DYSFUNCTIONAL QUESTIONS IN MEETINGS: BEHAVIOURS ASSOCIATED

The team meeting. A necessary evil, an exercise in wasting time, or our organization’s secret weapon? Sometimes we wonder why our one-on-one meetings tend to feel unfruitful. Stock questions might be effective once or twice. But when we ask them during every one-on-one, every week, and over time, the effectiveness of the questions erode. The person grows sick of answering the question. Or they do not think we really care to know the answer anymore. Before too long, they start looking at the clock, staring into the distance, and giving us those short, nondescript answers. To avoid this, we will want to avoid the routine questions we lean on. Some of them maybe:

01: “How’s it going?”

It seems like a solid way to break the ice and initiate a one-on-one meeting. Yet it’s unusual that we ever get an answer other than “Fine” or “Good” in response. While someone might truly be fine and good in reality (which is great!)…the conversation usually stops there. Anything personal we wanted to learn, any sense of rapport we wanted to create dies with the question. This is because, as a society, the question “How’s it going?” has become our default greeting to each other, so our answer to it has become just as automatic.

Alternate Perspective: If we are looking for a casual, open-ended way to kick off a one-on-one, ask “How’s life?”.  It gives permission for someone to talk more personally about life — about what they did that weekend, how their family is doing, how their personal side project is coming along, how they’re managing their workload. “How’s life?” invites the other person to elaborate.

02: “What’s the latest on XXX ?”

It can be tempting to use our one-on-one session as time to get caught up on what is going on. However, keep in mind that this completely squanders the purpose of our one-on-one meeting, to begin with. A one-on-one meeting isn’t a reporting session. It’s not an accountability tool. A one-on-one meeting is our radar. It’s one of the only ways we have to unearth what’s actually going on in our team, and what an employee is thinking and feeling. Client problems, unforeseen issues with the product, messy team dynamics, unspoken personal frustration — this is only time we will get to hear that stuff.

This question “What’s the latest on X?” can be great if we are using it to segue into asking deeper questions. For example, perhaps we follow it up with, “What’s most frustrating about how X has been going so far?” Or, “Where do you feel you need more support in working on X?” Merely asking “What’s the latest on X?” falls flat if we use it singularly.

Alternate Perspective: Ask something specific about the project, instead of asking for a general project update. For example- “Can you tell me about what’s been most surprising about working on X so far?” If an employee has found something surprising, good chances that we will find it surprising too. A surprising insight is always useful for us to form an accurate picture of potential issues bubbling up within our team.

03: “How can I help you?”

The intention of this question is fantastic. We want to help and we want to figure out what we can be doing better. However, this question is the worst way to signal that. It makes the person receiving the question do all the hard work of having to come up with the answer. It’s also a very hard question to answer, especially on-the-spot and given that we are a person in a position of power. We are asking a person to critique us, “The Boss,” across all spectrums and come up with something actionable for us to do. If we do ask this question, answers tend to be, “Nothing I can think of right now,” something vague, or an answer that involves something that we are already doing.

Alternate Perspective: Suggest something that we can be doing to help. Then ask, “What do you think?” For example: “I was thinking I’m being too hands-on on this project. Should I back off and check-in with you only bi-weekly? What do you think?” By being targeted in what we suggest — and suggesting it ourselves — we make it easier for that person to share the exact ways in which we can support them. We help our people by suggesting what we think we can do to help, first.

04: “How can we improve?”

The problem with this vague question is they invite vague answers. We prompt the person to offer broad suppositions and knee-jerk assumptions, instead of exact details and practical examples. Ask an employee “How can we improve?” and they think, “Hmm, from a business development perspective? Marketing perspective? Leadership perspective? Where to even begin?”

Now, some employees we work with will be able to craft a distinct, rich answer from this question. But it is infrequent and they probably spent time thinking about the answer beforehand. For most employees who we ask this question to without any warning, we will receive a variant of “I think things are pretty good right now” about 90% of the time.

Team/ One-on-one Meetings

There is broad consensus that the team/ one-on-one is one of, if not the, most important meeting we can have. But what exactly can we accomplish through 1:1 meetings? Successful 1:1s aim to facilitate the following things:

1. Building a trusting relationship
2. Staying informed and aligned
3. Providing mutual feedback to help each other grow
4. Addressing topics prone to getting lost in the shuffle (e.g., career development)

In conclusion, the questions do the heavy lifting. The questions determine the path to which our one-on-one meetings will take. Ask thoughtful, sincere questions, and there’s a higher likelihood our answers returned back will be thoughtful and sincere too.

