Leading Meetings vs. Managing Meetings

Meetings, Problem Solving and Decision Making

Learning Objectives

There are definite differences between leaders and managers.
There are many ways to hold meetings and build teams.

There is a difference between leading and managing a meeting. It is the same difference between leading and managing employees, and will play a major roll in determining if the meeting participants actually make the best decisions possible. If you are running a meeting, you have to know in advance how you will run it.

Are you there as:

Leader?
Manager?
Facilitator?
Referee?
Drill sergeant?
Expert?
Someone to suggest ideas and solutions, or to seek them?

There are as many different ways to lead a meeting as there are meetings. Different types of meetings—and different meeting participants—often require different styles of leadership.

Leadership vs. Management

Managers manage. They get things done. Management is a function that is used to establish budgets, develop plans and schedules, and make sure that everything is moving along the way it is supposed to.

Leaders lead. They can get people and entire organizations to change. They have a relationship with the people they lead, and those people follow them.

"Managers do things right, while leaders do the right thing.” -- Richard Pascale

“For any quality initiative to take hold, senior management must be involved and act as a role model. This involvement cannot be delegated.” Daniel. F. Predpall

“Leaders stand out by being different. They question assumptions and are suspicious of tradition. They seek out the truth and make decisions based on fact, not prejudice. They have a preference for innovation.” John Fenton

“Leaders must let vision, strategies, goals, and values be the guide-post for action and behavior rather than attempting to control others.” Daniel. F. Predpall

“Leaders are observant and sensitive people. They know their team and develop mutual confidence within it.” - John Fenton

Three Leadership Rules to Remember

Dr. James N. Farr, founder of Farr Associates, a behavioral science consulting organization based in Greensboro, N.C., says there are three rules to becoming a leader:

1) Understand the people you are leading. How do they look at you and the situation you are all in? Since most sensible followers avoid saying negative things to their leaders, or bosses, leaders need to create a system of feedback loops that keep them in permanent touch with follower mindset so they lead professionally with maximum impact.
2) Show your “leaderself.” There is your “natural self” and your “leaderself.” “Leaderself” is designed and created to make a leader. Ask yourself what a leader would do, and then do it.

Instead of making the role of leader fit them and their personality, leaders develop a new personality that fits the role. It is similar to a police officer who puts on a “police face” along with the uniform. A great deal of poor leadership comes from people who respond to a situation by doing what comes naturally to their personality instead of what they need to do in their role as a leader. It’s akin to a soldier going into combat. The person he really is might want to run and hide, but his job is to go in there and fight, and that’s what he does.
3) Know what you are doing. Effective leaders do not operate on automatic pilot. They know exactly what they are doing, the image that they are creating, and what they need to do in order to get people to follow them. They know what their goals are and how they have to behave to get people to help them achieve them.

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Starting the Meeting

Whether you are a leader or a manager, you have to get the meeting started. No matter what sort of meeting it is, the topics to be discussed, or the decisions that have to be made, a good, positive, and energetic opening can lead to a good meeting.

It’s hard to get a good meeting out of one that starts out poorly. There is usually too much negative energy and antipathy to overcome. That’s why the first few minutes of the meeting are so important.

Here are some tips to get the meeting going:

Set a positive climate. Show your support for the people there and for the job you all have to.
Be prepared, and make sure everyone in the room knows that you are prepared, that you know and understand the purpose of the meeting and all the different items on the agenda
Have a good, strong opening statement.
Maintain your own enthusiasm during the meeting, especially as the energy levels begin to decrease.
Make sure that everyone there understands what is expected of them and why they—personally—are there.
Be fair. Listen to everyone. Don’t play favorites. Don’t single anyone out for special treatment, or ignore anyone.

