A guide to running meetings
How to manage difficult people during a meeting or workshop.
And not waste everyone time with another meeting.
Have you ever been in a meeting where you just wanted to bang your head on the table? We have all seen it, those one or two people that seem to take over a meeting, to challenge all conversations, to be such a distraction that time runs out and we just need to set up another call. When it comes to meetings or running a workshop you get a mix of listeners, engages, and detractors. The engagement of people is what you are really seeking in order to collectively work together for an outcome of an idea, strategy, or action. (Something to actually go and execute on). Hiding inside the group of engagers you can sometimes run into personality types that can bring about detractors to the meetings flow of the conversation. These personality types can be generalized into three buckets:
Why are they always arguing with everyone!
The challenger — are people who are engaged in meetings or workshops but it seems their main point is to always point out something is wrong, something can be better, or the theoretical challenge (the what-if person). This type of personality can be beneficial for conversations because they can bring up topics or strategies that no one has thought of. If they can not control themselves this can lead to the derailment of the whole meeting.
Can this person ever stop talking!
The dominator — are the talkers of the room who love to hear their ideas. They tend to be really poor listeners. You need to be careful that they do not dominate the meeting, while it may not be their intention, they tend to make other ideas inferior and can cause others not to chime in.
Are they ever going to pay attention!
The sideways person — this type of persona tends not to share ideas directly with the group but is ok in peer-to-peer conversations. Their personality tends to lean one of two ways they are either disengaged with the group and have side conversations or they are engaged but too shy to share their ideas.
From the book Death by Meeting
“The hard truth is, bad meetings almost always lead to bad decisions, which is the best recipe for mediocrity.” — Patrick Lencioni
Let’s now shift the focus to the strategies for managing difficult people. Some of these strategies can be completed before the meeting starts and can be used to help define the culture of an organization. First, let us start with Meeting Principles. Meeting principles are a set of rules or guidelines that the group can agree upon in order to make the session more active. Make sure there is a shared understanding of what each principle does for the group and that there are no deviations or differing opinions. These principles are not set in stone and can be amended to suit the need of the meeting but the principle will need to be ratified by the group. I have listed a few example of meeting principles
Example principles:
- Stay on the topic at hand
- No electronics!
- Listen more than you talk
- Politely interrupt conversation, not on topic
- No question too small
This next strategy is one of my go-to ways of managing difficult people. I always set up what is called a parking lot. The Parking Lot concept is basically a placeholder for a topic that does not pertain to the topic at hand. They don’t directly relate to the outcomes, goals, or subject. For the conversations that drift off the main topic, just write them down on a sticky note and put them in a visual place for everyone to see. If you are in an online meeting use a common tool that everyone has access to and can see the parking lot. Tools like Google Docs, Miro, or Lucidcharts work well. Use these methods for the personas we walked through to subdue the conflict person, quiet the dominator, or get the sideways person back on track. Towards the end of the meeting or workshop take a little bit of time to acknowledge the Parking Lot, maybe even review one or two. Most parking lot topics end up being not relevant but the few that do take notes and save them for another day.
Now on to the whole reason for the collective group, setting a Meeting OKR (Objective and key results). Setting OKRs at the very beginning of the meeting or even better before the meeting starts keeps the topic on track to an end goal. To define the OKRs have everyone lists the goals or metrics the team seeks to achieve. Put a time limit to this say 5–10 minutes as the goals should be clear to identify. OKRs should have a clearly defined goal with metrics associated with them. (E.G. Drive an additional 5% traffic engagement to our website with the age group between 21–35) Group the OKRs into the like categories or objectives. Once completed it’s time to stack rank and eliminate the OKRs down to 3–5 main goals or metrics to talk about. It’s these OKRs that the whole meeting or workshop should be based on. Now I know what you are thinking an ORK doesn’t seem like a strategy to manage difficult people. Well you are right, but it’s the main purpose of the activity and if it is not defined how can you keep a team on track? If subjects or topics arise that are not based on the OKRs follow up with the meeting principles or parking lot the topic to keep everything moving.
Armed with these strategies to handle difficult people should lead to smoother progress in any meeting. There is a little bit of prep time to put these strategies in place but it’s well worth it by investing to not have an additional meeting!
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