Using Group Process Techniques to Improve Meeting Effectiveness
By James L. Creighton, Ph.D.
1. Professional meeting facilitators have developed a number of "group process" techniques designed to help groups work more effectively in meetings. These group process techniques do make a difference. Research has shown that groups that use group process procedures are more satisfied with their decisions and more committed to their implementation.
2. Does this mean you need a facilitator for your meeting? What a facilitator brings to a meeting is knowledge of these techniques, and even more important, an understanding of which technique is useful in a particular situation and a sense of timing as to when to suggest it. So if your meeting is exceptionally important, if there are major disputes, or if key players need to be participants rather than meeting leaders, then, "yes," a facilitator may be very useful.
3. But most managers are in scores of meetings, maybe hundreds of meetings every month. Senior managers often spend more that 50% of their time in meetings. The reality is that most managers won't have access to facilitators for most meetings. The challenge is to get value from the group process techniques that facilitators use, without always having to have a professional facilitator around to tell you which technique to use.
4. There are some basic principles you'll need to follow. Otherwise you may find yourself doing something that is the equivalent to using a spreadsheet application when you really need word processing – it may be an absolutely wonderful spreadsheet program, but if it is grossly inappropriate to the task it will impede rather than help the group work effectively.
5. The secret to avoiding this kind of problem is careful pre-planning of your meeting. I frequently tell my clients that at least 50% of the value I bring to their meetings as a facilitator will come from the work I do before the meeting. All the groundwork has to be laid before the first "Good morning, the purpose of today's meeting is...." An effective manager recognizes that he or she (or someone he/she designates) needs to spend upfront time to do the kind of meeting planning that a facilitator would do.
Here are some of the issues you need to address during your pre-planning:
一. What type of meeting is this?There are a number of very different meeting types, for example:
Information briefings Program/project planning or review
Trust building/team-building Decision-making
Generating new ideas or approaches Dispute resolution
Strategic planning Problem solving/crisis resolution
Commitment-building Celebrations
6. The type of meeting, combined with the subject matter, tells you who needs to participate, what kind of interaction is needed to accomplish the meeting purpose, and provides the context for selection of group process techniques.
7. Many meetings play multiple meeting functions. Agenda Item #1 may simply be an informational briefing, while Agenda Item #2 is a decision-making item, and Agenda Item #3 is a problem-solving item. Your agenda needs to clearly specify what kind of item it is. This tells people; "Here's what we expect from you during this agenda item." When this is not clear, people may engage in dysfunctional behavior even when trying very hard to be a good team player because they don't understand what they are being asked to do.
8. In the future, as various kinds of collaborative technologies becomes common, defining the meeting purpose will be a prelude to the question; "How many senses does this meeting require?" If the purpose of the meeting is trust-building, you probably need a face-to-face meeting with everybody is present in the room (all five senses). If the meeting is strictly informational, you may do better to post the information on the intranet, and let people download it at their own convenience (1–2 senses).
