and CEO of AlliedSignal
“If you lack self-awareness you can’t change. Why should you? As far as you’re concerned you’re doing everything right.”
Jim Whitt, author and founder, Purpose Unlimited
There is compelling evidence suggesting that we are poor judges of our own leadership skills when it comes to meetings. Namely, we have an inflated view of our skills. This inflated perception, in turn, results in a sizable blind spot that likely prevents us from developing, improving, honing, and maximizing our ability to lead meetings. Given how essential meeting leadership is, the “victims” in this narrative are the meeting attendees themselves; they are the ones who experience the consequences of unproductive leadership practices. Furthermore, these unproductive practices have the potential to become the norm across the organization (“this is just how we do things”) and consequently spread to other managers and their meetings, infect new leaders, and ultimately define the meeting culture of the organization. In other words, we must not ignore the risk that poor meeting leadership skills will beget poor meeting leadership skills in others.
In this chapter, I will share how I reached these conclusions about our misaligned self-perceptions. Then I will discuss what we can do to promote accurate self-awareness of our meeting skills—to align the image in the mirror with reality. And, perhaps most importantly, we will discuss the target image in the mirror: the image leaders should aspire to see.
Human Bias in How We Perceive Ourselves
A Prairie Home Companion was a live radio program introduced in 1974 on Minnesota Public Radio. The show was set in Lake Wobegon, a fictional town. The town was described as a place where “all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.” From this, psychology professor David Myers coined the term the “Lake Wobegon Effect,” which refers to the robust human tendency to overestimate—relative to others—one’s knowledge, skills, abilities, and personality traits. In other words, most people believe they are well above average, which clearly is a statistical impossibility.
One of the first studies on this effect was conducted by researchers at the College Board, the publisher of the SAT exam. They attached a research survey to the SAT exam asking students to provide self-ratings on a variety of personal characteristics, such as leadership and the ability to get along well with others. Seventy percent of the students rated themselves as being above the median on leadership. With regard to the ability to get along well with others, 85 percent indicated they were above the median, and a whopping 25 percent indicated they were in the top 1 percent!
One reaction to these data is to assume that this is just another example of the warped and narcissistic teenage mindset and that these results would not extend to more grounded adults. Well, not so fast. Faculty at the University of Nebraska were surveyed about their teaching ability. Over 90 percent rated themselves as above average, and 68 percent indicated that they were in the top 25 percent. Another research project looked at self-perceptions of driving skills relative to others’. When asked about driving safety, 88 percent of a US sample indicated they were in the top 50 percent of drivers. Most recently, a unique study was conducted with prisoners in England, the majority of whom had been convicted of either violence against people or robbery. The participants were asked to compare their standing, relative to other prisoners and non-prisoners, on nine traits, such as kindness, generosity, self-control, morality, and law-abidingness. In light of the other results presented here, it should come as no surprise that the vast majority of participants rated themselves as “better than the average inmate” on all traits. What is most interesting is that when the inmates compared themselves to non-prisoners, they still rated themselves as better on all dimensions, with one exception: they rated themselves as equal to non-prisoners on law-abidingness. For our international readers who may think this does not apply in their country, research has found this “better-than-average bias” in diverse sets of samples from Germany, Israel, Sweden, Japan, and Australia.
Focusing Back on Meeting Leadership
Although direct tests of the self-inflation bias with regard to meetings do not yet exist, a host of related evidence paints a not-so-rosy picture. In multiple studies my colleagues and I conducted, we found that meeting leaders consis
tently rated their meetings more favorably than non-leaders. Thus, a leader’s experience of the meeting appears to be fundamentally different from the experiences of other meeting attendees, with leaders thinking things were, well, quite glorious. Additional research provides some insight into this finding. For example, in a study I conducted with Sophie Tong, a professor from Peking University, we found that the amount of participation or involvement in meetings correlated positively with perceptions of meeting effectiveness and satisfaction. In other words, if you talk a lot, you are more likely to think the meeting experience was a good one. Well, guess who typically talks the most in meetings? The leader.
