How to Make Meetings Matter with Dr. Carrie Goucher
Understanding the Work of Meetings with Dr. Carrie Goucher
Carrie has redesigned the collaboration ecosystem, crafting meetings that are focused, honest, supportive and energising - and helping organisations flatten hierarchy and reduce ‘collabureaucracy’. Carrie’s work is built on 19 years of culture change programmes at BBCworldwide, PizzaExpress, Mondelez, BP, Pfizer and many other organisations. She has systems engineering PhD from Cambridge University in which she researched the factors which underpin meeting success (spoiler alert: it’s not having an agenda!). Her model was described as 'game changing for meeting science'. Follow Carrie on LinkedIn. Join her FrictionFree weekly email: www.FewerFasterBolder.com/frictionfree
If you’re over 40 you have probably been in about 10,000 meetings by now - and according to Malcolm Gladwell - you should be an expert in them by now! But sadly we are not.
According to Dr. Carrie Goucher, studies have shown that meetings have not improved in the last 50 years, despite everyone being aware of basic techniques of how to run an effective meeting.
In this episode, we are talking about the root of meetings and how we can be an effective leader and participant in meetings that will make tangible progress, strengthen relationships, and achieve important strategic milestones.
[00:00] Introduction: The Role of Meetings in Organizations
[01:11] The Root of Meeting Frustrations
[02:11] Understanding Tribal Behavior in Meetings
[03:26] Practical Tips for Leading Effective Meetings
[06:05] Participant Strategies for Productive Meetings
[08:11] Success Stories and Results
[10:13] Additional Resources
If you enjoyed this, you might also enjoy my Life Satisfaction Assessment. It's a 30-minute program where I guide you through a deep dive into 10 areas of your life to assess what's bringing you joy and what's bringing you down. I call it Derailed and it's a fabulous place to begin a joy-at-work redesign.
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Understanding the Work of Meetings with Dr. Carrie Goucher
Introduction: The Role of Meetings in Organizations
Lucia Knight: Constant interruptions. Overtalking. Undertalking. Ego stroking. Passive aggression. Defensiveness. Disengage. Slumping. Ego plays. Status gains. You thought you were in your regular Monday morning meeting, but oh no, according to Dr. Carrie Goucher, you were actually in a pop up tribal gathering. Carrie helps companies stop getting bogged down by the dysfunctional behavior that plagues so many meetings.
I became such a fangirl of her research and her methods that I unashamedly hunted her down until she agreed to join me on this episode of the Joy at Work podcast. It's my opinion that every company I've ever consulted with or worked within needs to know Carrie. She shares fresh ways to both think about meetings and do meetings so that we can get to the heart of what matters sooner and still have time left to focus on doing the work that's going to shift the needle.
Let's dive in.
The Root of Meeting Frustrations
Lucia Knight: Carrie, almost every single professional I interact with at the moment are absolutely frustrated to the core by how much precious life time they are spending, not, and wasting in meetings. What on earth is going on there?
Dr. Carrie Goucher: If you're 40, you have probably been to about 10, 000 meetings by now, and surely after doing something 10, 000 times, or even 1, 000 times, we should be really good at it. And anyway, everyone knows how to run a good meeting, so start and finish on time, use an agenda, circulate actions, and meetings are really not that hard to nail, right? Wrong. So studies actually show that meetings have not improved in the last 50 years, despite almost everyone at work being fully aware of these basic techniques. And the story doesn't start.
Understanding Tribal Behavior in Meetings
Dr. Carrie Goucher: I know the story doesn't start 50 years ago in the seventies, when we started measuring them, it starts 50,000 years ago when in the stone age when our brains were shaped by the only source of security at the time, which was the tribe.
So today in office age, staying safe in the tribe is less about avoiding tigers and being able to participate in resources and find mates, but it's more about Keeping our jobs, keeping our identity and, maintaining and building our status. And we are subtly thrashing out tribe status on the hour, every hour, in every meeting we go to.
And that's why nice people end up in meetings being defensive, interrupting, talking a lot, or more subtly, getting too many people to every meeting so that everyone's had a chance to be included and to agree, not leaving anybody out. or maybe staying silent when really it's important to speak up.
Lucia Knight: wow. Oh my God, this is crazy good. So I've got about a billion questions, but we're limited on time. So I'm going to ask you to bring that into a more practical.
Practical Tips for Leading Effective Meetings
Lucia Knight: So let's say I am leading a meeting. Yeah. And I really want that meeting to be. A good investment of everyone in the room's life moments. Where do I start?
What do I do? What don't I do?
Dr. Carrie Goucher: So how can we make good use of those heartbeats? And that is to understand this Stone Age tribal behavior that we're all doing and to diffuse it and handle it and channel it. The way we defuse office age tribal behavior is through really good scaffolding. So you're making a pop up team for the duration of the meeting.
