Deathly 'Silent' Meetings

Are your department or team meetings a monologue or a time for the Head to 'practise' his soliloquys? Meetings that are otherwise deathly silent, are an indicator of potential team dysfunction and poor team results. One can only imagine about how business bottom line and organisational morale are being hurt by such meetings.

Silent meetings are reflective of one or a combination of the following:

• an unwillingness to engage in surfacing potentially different views
• an apathy over the team's process, goals and direction
• unresolved issues from the team's past
• a mutual lack of confidence amongst team members in each other

Nothing much is exchanged, simply because the the group members basically want to end the meeting to end quick and for each to move on with the rest of their lives. The meeting is merely an inconvenience to get over and done with. If you think that's a ghastly thought, you haven't heard the half of it!

The veneer of consensus created by a lack of debate and an aversion for divergent thinking, sets the foundation for poor results. Ideas are not challenged and team decisions are not refined. Operational processes are based on nothing more than paper-thin assumptions.

Team or Department meetings are too important to be rendered 'silent' occasions. They are occasions when team members need to be engaged in active analysis, divergent thinking, informed critique of possible solutions, before converging on a solution. Such a process requires the team leader to be an active agent in building healthy collaboration, not what passes off as consensus.

Team leaders can do a couple of things to make sure that meetings lead to business decisions and results:

• Establish team norms & practices that celebrate openness and collaboration
• Keep meetings active and solution-focused, based on ready information rather than opinion
• Encourage a healthy appreciation of diversity through team and meeting roles
• 'Exorcise' the ghosts of the team's past if the issues are obstacles
• Ensure that members recognise that conflict can sharpen team commitment and hence not become the subject of aversion.

Noel Tan

Resident Philosopher

(*All text is copyright of Trailblazer Trainers Pte Ltd)

Trust and the Family Fabric

Brenda and I are Family Life Ambassadors with the Ministry of Community, Youth and Sports. As part of Trailblazer Trainers' corporate citizenship responsibilities, we are currently resource speakers with a social service centre, providing our expertise to help their clients on parenting and work-life balance issues that they are facing.

One theme that runs through our work is that trust is an essential element of success, regardless whether we are working with corporate teams, student leaders or families. Perhaps especially in the case of families, trust is most often taken for granted. If trust is the fundamental building block of business relationships, then isn't it an even more important pillar of family life?

When one can no longer possess a complete reliance in the integrity of another family member, the solution of other problems becomes inhibited, because communication channels are broken. Problems would simmer under the surface, occasionally surfacing, but never really fully resolved. If at all, these become flashpoints for further conflict. Every family fights over issues, but it is the one whose members still trust each other, that overcomes conflict and the emerging problems.

It is often said that trust is earned and like most meaningful things in human existence; that process takes time. Trust is essentially built on repeated experiences where spouses and children reinforce their belief in the integrity of the other family members. I leave you with a short list of seemingly-innocuous things that go a long way in building trust, which we have done in our own family:

• Keep promises we made to each other
• Playing fair during games
• Choosing activities that everyone in the family can be engaged in interaction at the same time (Television-watching doesn't really count)
• Role-modelling trustworthy behaviours
• Encouraging active interest in the specific interests & hobbies of others in the family
• Making time to have fun together

Noel Tan

Resident Philosopher

(*All text is copyright of Trailblazer Trainers Pte Ltd)

Essence of Decision for individuals

I remember 'Essence of Decision' well when I was reading for my Master's degree in Strategic Studies. It was and still is an excellent study into the Kennedy administration's management of the Cuban Missile Crisis in those fateful days of October 1962. That book remains on the required reading list of students of Strategic Studies, as it is a powerful analysis into a moment in history, when the world could have plunged into World War 3, if information, intuition and urgency of time did not converge as fortuitously for Mankind.

Less 'global' but no less dramatic are the situations of individuals and teams we often meet in the course of our work, who experience difficulties in coming to grips with making personal and team decisions. At the heart of these difficulties is the decision-making process itself.

Based on our work in studying thinking preferences, decisions may not yield the results because the process has either:

a. taken in too much data, leading to a gridlock situation for the decision-maker,

b. taken in too little data, so while the decision is made fairly swiftly, it does not fully completely satisfy the situational requirements,

c. not taken account of current reality, so the decision is rendered impracticable,

d. not sufficiently bold or imaginative, so the decision's effectiveness is limited.

We use a 4-step model to improve individual decisions:

a. Firstly, gather the facts about the situation and analyse them

b. Brainstorm a few decision outcomes that are favourable or desired, within the constraints established by the facts

c. Select the outcome that is likely to yield the greatest benefits from the list previously brainstormed. Set up an action plan to achieve the outcome.

d. Review the plan and anticipate its effects on people and their reactions before implementation. If 'collateral damage' is not worth the implementation, then you might want to start from step (b) again.

Individual decision-making is tied closely to thinking styles. By using developmental assessment tools like the Herrmann Brain Dominance Instrument and the Emergenetics profile, individuals can determine their decision-making style and be coached to improve the way they arrive at decisions.

Noel Tan

Resident Philosopher

(*All text is copyright of Trailblazer Trainers Pte Ltd)