• Most importantly, walking meetings are really only effective for small gatherings. Two or three attendees is ideal. Four attendees can work with excellent facilitation.
• The agenda must be such that technology tools are not needed. That said, I recommended to one leader that he make voice-to-text memos using his phone, to capture key takeaways during the walk—this is fast and easy.
• Walking meetings are not ideal for conversations heavy on supporting materials or those that require extensive note-taking.
• Remember, these types of meetings still require planning and structure to yield their full potential—you should still have a well-thought-out agenda. They are not just breaks from work.
• If you plan to use a walking meeting, attendees should know this is in advance so that they are not surprised when they arrive (e.g., certain shoes, for example, may not be conducive to long walks). Although comfortable shoes are recommended, the walking speed should be slow and not aerobic in any way.
• Ideally, these walks should be outside; if this is not possible, even a walk inside a building can be a nice change of pace. In either case, pay attention to the route. You want to pick a path that is relatively quiet and circular. If it is not circular, just be sure to end the meeting in an agreed-upon location, such as a coffee shop, the parking lot, or the lunch room.
I’ll conclude this section with a passage from a blog by Richard Branson, CEO of Virgin:
When given the opportunity I often like to take things a step further—literally, with a walking meeting. I sometimes even set myself a personal challenge of trying to come up with a plan of attack in the time it takes to walk around the block . . . five minutes, go! A lot of time is wasted in meetings. Agendas get forgotten, topics go amiss, and people get distracted. While some circumstances call for workshops and more elaborate presentations, it’s very rare that a meeting on a single topic should need to last more than 5–10 minutes. If you stand up, you’ll find that decisions get made pretty quickly, and no one nods off! Plus, it’s a great way to fit in a bit of exercise and stay focused on a busy day. Another positive about meetings outside the boardroom is a lack of fancy tools, and instead an emphasis on real communication.
A Standing Meeting
A standing meeting is another way to ditch the chairs and just get up. Here is what we know about sitting: too much sitting is bad for your health. It is associated with higher blood pressure, increased cholesterol, and overall elevated cardiovascular disease. One study, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine and reported widely in the popular press, included eleven thousand adults and evidently found that every hour spent sitting watching TV, DVDs, and other gadgets with screens reduces life expectancy by around twenty minutes. Which brings us to the merits of the standing meeting.
Allen Bluedorn, a professor at the University of Missouri, and his colleagues conducted an experimental study in which they compared standing meetings with sitting meetings in a laboratory setting. They examined a hundred five-person meetings. Although meeting quality was unaffected by meeting format, sit-down meetings took 34 percent longer than standing meetings—so, same quality in considerably less time. Attendees also reported greater satisfaction with the standing meetings.
Andrew Knight and Markus Baer, two researchers at Washington University in St. Louis, recently examined fifty-four small groups of three to five attendees. There were two conditions in their study, standing and sitting. The attendees’ task was to develop and record a university recruitment video in thirty minutes. Overall, the researchers found that in stand-up meetings there was better collaboration, less possessiveness of ideas, more willingness to consider others’ ideas, and greater levels of engagement. Based on this evidence, we can conclude the stand-up meeting is a good tool to have in the meeting leadership arsenal. There are some noteworthy caveats to keep in mind when implementing a standing meeting:
• Be sensitive to meeting length; folks will only want to stand for so long. There is no research on this per se, but I would advocate aiming for fifteen minutes or so. This consideration should mitigate fatigue and prevent any inadvertent privilege of those in good health.
• If you try a standing meeting, keep a close eye on any odd dynamics that might emerge due to differences in physical stature among attendees. For example, you don’t want your five-foot, two-inch attendees to feel intimidated by your six-foot, four-inch attendees. Having stools to perch on without a table could be one solution to this type of situation.
Conclusion
The techniques presented here are tools and approaches I encourage you to try—to energize, promote focus, and generally improve the meeting experience. They are just additional arrows in a quiver, tools in a toolbox, colors in a palette, and crayons in a box. Overusing any of these techniques will yield just another habit, so be sure to use them sparingly. Leveraging different techniques at different times, given a set of meeting goals, is a best practice for sure. Trying new things conveys to your team that you care and that you value controlled risk-taking and experimentation. Your team may groan and even tease you when you introduce these alternative methods, but they likely will appreciate that you are taking a banal experience and trying to bring it to life. It only reflects well on you—give it a go. Heed the famous words of William Cowper: “variety’s the very spice of life that gives it all its flavor.”
Takeaways
1. Humans are inherently habitual. This tendency to favor routines also applies to the meetings we host: they can easily become stale. Our meetings pretty much look quite similar in process, composition, and setup.
2. There are several ways to introduce variety into your meetings; one technique is to change the seating arrangements in your gatherings. Although it may seem rudimentary, whom folks sit next to, across from, and far away from can absolutely affect their meeting experience and the overall meeting quality. As creatures of habit, people tend to sit in the same spots at these meetings over and over again. You can change seating arrangements by simply asking attendees to sit somewhere different, shuffling and placing name placards, or changing the table setup or meeting venue.