Treat all ideas with the respect they—and the people expressing them—deserve. If you belittle someone’s idea, they may assume that you are belittling them personally.
Invite participation. Don’t dominate the meeting. The people there are there because they have something to contribute. Let them make their contributions.
Use the power of silence. It makes people uncomfortable. People feel compelled to fill it. When you want someone to answer a question or make a suggestion, let the group know what you’re after, and then be quiet. Someone will jump in. You can aim your “silence” at the group, or at any specific participant.
It’s a meeting, not a two-way dialogue. Do not get involved in a two-way exchange with one participant. This can turn the meeting into a debate, and the other people there become spectators instead of participants. Get the others involved in the dialogue and turn it into a group discussion.
Ask the members how they feel about an idea. No matter how nuts-and-bolts a decision might seem to be, emotions and feelings can play a part in both making it and carrying it out.
Do not assume that everyone in the group shares your attitudes. When someone expresses an opinion, find out if the other members of the group share it. If they do, why? If not, why not?

See: Seven Steps To Building A Team

All groups—regardless of their size, composition, location, or purpose—have two types of leadership:

1. Official: The person or people in charge of the group because of their rank, seniority, or position.

2. Unofficial or Emergent: The person or people the rest of the group turns to because of knowledge, skill, friendship, experience, charisma, or personality.

In a “perfect” situation, the official leader also has the personality and natural leadership characteristics to be the unofficial or natural or emergent leader as well. If you are the official leader but not the unofficial one, you have to determine who is.

Sometimes people become the unofficial leader because the rest of the group knows them better than they do the official leader.

If a group shares a commitment to a common purpose, everyone in the group can work together toward that goal. The official and unofficial group leaders must agree on the group’s purpose, and on how to “share” leadership, even if that is tacit, otherwise the group will not be able to function smoothly.

Official and unofficial leaders must also accept reality, recognize what each has to offer, and know when to lead and when to let others lead.

Every meeting has moments when things can get out of control, when you can lose both the attention of the participants and the momentum. The meeting may still be officially “running,” but something’s broken and you can’t seem to get it working again. Let’s look at three common meeting busters, and at ways to deal with them.

Problem 1: People treat the meeting as a joke. They don’t take it seriously. They arrive late, leave early, and spend most of their time doodling, catching up on their reading, sending e-mail from their PDAs, or chatting.

Solution: Intel, the semiconductor manufacturer, has developed a way to deal with this problem. In every conference and meeting room in every Intel office or factory around the world there are posters on the wall with a series of simple questions about the meetings people attend in these rooms:

Meetings are important at Intel, and the organization has made treating them importantly part of its organizational culture, from the CEO on down. Michael Fors, Intel’s organizational training manager, told Fast organization Magazine that: “We talk a lot about meeting discipline. It isn’t complicated. It’s doing the basics well: structured agendas, clear goals, paths that you’re going to follow. These things make a huge difference.”

Although you might not put up posters in your organization, do keep in mind the questions raised by the Intel posters so that you keep your focus on the goal of the meeting.

Solution: Bernard DeKoven, founder of the Institute for Better Meetings in Palo Alto, California, has developed a software program called the Meeting Meter that calculates how much a meeting actually costs. All it takes is the names of the meeting participants and their salaries. The program runs like the meter on a taxi. The idea is to make both the participants and management aware of the actual price tag. Once management is aware of the actual costs, meetings tend to get shorter.

Problem 3: The meeting isn’t on target. People spend more time digressing than discussing the actual topic.

Solution: Michael Schrage, a consultant and author, told Fast Times Magazine that the real problem is the lack of an agenda. “In the real world,” says Schrage, “agendas are about as rare as the white rhino. If they do exist, they’re about as useful. Who hasn’t been in meetings where someone tries to prove that the agenda isn’t appropriate?”

Intel takes its agendas very seriously, and has even developed an agenda “template” that everyone in the organization uses. The template lists the meeting’s key topics, who will lead which parts of the discussion, how long each segment will take, what the expected outcomes are, and so on. It even specifies the decision-making style to be used at the meeting.

Every meeting ends, and how you close it can be as important as how you opened it. What impression and feelings will the participants have when they leave?

Before getting to the actual closing, however, you might have to deal with some common late-meeting problems:

� Failure to reach—or even move toward—an agreement. You might have to call the question and force a vote to make attendees reach a decision.

You have to move the meeting toward the ending. When you reach it, you still have four things to do in order to provide proper closure to the meeting: