What vital element of business communication is the most forgotten? Discovering what hasn't been said. Marianne, Jamshid, Johanna, and Dave are participants in a project retrospective for the CRM system. Lan, the retrospective leader, asks the group to brainstorm the question, "What problems did you experience working with your clients … [Read more...]
Start Meeting Punctually?
Twenty percent of the participants arrive late to the weekly meeting you lead. What do I recommend you do? It depends. Do you arrive late? If you do, I recommend that you change your behavior. Participants respond to leadership cues. You are enabling participants to excuse their behavior when you demonstrate the meeting isn't important … [Read more...]
Dealing with Method Zealots
Has a member of your team become completely concerned about how something is done rather than whether it is done? Is it a problem when someone is completely focused is on how something is done? What do you do about it? A good starting point for exploring these questions is a quote from John Gardner's book Self-Renewal: ...goals are achieved … [Read more...]
I Won’t Stand In the Way
What do you do when a teammate says, "I won't stand in the way of the team accepting the proposal." and when asked directly whether they will support the proposal, they hem and haw without clearly saying "Yes."? In my post on Decide as a Team, I discussed how a team can use the Roman Evaluation Process to make a consensus decision and, if … [Read more...]
Decide as a Team
Do some members of your team make agreements during meetings but fail to support them afterwards? If this behavior is happening, I suspect your team is using an obscure process to make decisions. Identifying Obscure Process An obscure decision making process is easy to identify. Ask each member to create a map of the process used to make team … [Read more...]