Finally, referring back to the Verizon telephone survey of more than thirteen hundred meeting-goers that was mentioned in Chapter 1, as you may expect, respondents rated the meetings they themselves initiated as being extremely or very productive (79 percent). Meetings initiated by peers, in contrast, were evaluated as being significantly lower in productivity, with 56 percent of the meetings seen as extremely or very productive.
Taken together, leaders seem to have an overly positive sense of the meeting experience compared to that of meeting attendees. This inflated optimism ultimately diminishes self-awareness and the ability to truly recognize one’s own developmental needs. Hence, the premise of this chapter: the leader’s image in the meeting mirror is likely wrong.
What an Organization Can Do to Improve Leader Self-Awareness
The path to meeting enlightenment is multipronged. Before talking extensively about what each leader can personally do, it is important to recognize that organizations themselves can develop systems and practices that promote self-awareness (and accountability) among their leaders more broadly. These systems and practices take a few different forms. First and foremost, to facilitate self-awareness, leaders need meaningful meeting skills and facilitation training. After all, if you don’t truly know what excellent meeting behaviors look like, you don’t have an internal standard of sorts to compare yourself to. This type of training is essential, especially as it is rare to see this content domain addressed in bachelor’s-level business programs, standard MBA programs, or on-boarding programs, let alone among the millions of liberal arts graduates who enter the workforce. Andy Grove was arguably one of the greatest CEOs in modern history and was so passionate about the importance of meetings that he required every new employee—literally everyone, regardless of position—to take Intel’s course on effective meetings. He was so devoted to this ideal that, for many years, he actually taught the course himself.
The second major prong to promoting self-awareness is feedback. A company’s annual employee engagement and attitude survey must contain content on meetings in order to provide data on how leaders are doing. To date, I have identified only a couple of Fortune 500 companies engaged in this practice. This really is unfathomable—how could a frequent organizational activity like meetings not be a topic on these surveys? Without such content, organizations and, more importantly, individual leaders are left in the dark about whether their meetings are working as well as they think they are. In turn, they remain blind to employee suggestions on how to improve meetings.
Another opportunity for leader development and accountability is to conduct 360-degree feedback surveys that contain some content on meetings. With 360-degree feedback, a leader receives aggregated anonymous feedback from key groups of individuals: their peers, their direct reports, and their boss. Typically, organizations outsource 360-degree survey efforts to consulting companies. I have yet to find one consulting company that includes any content around meetings in its assessment. Given the amount of time spent in meetings, it is hard to imagine a bigger oversight in our leadership development toolbox. To facilitate these feedback efforts, I have provided sample engagement survey questions and sample 360-degree feedback questions in the “Tools” section at the end of this book.
Taken together, when it comes to organizational practices to promote feedback about meetings to leaders and accountability for being a poor meeting leader, we are in the dark ages. However, it is not all doom and gloom—there are some nice examples of innovative meeting evaluation practices in certain companies. Take, for instance, efforts exercised by Weight Watchers at their New York headquarters. They installed touchscreen tablets outside their conference rooms to capture anonymous feedback about the meetings just completed there. They keep the feedback quite simple: meeting attendees rate the last meeting on a five-point meeting-quality scale using emojis. Weight Watchers leverages the ratings to identify if interventions are needed and to ultimately assess the effectiveness of interventions attempted. For example, after installing agenda whiteboards—one of the suggested interventions—meeting dissatisfaction dropped from 44 percent to 16 percent. That said, perhaps the biggest value of an initiative such as this is actually more subtle in nature. By engaging in this practice of rating meetings and making improvements based on feedback, Weight Watchers is creating a culture that elevates the importance of meetings.
How Can Leaders Take Control of Their Meeting Leadership Skill Development?
When I’m working with executives and managers who want to make their meetings more effective, I recommend that they start by truly “seeing” their own meetings. Specifically, there are signals that, if we look carefully, inform us about meeting leadership abilities.
