One Simple Line to Improve Your Meetings and Your Team Morale
We’re heartened to see that so many organizations have leaned into participatory leadership. Participatory leadership means recognizing the value in asking many people for advice, input, ideas, and problem-solving. This can raise new ideas and garner early buy-in.
Because organizations are using participatory processes more often, employees (rightly!) have come to expect that their opinions and voices should be heard and help to shape the work of the organization. I agree wholeheartedly. But I can also see many examples where the culture of participatory leadership isn't married to clarity of decision making. This mismatch can often lead to hurt feelings and poor morale.
Imagine, as a leader, you open up a discussion about a new business opportunity. Your team, the associates in the room, give you several ideas they're excited about. A few ideas that bring forth debate. After 30 minutes of brainstorming, advice, and feedback everyone walks out energized by the sticky notes and new ideas. Your team is still sharing ideas as they walk down the hall.
You leave the meeting smiling about your engaged team. Then you go back to your desk and pick two ideas to move forward. What a great day!
At the next staff meeting, you announce your two choices that came from the pool of ideas at the last meeting. You’ve chosen one of the “excited” ideas and one of the “debate” ideas. In an instant, the body language shifts as people cross their arms; people start looking at their phones and out the window and away from you. You can sense something is not right. People seem frustrated and annoyed. What happened? Where did you go wrong? Wasn’t everyone engaged?
We’ve been in this room. Sometimes we were even the host! We’ve found two common causes of the shift from excitement to frustrated:
People whose ideas weren’t chosen are frustrated. They don’t agree with your decision.
People misunderstood their role in the conversation you had the week before. They thought they were making the decision or at least continuing to play with the ideas. They feel like the process was yanked out from under them.
Over time we’ve found some ways to avoid situation two.
While the benefits of participatory processes are well known, there are also hazards. We frequently see participatory processes that fail to name and clarify decision making roles. If you're the meeting leader, you owe it to your team to clearly state who will make decisions about the topic at hand. Are the people in the room making a decision together using consensus? Will they decide by voting? Or, are they not the decision makers at all, and instead the decision makers are looking for advice, or just input and these are the folks you need to hear from.
We use a simple visual to help name and clarify what role people are being asked to play. In the examples below….
Because of efficiency pressures, accountability pressures and just normal workplace challenges, it's not always possible for every decision to come from consensus. What is possible however, is that every team member knows the kind of conversation they're having. So as they give input, they know there is a chance that input may show up in the decision, and there's also a chance that it will not. It's unfair to your team members to let them think they're shaping a decision when they're really giving you advice and input as the leader. Before your next meeting, draw a simple line with input on one end, advice in the middle and decision-making on the other end. Let people know who the decision-maker is and avoid the disappointment that comes from role confusion.
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