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Are you a team, or just a committee?
The essence of a team is that its members either win together, or lose together. If a sports team wins a competition, everyone gets a winners medal. In business, however, many so-called teams are no such thing, and it is definitely possible for some members to win at the expense of others. In fact, many such groups are actually just committees made up of independent parties with individual agendas. Their meetings are arenas for wasteful internal competition (politics, turf wars etc).
"Business meetings are like untamed beasts that eat time.
Minutes and hours are devoured, chewed up, gone"
Genie Laborde
And of course, once that time has gone, it's gone for ever. The cost of ineffective meetings, whether externally (with clients, customers or collaborators) or internally (including retreats and awaydays) includes not only the salaries and associated overheads of everyone present, but also travel time, preparation time, meeting rooms, equipment, food, not to mention the opportunity cost - time and energy lost to other, potentially more rewarding activities.
Then there's the demotivating effect of boredom, hearing old political battles played out one more time, and the general frustration of feeling that time is being wasted.
And there's an even bigger potential downside: the wrong decision can cost a fortune way beyond the time and money spent in making it.
These familiar problems also presents a great opportunity
Since meetings are held for all sorts of purposes, improvements in how they are conducted can affect many areas of business effectiveness.
Next steps
- Teams can be coached to collaborate more effectively
- An external facilitator can run the meeting, thereby freeing participants to concentrate on the task in hand
- Your own people can be trained to facilitate meetings for each other
A skilled facilitator understands and can influence the factors that lead groups towards useful results and away from the traps which eat up precious time. They can transform the performance of a group, help it work as a team, and produce clear and worthwhile benefits from meetings.
To find out more about developing true teams, and about enhancing your meeting effectiveness please contact us.
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