• If attendees are on their phones throughout the meeting multitasking, that is likely a negative reflection on our leadership.
• If attendees are engaging in a host of side conversations, that is a negative reflection on our leadership.
• If we are doing most, if not all, of the talking, that is indeed a negative reflection on our leadership.
• If one or two attendees are dominating the meeting discussion, it likely suggests that we did not construct an agenda highly relevant to all, that we have not created a psychologically “safe” setting in which folks can engage, or that we are not actively facilitating the meeting—all of which are not a positive reflection on our leadership.
These signals serve as feedback. If they are present for you, it’s time to consider some change.
Putting this informal scanning of cues aside, the best practice for you, as a leader, is to evaluate your standing meetings every three months or so. The evaluation should be quick and easy: a survey given to all attendees containing just a handful of questions. Let me share with you an assessment with some results collected from RSC Bio Solutions, located in Charlotte, North Carolina. The CEO implemented daily fifteen-minute meetings (aka huddles) with his commercial team to improve communication and coordination. A couple of months later, he administered the following short assessment to evaluate the huddles, shared here along with the annotated results.
COMMERCIAL HUDDLE CHECK-IN SURVEY
OCTOBER 18, 2016, 7:25 A.M. EDT
Q1: Overall, how useful are our Commercial huddles to you?
Answer % Count
Very useful 42.86% 3
Moderately useful 57.14% 4
Somewhat useful 0.00% 0
A little useful 0.00% 0
Not useful 0.00% 0
Q2: With regard to promoting communication, teamwork, and coordination, how effective do you feel our Commercial huddles are overall?
Answer % Count
Very effective 57.14% 4
Moderately effective 28.57% 2
Somewhat effective 14.29% 1
A little effective 0.00% 0
Not effective at all 0.00% 0
Q3: Overall, are you glad we are having Commercial huddles?
Answer % Count
Yes 100.00% 7
No 0.00% 0
Q4: What do you think is working well about the Commercial huddles?
“Cross-communication and awareness have been good; much more cooperative effort, prompts action.”
“Collaboration and overall better communications throughout the Commercial team.”
“Delivers a level of accountabi
lity and brings up areas where teamwork can be effective.”
“Keeping everyone in the loop and feeling part of a team. Keep moving things forward.”
“Sense of urgency is increasing. I see the huddles initiating collaborative work outside the huddle that wouldn’t otherwise happen. People are made aware of key things faster. We are removing obstacles as a result.”
Q5: What do you think we can do better/differently to make our Commercial huddles more effective?
“Continue to remind people to focus on key items and roadblocks. Still get into the weeds too often.”
1. Everyone must stay focused and concise (60–90 sec) for daily report-out—i.e., Roadblocks; Wins or Movement; Top Priority for the day. This would leave more time for questions/clarifications, suggestions/tips, and BRIEF beneficial discussion.
2. Every other day vs. every day?”
“I find that daily huddles can be somewhat distracting, it seems that mornings tend to be my most productive time. I suggest trying two or three times a week versus daily. I think we’d have the same results.”
“Less about all of the tasks . . . more focus on bigger issues and opportunities. Would love to see us sharing more wins/successes/accomplishments.”
The CEO was pleased that the huddles were well received and that folks derived value, but he acknowledged there were opportunities for improvement. Instead of reducing the frequency of the huddles as some suggested, he wanted to first see if they could make adjustments to the meetings to increase quality. He noted that a number of comments alluded to feelings of monotony and a lack of tightness around conversation. To address these concerns, he created additional huddle discussion prompts to try periodically. They also started rotating huddle leadership responsibilities and encouraged daily leaders to experiment with new prompts to spark energy and important insights. Before some meetings, he reminded folks what to avoid during huddles: just a long accounting of day-to-day activity (this serves to set expectations). After another assessment, they will see what effect these changes have had and then determine if it is best for the frequency of huddles to decrease.
The Surprising Science of Meetings Page 3