Maximizing Meeting Value and Participation

Our team is saying "No" to our co-work session.

We want to have a working meeting with them to get important information and make decisions. Since they declined, now we are missing an important viewpoint and source of design inputs! Plus, it could prove disastrous, later, when we have a pass/go decision on our concept designs.

In this week's episode we talk about ways to overcome this challenge, beyond typical schedule availability. Tune in as we uncover practical strategies that make co-working sessions truly valuable, which will help us in maximizing meeting value and participation.

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ABOUT DIANNA
Dianna Deeney is a quality advocate for product development with over 25 years of experience in manufacturing. She is president of Deeney Enterprises, LLC, which helps organizations and people improve engineering design.

Transcript

Prioritize and Facilitate Effective Co-Working

Speaker 1 0:00

We've decided, or our boss has decided, that we really need to get the cross-functional team or a team of people together to help us solve a problem, prioritize things, gather information for design, whatever it is. We're being asked to host a meeting, a co-working meeting with our team, meeting with our team. Just scheduling those things can be difficult by getting our meeting on someone else's schedule because their schedules are already so full. So we're already careful about who it is we're inviting and who it is that we really need to get information from or to be there. We sometimes run into a challenge where people just say, no, I can't make that meeting, or it's not a priority for me. They've decided that whatever it is that you need to talk about isn't worth the investment of their time. But you really feel like they need to contribute to whatever decision is being made or whatever information is being gathered, or they need to attend to be able to gain a better understanding of what it is you're all talking about what is really happening here and what are some of the things that you can do today to invest in the bank of goodwill for tomorrow, for the next time. So you don't get a no. You instead get a yes. More about all this after the brief introduction.

Speaker 1 1:22

Hello and welcome to Quality During Design, the place to use quality thinking to create products. Others love for less. I'm your host, diana Deeney. I'm a senior level quality professional and engineer with over 20 years of experience in manufacturing and design. I consult with businesses and coach individuals on how to apply Quality during design to their processes. Listen in and then join us. Visit qualityduringdesigncom On social and in print.

Speaker 1 1:56

I read and digest the things that Dori Clark puts out. Now, dori Clark is a business professor and an author. She talks about being strategic with our time and priorities, or at least that's one of the topics that she talks about. She recently posted on LinkedIn with a video and I will link to it in the podcast blog. One of the points that Dori makes is for us to say no to meetings where we don't need to be doing things we don't need to do. We are all constantly bombarded and requested for us to give our time to different things, to different meetings, just in work, in different meetings, and then you add just life in general and our schedules can be pretty full. So Dory's point is to prioritize what it is that's important, that we need to attend so that we can save some of our time for our own creative endeavors, our own work, the things that are priority for us to get done, for ourselves and for others, for our responsibilities.

Speaker 1 3:02

I'm sure you've also heard of the urgent, important matrix. It's a two by two chart where you take your tasks and you put them into one of four quadrants based on the urgency of it and the importance of it. These are all ways that we can prioritize our tasks and our decisions. What does this all mean for us? Well, we should do this too, right? Yes, we should prioritize our time too. What this also means is that our cross-functional team is also doing it. So when we want to have a working meeting with them to get design inputs and prioritize them, or do a risk analysis or have some other effect on our design decisions before we start engineering design, we might get a no from our team.

Speaker 1 3:53

As engineers, we like to work with data, or at least many of the engineers that I know like to work with data, and data is important. With data, we look for things like trends and patterns and limits, and those are all excellent skills to be able to use when we're facilitating meetings with our team. What we're really doing is we need to pull the information out of the people that are at the meeting. We need to pull the information out, or pull out the truth, which is a little bit of a different skill set. It's not data, it is information.

Speaker 1 4:32

Generally, people want to contribute their ideas, especially if it's going to help do awesome things like create new products that other people are going to really love using. They want to contribute, but they also need to protect their time. We're inviting them to a meeting to discuss something. Looking at that invitation, when they open it, they are assessing whether or not they want to come. Our team is judging our invitation. How is our team going to prioritize our request? What has been their experience in participating in our meetings before Some things they consider is was it really value added? Did I walk away from our exercise with a better understanding of something? Was I respected and given a voice during the meeting? Was my opinion considered? Or was it just lip service, saying that we really wanted their input but they didn't really want it? And what happened to the information? Did it affect the design or did it just sort of fizzle out and disappear, if their experience with us previously has missed the mark. They may now say no thanks, because now it's no longer a priority to participate in our co-working sessions, and it's a shame for us because now we're missing an important viewpoint and source of design inputs.