Content Curated By: Dr Shoury Kuttappa

THE DAILY STAND-UP MEETING: ALTERNATIVE BEHAVIOURS

Daily stand-up meetings might be the quickest way to waste your time as a leader. As a manager, you’ve likely witnessed this first hand. Your daily stand-up meetings have become bloated and unengaging, the more time passes and the bigger your team grows. Should you be doing something different? And if so, what? The time to kill the daily stand-up meeting has come. Here’s exactly why and what we should do instead…

Why A Daily Stand-Up Meeting Doesn’t Work

Many oars, too many directions: . . . . . . . . . . . The original intention behind a daily stand-up meeting is extremely sound. Popularized by the Agile methodology of project management, daily stand-up meetings are meant to share progress and identify any blockers the team is facing. For the few teams who strictly adhere to only sharing status updates and blockers, a daily stand-up can serve them well.

However, for most of us in practice, it’s a different story. We get overly excited and cram other intentions into our daily stand-ups: We want them to be an energizing morale booster for the team, a time to reflect on what went well, an opportunity for team members who don’t regularly talk to each other to feel connected… No wonder daily stand-up meetings start to run over, with folks rambling, and people disengaging.

Try to do all three at the same time, and you end up having too many oars, rowing in too many directions. A bloated, ineffective meeting manifests.

Twenty hours down the drain per week: . . . . . . . . . . . Say you are able to miraculously, consistently hold 10 – 15 minute daily stand-up meetings with your team. But as you switch gears to dig back into your work, what you don’t realize is that it takes an average of 20/25 minutes to get back to the task at hand.

This means the time a team member needs to recoup from the daily stand-up is longer than the daily stand-up meeting itself. That’s an irreversible 25 minutes taken away from every single one of your team members every week. So if you have 10 team members, that’s 20 hours poured down the drain. Is the cost of the interruption worth it?

Lack of recorded history: . . . . . . . . . . . Someone calls in sick and cannot make the daily stand-up meeting. A remote employee can’t participate in the daily stand-up because it’s 1AM their local time when it’s 9AM for the rest of the team. How do you ensure that everyone is on the same page, especially as your team grows and becomes more spread out? With daily stand-up meetings being in-person or over Zoom, you lack a shared recorded history of the progress being made.

This particularly becomes apparent when someone new joins the team. You’d love to be able to share the week-to-week progress the team has made to give them full context on a project… But with daily stand-ups meetings, that history is scattered in a series of haphazard notes at best and doesn’t provide the new hire a complete picture.

So What To Do Instead?

There are a few options for either replacing your daily stand-up meeting and/or alternatives to holding them.

• Automate status updates with a tool.

Status updates are a critical part of ensuring everyone on the team is on the same page. But they don’t need to happen during an in-person daily stand-up meeting. Instead, you can ask folks to take 30 seconds to write a few bullet points on what they worked on yesterday, what they plan to work on today, and any blockers they have. They can answer on their own. An email or Whatsapp/Slack message every day asking, “What are you working on today?”, will also work. It takes a minute to respond and it helps orient the team’s day without pulling their attention away from the work itself.

You can customize the questions to be more specifically geared toward your team (e.g., “What’s something that might be blocking you today?”) and change the frequency to be as often as you’d like. With this, you also have a complete recorded history of everyone’s progress over time.

• Use a monthly all-hands or weekly staff meeting to focus on other functions.

You’ve likely realized that, although well-intended, you have too many varying purposes for your original daily stand-up meeting (e.g., you wanted to align the team around a vision and help build rapport in the team). Decide what specific functions are most important in your team to foster, and then devote other meetings, processes, or tools to fulfilling these functions. For example, here are functions you could incorporate into a monthly all-hands meeting or weekly staff meeting…

1. Reflection: Use a weekly staff meeting to encourage shared reflection about what could be better. For example, you could pose the question, “Knowing what we know now, what would you change about how we approached this project?”
2. Recognition: Take time during a monthly all-hands meeting to highlight positive progress that’s been made. You could ask, for instance, “What’s something you’ve been surprised or encouraged to see us accomplish?” or “When is a moment you’ve felt proud of working at XXX, and why?”
3. Connection: Carve out some time during the all-hands or staff meeting to enable people to connect with what they enjoy most about working on the team. You could ask fun non-work related questions like, “What’s the thing you bought with your own money?” or “Who’s the most famous person you’ve met?” You can also use our Social Questions Tool for this – we give you hundreds of questions just like this with our Social Questions.
4. Vision: Use an all-hands meeting to align folks in your team around vision and how each team member contributes to that vision. For example, you could ask your team: “If someone were to ask you what the vision of our company is, would a clear answer come to mind? How do you feel your individual work is contributing to that vision?”

The best process results from what is deliberate and thoughtful – not what is convenient and familiar. Daily stand-up meetings are an antiquated relic. It’s time to sunset them.

Content Curated By: Dr Shoury Kuttappa