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)