Speaker 1 5:59

We'll get less friction about these kind of requests to work with our cross-functional team if we take the approach that in that moment, in that co-working session and the invitations that precedee it and the follow-up that we do afterwards, we take the mindset that in all of those interactions they are our customer. If you're the leader of that co-working session and you're the one that is driving the analysis or driving the information gathering, then they are your customers for that co-working session. If you think about it, we have these kind of meetings with our actual customers, our businesses' customers, whoever is going to be potentially using our new product. At the end we wouldn't be so laissez-faire about a meeting with our customer right? We would want to put our best foot forward, we would want to plan ahead and we would be respectful of their time. It's that sort of care and attention that really our cross-functional team deserves. When we take that care and attention, they are going to want to participate more in co-working sessions with us, and the information flow is going to become easier and more abundant. So the mindset that we can take when we're setting up these co-work sessions is that my cross-functional team are my customers and I'm asking them for information and we're going to be making some decisions about it together.

Speaker 1 7:37

What does this mean for when you're actually planning out a facilitated meeting? It's really about taking care and being respectful For one. We want to be prepared. We want to be prepared with the information that they may want to see as far as the scope and background of the meeting or whatever it is we're discussing. We want to have supplies and we want to have a plan for how we're going to do some co-work. We want to own the meeting, so we're going to facilitate and guide the team. Like a museum curator is guiding a group of people through a museum.

Speaker 1 8:18

We want to guide our team through this process. We want to make it easy for them to participate. We're going to start on time and end on time or end early, and this is part of respecting other people's times and schedules. We want to allow time for proper co-work session closure, so at the end of the meeting, we don't want to use up the whole meeting time for just information gathering. We need to leave a little bit of time at the end for the normal teamwork stuff Agreeing on action items, allowing time to collect notes before you have to give up the meeting space and then doing any kind of meeting evaluations.

Speaker 1 9:04

If you're consistently meeting with a team and you decide together that you want to do it better maybe you've instituted a meeting evaluation form where you decide you want to do it better. Maybe you've instituted a meeting evaluation form where you decide you want to be better at being more efficient or effective with your meetings we need to make sure that we leave enough time at the end of our meetings to be able to do those things. After the meeting, we definitely want to follow up, not just hey, thanks for attending my meeting, but actually showing how the results of the meeting are tied to the design inputs or to the risk analysis. Those are all ways that we can treat our co-work teammates as customers of this co-working sessions that we're scheduling. This puts them sort of at the forefront of keeping them happy while at the same time allowing us to gather the information from them. Now it's not like we have to treat our teammates with kid gloves or anything like that, but it's just being conscientious of them, their ideas and their time, which will go a long way in the end toward getting that yes when they get the invitation.

Speaker 1 10:22

The other thing that is going to help you get that yes is being consistent. Thing that is going to help you get that yes is being consistent. If you are consistent with these sort of things, with being prepared, making it easy for them during the meeting, being respectful for their time and actually following up and following through at the end, if you are consistent with those things, then people are going to trust you with their time and you'll more likely get yeses when you send out those invitations for those co-working sessions. One of the things that I do to be consistent is I follow a model of co-working teamwork which is ADEPT. That's an acronym for align, discover, examine, prioritize and teamwork. Within every co-working meeting that I do, I make sure that I am prepared to take all those steps and those are the steps that I take to help my team and to help me achieve that kind of a mindset and to be consistent with my team. Is it a rigid format? No, it's an internal checklist and repeatable framework that I use to help me. I'll link to more about this ADEPT method in the podcast blog.

Speaker 1 11:40

So what's today's insight to action? When we want our teammates to say yes to our meeting, to prioritize our meeting over other things? To start, we may need to prove ourselves a little bit. We may need to show them ahead of time in the invitation that we're prepared and that we're going to own the meeting and facilitate it for them. After the meeting, we're going to make sure that we follow up and follow through and provide some sort of value out of the meeting. We don't just have a meeting for meeting's sake, but we moved something forward, we moved the needle, we made a decision, or the information we gathered is being used here. When you combine these two things, your teammates are going to see that you really do respect their time and their opinions and they're going to be more willing to say yes more often, which will help you to design great products for your business's customers.

Speaker 1 12:40

Please visit the podcast blog at qualityduringdesigncom. I'll include additional links that tie into this topic. While you're there, scroll to the bottom of the podcast blog and sign up for the weekly newsletter. Every Friday, I send out information either about this podcast or other recommended readings and things that I find in the news. I also ask the community some questions and ask for feedback or provide opportunities for special downloads that you don't otherwise get. You get access to all of that when you subscribe. This has been a production of Dini Enterprises. Thanks for listening.