3. Another technique to use to introduce some variety into your meetings is having a walking meeting. Research has shown the benefits of walking: everything from reducing obesity and heart disease to increasing creativity and focus. It is important to keep in mind that walking meetings are best for two to four people, they still need to be planned, and, ideally, they should involve an outdoor, circular route (though slight variations on this are welcome).
4. Consider a standing meeting. Similar to walking, standing has health benefits and has been shown to be associated with increases in meeting satisfaction and efficiency. Standing meetings can work for larger groups of people, but they should be shorter—fifteen minutes or so.
Chapter 8
DEFLATE NEGATIVE ENERGY FROM THE START
“You said ‘long-story short’ 10 seconds ago, seriously, wrap it the f**k up.”
Internet meme
Negativity is personally draining and collectively contagious. We know that a person’s mood state (i.e., his or her current mood) greatly affects how that person thinks and acts. Not only do mood states vary from person to person, they can vary for the same person over the course of a single day. Mood states may be transient, but the evidence supporting the benefits of positive mood is robust and associated with many favorable outcomes. In this chapter I will discuss how bringing positive energy into your meetings will benefit individuals and teams. Because mood states can be both influenced by and influential on others, the following recommendations are a powerful addition to the meetings toolbox.
Why Positivity?
Positive mood states promote individual cognitive flexibility, resilience, well-being, and even creativity. Interestingly, and of great relevance to this chapter, the collective mood states of the meeting attendees, taken together, also matter. Matthew Grawitch and colleagues from St. Loui
s University conducted an intriguing study on this topic and published the findings in the journal Group Dynamics: Theory, Research and Practice. They used a mood induction process (e.g., having participants focus for three minutes on a recent past event that put them in a good mood, thus prompting that good mood to reemerge to some extent) to create three groups: individuals in good moods, those in bad moods, and those in neutral moods. Groups of meeting attendees in the positive-mood condition outperformed groups in the neutral- or negative-mood condition on a creative task (similar to the paper-clip creativity task I mentioned earlier). The researchers discovered that when attendees were in good moods there was more engagement and a greater likelihood to use and integrate information across attendees. From these findings, it appears that the collective positive mood state serves as an intellectual and social lubricant leading to a more robust, integrative, and creative discussion.
A related study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, conducted by professors and leading scholars Nale Lehmann-Willenbrock and Joe Allen, examined humor in meetings. They videotaped fifty-four actual team meetings in an organization. The researchers focused on patterns of humor and laughter (instances of this were tallied by external evaluators of the videos). The research team was also able to collect performance ratings of the teams by supervisors. In meetings with more humor and laughter patterns (more than would be observed due to chance), there was a greater propensity for socioemotional communication (e.g., support), constructive conversations, and novel solutions. Furthermore, meetings with more humor rated higher on overall team performance. Of course, humor patterns that are more mean-spirited and contain put-down humor, even if they fuel laughter, show a negative relationship with the overall performance of the team.
Unfortunately, I know it may be hard to believe, but attending a meeting does not appear to put people in a good mood. In my early research, I found that meetings are often experienced as a work interruption. We proceed through our workdays engaged in tasks and activities to meet goals and accomplish objectives. A meeting occurs in the midst of these activities. Although most workplaces have many team-based elements, work is largely evaluated individually; individuals are held personally accountable for inadequate performance. Given this, a good amount of our time is spent working on individual-based objectives and goals. While we work, a meeting can break these rhythms. Although we may welcome the occasional interruption, in general, we find interruptions bothersome, agitating, perhaps even downright detrimental to our work and mood. It is not uncommon for negative stress to occur in the face of a distraction; after all, once the distraction is over, the employee must spend additional time thinking about what he or she was working on before the interruption in order to get back on track. Given this, helping folks get in a positive state for the meeting you are about to lead requires a bit of work. First, you will want to do things that help your attendees feel mentally present (e.g., not perseverating about what they were just doing prior to the meeting or what they would rather be doing). Stated differently, to achieve presence and, in turn, positivity, you must start by creating separation from the strain associated with the interruption.
Creating Separation
Even before the meeting gets underway, the leader should actively greet attendees and help folks feel welcome, appreciated, and needed. As a meeting leader, be on your feet, move around to where folks are sitting as they come in. Make eye contact. While the types of greetings will certainly vary depending on relationship dynamics, consider shaking hands, pats on the back as appropriate, and other types of welcoming forms of engagement. If some attendees don’t know each other, be active in making introductions and even pointing out common areas of interest. In an earlier chapter, I likened a meeting to a social event, such as a wedding. It should come as no surprise that the behaviors I am describing, as a collective, are examples of what you would expect from a good host. After all, isn’t that what a meeting leader is? Above all else, be a source of positive energy. Attendees will immediately feed off your energy and take cues from you about what kind of scene they have just walked into. The research is clear on the concept of emotional contagion: moods travel quickly. As this goes both ways, don’t let others negatively weigh you down. Remain upbeat and positive in the face of potential attendee negativity.
