An intelligent group of diverse people will seldom agree on issues that matter. It’s natural and productive for disagreement to unfold. Working to resolve those differences and compromise on a unique solution is interesting, productive, and fun.When you avoid these disagreements and stifle debate, you bury resentment and frustration that will fester and manifest itself in other forms of unproductive personal conflict, or politics. You have deprived your team of actively engaging in the meeting and working towards a better solution.As a leader, you must have the courage to mine for conflict.

Mine for Conflict

A meeting without contextual structure leaves a bad taste in everyone’s mouth. One generic meeting format is a surefire recipe for ineffective meetings.Without context, some team members will believe that the meeting should have been shorter and focused on tactical day-to-day issues, while others will be upset that the meeting didn’t allow enough time to have a thorough strategic discussion. You cannot satisfy both at the same time. We must be disciplined to structure our meetings with the purpose to cater towards a specific business need.

Providing Context with Structure

Lightning Round: A quick, around-the-table reporting session in which everyone communicates their two or three priorities of the week. Each person is given 60 seconds.Progress Review: Next, the group should routinely review the reports on critical business information or metrics. This should take no longer than five minutes.Real-Time Agenda: The agenda for a Weekly Tactical should NOT be set before the meeting, but only after the lightning round and progress review have taken place.

The Three Components Of The Weekly Tactical Meeting

It’s where the executive team grapples with complex and critical issues that will fundamentally influence the direction of the business.The length of the Monthly Strategic will vary depending on the topics addressed. But the rule of thumb says that it will require at least two hours, and should not cover more than two topics.This type of meeting requires a prepared agenda and upfront research or preparation by the team members. It is imperative that the leader mines for conflict in these meetings and that the team engages in constructive debate as they work to arrive at the best solution.

The Monthly Strategic

<ul><li>Too many meetings are just plain boring. They’re tedious and uninspired.</li><li>The leader is too focused on agendas and ending on time to notice a lack of engagement.</li><li>Most meetings have an aftertaste of being drained.</li><li>The worst part of participating in a mind numbing meeting is the lack of a commensurate return. This contempt festers when we invest time and energy into an activity that drives insufficient clarity or resolution.</li></ul>

Meetings Are Boring And Ineffective

Sometimes the group in attendance will be reluctant to challenge each other in active debate. One tactic you can use to mine for conflict in this situation is to give real time permission. At the start of the meeting, a leader may announce that the topic is expected to drive conflict, and that meeting members are encouraged to debate and challenge one another.Acknowledging the discomfort associated with conflict, while still challenging the group with your expectation up front, is a great way to diffuse tension and set the meeting up for a healthy and engaging debate.

Give Real-Time Permission

We can sit at attention silently for hours in a dark theatre, but somehow can’t make it through a 30-minute project status meeting without checking our email. What’s the key difference? Drama.Drama is the driving engine of every movie. Over the years, screenwriters have mastered the art of conflict to draw you in and keep you entertained.

Allowing For Drama

The hook is the first key to injecting drama into a meeting. As the leader of the meeting, it behooves you to ensure that you set up the meeting within the first 10 minutes such that your team understands and appreciates what is at stake.You may need to illustrate the consequences of a bad decision, highlight a competitive threat, appeal to the meeting participants’ commitment to a larger mission, or remind them of the impact their decision has on their clients, employees, or society at large.

Injecting Drama: The Hook

The daily check-in is a 5-minute standing meeting where the team gets together in the morning to clarify the actions they intend to take that day. It provides a forum for ensuring nothing falls through the cracks and the team is informed and aligned with what everyone else is doing. You will be amazed by how just 5 minutes in the morning will drastically reduce the number of superfluous emails between team members sent throughout the day.The rules for the Daily Check-In are simple. 5 minutes. Standing. Everyday.

The Daily Five Minute Check-In

Meetings are the nexus of all business decisions and activities. We need to remember that meetings are human. They require a personal touch. Rigid rules and agendas will never solve our meeting dilemma. Leaning out the process by eliminating the number of meetings we have won’t help either. Reducing the amount of face to face communication only guarantees more confusion and lack of clarity.It’s with the help of drama and context that leaders stand to reclaim a productive meeting culture.

