Category — Collaboration

By being unrealistic and crunched for time, I recently discovered a new way to start a follow-up meeting.

The session had been rescheduled several times. Stragglers were making us late and, frankly, I was getting irritated. Because I’m a champion eavesdropper, it was easy to overhear that the team’s memory of our last meeting was dim – and the commitments they left with, then sincere, were now even foggier. Layoffs, the holidays, countless other distractions in the interim… I needed to get them on the same page and focused, fast. Foolishly, I hadn’t built in time to do it.

All I could think of was to make them do it for me.

“Imagine this spot,”  I said, walking to one side of the room, ”is 5:00pm on November 17th – the moment we walked out of our last meeting.” [Read more →]

Ever start what begins as a reasonable political discussion with your parents… and 15 minutes later find yourself hip-deep in a mucky, confusing swirl, dreadfully off-topic and surprisingly upset?

This doesn’t just crop up at the dinner table, on the telephone, or with your family. Sometimes it happens smack in the middle of your team’s budget review.

I recently stumbled on a post that really got my attention, about people’s ability to hold a point of view – even when there’s strong evidence to contradict it. [Read more →]

Often, when I ask clients how they make decisions, I hear, “Oh, we mostly use consensus around here.”

Danger, Will Robinson, Danger!

Eight times out of ten, these are the same people who also note that group decisions often get reversed, people say one thing and then do another, or that their team spins and spins when they discuss potential decisions, investing loads of precious time but getting nowhere. What I often see is that “consensus” means a decision process that’s unclear or a wee bit sloppy, where the boss ended things with, “Oh, we’re out of time – but we’re all in agreement here, right?” But no one dug deeply for different points of view or concerns, let alone truly addressed them. [Read more →]