Almost a year ago, I had just finished reading Patrick Lencioni's Book Death By Meeting, when I got a request to do a presentation in front of a group of mid-level managers. As luck would have it, they needed help with their team meetings.
I was really excited and walked through all the materials that were available from Patrick's group, on his website www.tablegroup.com.
If you dig a bit you will find his job aide for team meetings entitled, The Weekly Tactical Meeting Guide. After walking through this I was convinced that this was EXACTLY what the group needed. I was smart enough to call a couple of the managers and run a few ideas by them, but not bright enough to dig deep and find out how interested they would be to implement something totally new. That should have been the first sign to "slow things down" and provide a small piece of this books ideas, then work on the invitation to come back and share some more during another gathering. Of course, I missed this sign.
The day comes, I leap onto the stage, "begin with the end in mind" and tell a story with a nice hook, leading the audience to be interested in what they could learn from my presentation. As I progressed I felt the crowd starting to slip away.
If you look at the job aide the first part of the meeting is a "Lightning Round" where the manager zips around the room and hears a 60 second update from everyone on the team. I should have recognized that in teams of 12-15 that takes some significant time. I thought through that, but felt that getting an update from everyone in 15 minutes would really help the manager get a feel for where the team was.
Months later I did this with another team with varying results. You have to have a timer to get people used to speaking for 60 seconds. You also have get the individuals on the team focused on giving a quality report and not just a verbal smile sheet. When certain members of the team go overtime, with how amazing their week was, the eye-rolling from the rest of the team is amplified.
The second section on the worksheet was where the presentation fell apart. Patrick suggests that the manager sets the agenda for the meeting here, after listening to the team in the Lightning Round. You could have heard a pin drop as the group digested this and then turned on me. They didn't throw things, but the questions started to come and you could tell that the group was VERY uncomfortable with this, to the point of not doing it.
To be fair this is something that I have NEVER seen modeled and requires the manager to be very sharp as they have to put the meeting together on the fly. However, it is also a great opportunity for the team to bond together and take their experience as a whole to solve the challenges from the Lightning round.
This is where I compounded my mistake. I moved to the tactical and then strategic portions of the job aide thinking that this would save the presentation. FAIL!
I should have recognized that ploughing ahead wasn't the right thing to do, and circled back to the Lightning round and spent more time on that, and how the managers could use that information to understand and then provided training, role-plays, and leadership opportunities in future meetings.
The Lesson Learned
Just because I thought the whole job aide was amazing didn't mean the audience did. I should have tested my presentation out with 3-5 of the managers in the group, listened to their feedback, and then made some changes.
I also should have acted when I started feeling the audience slip, and moved back to the ground that they felt safe on - The Lightning Round. After all, if the grouped adopted just this one idea, they would have been much better off throughout their year.
Please be smarter than I was with this opportunity.
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