The Bottom Line

Upward of 30% of our time at work is spent in meetings. That’s a significant chunk of time, but it shouldn’t be too alarming.After all, meetings are vitally important to the success of any organization. Presidents and their cabinet members decide whether or not to go to war in meetings. CEOs and their board of directors choose whether to expand into new markets or shut down a regional branch in meetings. Meetings are the lifeblood of every organization.Yet the paradox of meetings is that we generally don’t like them. In fact, some of us despise them.

Meetings: The Necessary Evil

An effective Quarterly Offsite Review is an opportunity for executives to step away from the immediate issues that normally command their attention, and free them to review the business from a more holistic, long-term perspective.In these offsite meetings, the team may review their strategic direction in light of their competition or industry trends. They may evaluate the strength of their own team or the strength of their organization with a personnel review.

The Quarterly Offsite Review

The Weekly Tactical is analogous to a weekly staff meeting, but the focus is more disciplined. The Weekly Tactical is focused exclusively on tactical issues of immediate concern.The rules for the Weekly Tactical are as follows: Everyone always attends. It is facilitated with a sense of discipline and structural consistency.

The Weekly Tactical

Casey McDaniel had never been so nervous in his life. In just ten minutes, The Meeting, as it would forever be known, would begin. Casey had every reason to believe that his performance over the next two hours would determine the fate of his career, his financial future, and the company he had built from scratch. “How could my life have unraveled so quickly?” he wondered. In his latest page-turning work of business fiction, best-selling author Patrick Lencioni provides readers with another powerful and thought-provoking book, this one centered around a cure for the most painful yet underestimated problem of modern business: bad meetings. And what he suggests is both simple and revolutionary. Casey McDaniel, the founder and CEO of Yip Software, is in the midst of a problem he created, but one he doesn’t know how to solve. And he doesn’t know where or who to turn to for advice. His staff can’t help him; they’re as dumbfounded as he is by their tortuous meetings. Then an unlikely advisor, Will Peterson, enters Casey’s world. When he proposes an unconventional, even radical, approach to solving the meeting problem, Casey is just desperate enough to listen. As in his other books, Lencioni provides a framework for his groundbreaking model, and makes it applicable to the real world. Death by Meeting is nothing short of a blueprint for leaders who want to eliminate waste and frustration among their teams, and create environments of engagement and passion.

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Corporate Culture

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Leadership & Management

A straightforward framework for creating engaging and exciting business meetings Casey McDaniel had never been so nervous in his life. In just ten minutes, The Meeting, as it would forever be known, would begin. Casey had every reason to believe that his performance over the next two hours would determine the fate of his career, his financial future, and the company he had built from scratch. “How could my life have unraveled so quickly?” he wondered. In his latest page-turning work of business fiction, best-selling author Patrick Lencioni provides readers with another powerful and thought-provoking book, this one centered around a cure for the most painful yet underestimated problem of modern business: bad meetings. And what he suggests is both simple and revolutionary. Casey McDaniel, the founder and CEO of Yip Software, is in the midst of a problem he created, but one he doesn’t know how to solve. And he doesn’t know where or who to turn to for advice. His staff can’t help him; they’re as dumbfounded as he is by their tortuous meetings. Then an unlikely advisor, Will Peterson, enters Casey’s world. When he proposes an unconventional, even radical, approach to solving the meeting problem, Casey is just desperate enough to listen. As in his other books, Lencioni provides a framework for his groundbreaking model, and makes it applicable to the real world. Death by Meeting is nothing short of a blueprint for leaders who want to eliminate waste and frustration among their teams and create environments of engagement and passion.

Patrick M. Lencioni is an accomplished writer whose work has resonated with readers around the world. Patrick M. Lencioni has published several books that explore a range of topics, from fiction to nonfiction, and has received critical acclaim for the ability to weave compelling narratives. Patrick M. Lencioni's writing style is known for its depth and authenticity, and has earned quite a loyal following of readers.