And that is a lot of egos, agendas, concerns swirling around. So scaffold them. If you let them run around and swirl around, they will take over your meeting in disruptive ways or silent ways. And I'm not sure which one of those is worse. So How do we scaffold them? We can use the invitation and the way we open the meeting.
So two prime real estates to set up that social contract and to make it crystal clear. What job are we trying to do here today? How do I want you to contribute? Why are you here? So for example, if you want people to speak honestly and to listen carefully to others, you can say this, in the invitation, and you can say it at the beginning of the meeting as well.
So you can directly set up the tone and the behaviors that you're looking for, and also scope the exact piece of work you're doing. You can explain to people the specific roles you'd like them to play, to free up their talent and attention, or you can create an agenda together at the start of the meeting.
So you can ask people on the fly what is it crucial that we talk about today to achieve that job? Write it down. That's your agenda. And you can use a bit more scaffolding within the session to help people contribute effectively. So for example, if you're wanting thoughts from everybody, but you know that two people are going to dominate and everybody else is going to be quiet, then use scaffolding to equalize people's contributions. For example you might ask people to write something down in silence for one minute and then to share it in the chat or to share it out loud in a round. So by adding a bit of structure, not formality, but structure and scaffolding, that's how we equalize voices and contain ego agenda concerns.
Lucia Knight: Wow. I've never heard that idea before and I know it's only a simple idea, but I can see that would balance the styles, personalities in the room. Okay, so let's take it from a slightly different angle.
Participant Strategies for Productive Meetings
Lucia Knight: Let's say I'm not leading the meeting, but I'm participating in the meeting. What can I do, practically, to ensure that meeting is, again, a good use of the heartbeats in the room, without taking over control of the meeting?
Dr. Carrie Goucher: So taking over control of a meeting is a tribal behavior. It's an assertion of control and it's an unhelpful way to establish status and identity. So instead, what we can do is ask good questions that probe the social contract. So we can ask questions of the group, which encourage the group to develop the missing social contract.
So you might ask, what's the best use of our time together today? Or how would you like us to contribute? So if the meeting leader throws a question out, and it's unclear what they want, or you feel I think I ought to be contributing this, but I don't feel quite safe to do that. And then you could say, how would you love us to contribute today?
How do you want us to answer that question? Or you could ask the group, how can we best hear from everyone today? So get the group to, to start to self moderate or what kind of feedback are we open to in this session? So ask questions, which expose the social contract, and you can also make suggestions.
So these are ways to encourage healthy group behavior without taking it over. So would it help to go around and hear from everybody in turn? Or would it help if we took a moment and wrote down our perspective in the chat? Or would it help to spend 15 minutes discussing this? Cause it feels like that's really important.
And then take a vote and see where people's heads are at. So you can use questions and suggestions to probe the social contract and encourage the group to co moderate without taking over.
Lucia Knight: Fabulous. I wish I'd known you years ago, Carrie. So my final question is, you've been working with companies for quite a long time now in helping them improve the effectiveness of their meetings. Can you share some of your favourite results?
Success Stories and Results
Dr. Carrie Goucher: I'll give you two classic examples. So there will always be the organizations who want to save time. So there's somebody really senior who's looking around and saying, what are all these people doing in meetings? And it's my job to get them out of those meetings. I worked with one. large technology company who found that in the division we worked in, because this kind of work happens in large pockets, not in whole organizations.
That's not where it starts. It starts as a movement, not as a kind of comms project and they found they reduced meeting time by about 30 percent simply by really using one of my key principles, which is consult wide and meet small. Yes, reducing time in meetings is a useful indicator, but meetings are always about quality.
So baseline, get people out of wasted time and meetings, but really the value comes from making progress, building stronger relationships and achieving those crucial, important strategic milestones that the organization has set itself.
So I worked with UK parliament a while back, and one of the things they reported to me was that what they developed with my work was a shared language. So nothing more complicated than that, that allowed them to say no to a meeting without ruffling feathers. invite people to play specific, much more powerful roles than they previously did, and to give their own thoughts in much more direct ways without offending people. So to get to what matters at 5 past 11, not at 10 to 12, when it's too late to discuss it.
And they explained that changed everything. So not just the meeting, because a meeting is just a reflection of what else is going on in the organization. But it shifted relationships, it built trust between functions and areas that had mistrusted each other and that created a container in which great work could be done.
And now that is what I'm talking about. Milestones, progress, relationships. That is what the work of meetings is all about.
Additional Resources
Lucia Knight: If you enjoyed this, you might also enjoy my Life Satisfaction Assessment. It's a 30 minute program where I guide you through a deep dive into 10 areas of your life to assess what's bringing you joy and what's bringing you down. I call it D Railed. It's a fabulous place to begin a joy at work redesign.