As an alternative to greeting attendees as just described, I sometimes use music to foster separation and build presence. I have seen it work wonders. As folks enter the room, have music streaming at a pretty good volume. In fact, I sometimes ask the first-arriving attendee for his or her favorite genre or band and plug it into Spotify. The music can elevate mood in and of itself, but it also serves to punctuate the start of something new. When we reach the designated meeting start time, I turn the music off quite suddenly. This creates an auditory cue that work is now starting. It is an easy but striking intervention to start a meeting.
This advice is designed to set the stage for constructive meeting energy; I will now turn to the importance of starting the meeting itself effectively and with gusto, and continuing the momentum. First, meeting leaders must realize that they are uniquely positioned to promote a positive meeting environment. Research has indeed found that the mood of the meeting leader is a good predictor of the eventual mood of attendees. Other work has gone even further: we now know that the mood state of the leader is actually a predictor of group performance. The question now is how can leaders introduce, and more importantly sustain, a positive meeting tone and perhaps even create a joyful meeting?
There is evidence that, as the meeting leader, the early social interactions you encourage and promote have the power to influence the remainder of the meeting. For example, a study published in the European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology examined eighteen newly formed flight crews. The authors did an in-depth analysis of everything the crews said during the preflight phase (which is akin to the very first part of a meeting). First, they found that the types of communication that occurred early predicted the types of communication occurring later for the team (e.g., nonconstructive early conversations seem to persist throughout the meeting). Furthermore, when those early patterns are constructive (e.g., a balanced pattern of interaction), they are ultimately positively consequential to performance. The article concluded by emphasizing the importance of training focused on establishing strong early interactions.
Another study reported in the book Happy Hour Is 9 to 5: How to Love Your Job, Love Your Life, and Kick Butt at Work (Your Best Self) is quite intriguing. The author discusses a psychological experiment in which folks were brought together to reach consensus on a contentious subject. But there was a twist. One of the meeting attendees was actually an actor (a confederate) brought in to play a part. The actor was instructed by the researchers to be the first one to speak. In one half of the groups, the actor would say something positive. In the other half of the groups, the actor would say something negative and critical. After this first scripted line, the actor would simply participate in the rest of the group discussions in a neutral manner. What the researchers found was consistent with the flight crew study: early positive comments by the actor were followed by more constructive collective discussions, with increased listening and a higher probability of reaching consensus. When the actor started with a negative comment, however, the discussion tended to be more contentious, the mood was more hostile, and there was a lower probability of coming to consensus. Like playing dominos, how the meeting starts shapes the rest of the meeting. Therefore, it is critical that you start your meeting with intention—with care to ensure subsequent interactions are as positive as possible.
Creating a positive spark to begin the meeting can be simple to do. To start, make your first words to attendees count. Begin the meeting with passion, enthusiasm, vision, and direction. Make it clear why attendees are at the meeting and what needs to get done. Next, a meeting leader can consider using no more than one to two minutes to focus on recognition, celebration,
and appreciation—ideally, this is directed at a collective accomplishment, but this can also target individual achievements. This type of acknowledgment and gratitude can build a collective sense of joy and esprit de corps. Alternate versions of this approach (again, just a couple of minutes) also exist, such as going around the table and encouraging each attendee:
• To recognize someone (or the broader collective) who has helped them since the last meeting.
• To recognize the achievement or accomplishment of another person since the last meeting.
A range of other prompts can be asked, of course, as long as they are generally focused on positive topics and don’t take too much time. The key is finding the ones you think “fit” with the attendees. However, don’t let this become yet another habit. Try using different prompts occasionally to keep the discussion fresh and interesting.
I am also a fan of periodically reminding folks about “meeting values” as a means to further create separation and make early moments positively impactful. As we discussed earlier in the book, leaders should periodically assess the effectiveness of their meetings. One adaptation of this is to ask attendees at some point what expectations they have of the meeting environment—norms and behaviors they want to see in you as leader and in others. This is an ideal approach once a team or task force is created, but it can be used at other time periods as well. See the Meeting Expectations Quick Survey (at the end of the book) that one leader used.
Results from a short survey like this can serve as opening fodder. Namely, if attendees have said that they value and expect, for example, concise input, respectful disagreements, and no side conversation, this can be reaffirmed at the start of future meetings. This does not have to happen at all meetings, but periodically keeping values and expectations alive is a good practice. Doing so helps to build positive and constructive norms and provides the cue that all are starting a new task together, one that has particular behavioral expectations—this helps create separation. Furthermore, we know from research that by making expectations explicit, one increases the chances of them becoming the norm.
The Surprising Science of Meetings Page 9