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Don't Just Do Something, Stand There!: Ten Principles for Leading Meetings That Matter - Softcover

Weisbord, Marvin R.; Janoff, Sandra

 
9781576754252: Don't Just Do Something, Stand There!: Ten Principles for Leading Meetings That Matter
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1576754251 ISBN 13: 9781576754252
Verlag: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

This practical guide details ten key principles that will profoundly change the way you think about, organize, and lead the meetings that matter most.

Rather than trying to change anyone’s behavior, Weisbord and Janoff show you how to change the conditions under which people interact. By doing less, you help others do more.

With examples from around the world, and practical tips and exercises in every chapter, Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There! gives you many new techniques for helping people discover common ground, make productive use of dissension, and take responsibility for action.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Marvin R. Weisbord is a fellow of the World Academy of Productivity Science and is the author of Organizational Diagnosis, Productive Workplaces Revisited, and Discovering Common Ground.
Sandra Janoff, Ph.D., is an international consultant, psychologist, and coauthor, with Marvin Weisbord, of Future Search: An Action Guide. Weisbord and Janoff are co-directors of the Future Search Network, a global volunteer service collaborative.

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Making Every Meeting Matter

I want to see progress . . . or it is a waste of time. But that
isn’t the meeting’s fault. That is the fault of the person calling
and leading the meeting.

—DARIN HAMER, IT professional, Topeka, Kansas (2006)

Our purpose in writing this book is to help you become more effective in the world through the meetings you lead. You will have a chance to master a few simple practices to enhance whatever works for you now. You will learn to recognize procedures that no longer get results. Above all, you will come face to face with the assumptions you make about meetings. If you are going through the motions anyway, why perpetuate cynicism when you can succeed every time?

If you adopt our principles, you will become fanatical about make-or-break matters like matching participants to purposes; and you will manage the daylights out of mundane matters like time frames, rooms, and seating. You also will develop a new awareness of key factors few people notice. You’ll pay more attention, for example, to the emergence of informal subgroups that can derail your meeting in an eye blink. You’ll become more aware of what people expect from leaders and of the demands you make on yourself.

What you will not do is fret over people’s motives, attitudes, and personal quirks. In other words, instead of managing other people’s behavior, you will manage structure-the conditions under which people interact. The only individual you will seek to manage is you.

We began switching our focus from behavior to structure many years ago. Early in our careers, we noticed some recurring patterns that defeated our aspirations for engagement, outcomes, and follow-up. We found, for example, that the “wrong people” often were in the room. Among them they lacked the expertise, authority, or information to act. That’s a structural phenomenon certain to alienate even those with the best intentions. People grew sick and tired of adding more meetings to their calendars. For those who had to show up anyway, we turned ourselves inside out dealing with skepticism at the expense of action. We found it easy to diagnose bad behavior. While diagnosis brings with it the heady illusion of control, most people can’t be fixed, no matter how many prescriptions you write. People did, however, fix themselves when we changed the conditions under which they interacted.

We believe that structure becomes more critical the greater the range of differences in the room. If you treat differences as a problem crying for resolution, you undertake an anxious hunt for an elusive quarry. Differences— few of us like them—often divert people from doing their best. Think of difference as a fact of life you can learn to live with. Think of structure as a menu of choices you have for providing people opportunities to take responsibility.

In managing diverse groups, we realized as we crossed cultural boundaries that we could no longer diagnose individual or group needs. We had to learn how to honor differences while building on what people have in common, in particular-the indisputable validity (for every person) of their own experience.

Paradoxically, when you emphasize structure rather than behavior, you may be at your best in situations you once dreaded. You will come to see different worldviews, assumptions, and stereotypes as normal. Perhaps the most liberating discovery we have made is how to enhance a diverse group’s capability for action by accepting rather than fixing anybody’s shortcomings. If you train yourself to work with people the way they are, you will free yourself from endless suffering.

You will become more effective in two ways.

• First, you will pay more attention to organizing meetings based on purposes. You will discover the increased capability of those involved to reach goals they once thought unreachable.

• Second, you will develop keener instincts for when you need to shift structure and when you don’t. As your capability grows for letting people find their own voices, so will your self-confidence in handling new situations no matter what a group chooses to do.

HOW WE CAME TO WRITE THIS BOOK

When a cat chases its tail, success always hurts more than failure. Early in our careers each of us acquired a repertoire essential to our work-for goal setting, team building, problem solving, visioning, strategic planning, conflict management, and self-awareness. We had the unusual privilege of working with many pioneers of group effectiveness. They created a rich storehouse of methods that influenced generations of practitioners.

A Legacy—Ours and Yours

We trace our influences back to the first study ever to document the notable differences among democratic, autocratic, and laissez-faire leaders (Lewin, Lippitt, & White, 1939). This research with young boys doing arts and crafts projects opened up a new vista for action that came to be called “group dynamics.”

The practices we advocate were inspired by Ronald Lippitt and Eric Trist, among the founders, respectively, of National Training Laboratories (NTL Institute) in the United States and The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in Great Britain, and their collaborators Eva Schindler-Rainman and Fred Emery; John Weir (1975) and Joyce Weir, pioneers of personal growth laboratories in “Self-Differentiation”; Yvonne Agazarian (1997), developer of a “Theory of Living Human Systems” of functional subgrouping; Claes Janssen (2005), creator of the “four-room apartment” model of personal and group development; Paul Lawrence, who with Jay Lorsch (Lawrence & Lorsch, 1967) showed how differentiation/integration theory applies to organizations; and the late Gunnar Hjelholt (Madsen & Willert, 2006), a Danish social scientist who inspired us to connect meetings to larger purposes that help people transcend their differences.

To this wonderful legacy we quickly appended more techniques and variations like a cat spinning ever-faster toward its elusive goal. As the world grew more diverse and the pace of change went ballistic, we lined our bookshelves with more methods than we could use in two lifetimes. We were managing our own anxiety by creating higher hurdles, believing that the bigger the tool kit, the better carpenters we would be. By the late 1980s, we realized we would never have at our fingertips the right procedure for all the variations on culture and personal style that we ran into. Nobody could devise all-purpose hammers fast enough to bang away at the emerging multiple dilemmas of escalating complexity. The only way to exit this obstacle course was to stop chasing techniques.

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RETHINKING EVERYTHING

Thus, we began a transition that took some years. We decided that if the goals were too big for the people, we would not run the meeting. We began turning down requests to squeeze a day’s worth of work into 2 hours. We pared down our repertoire to a few structural procedures nearly anybody could follow. We determined to manage meetings in such a way that people could use the experience, skills, and aspirations they already had. Thus, action would be inevitable unless people consciously chose not to act. We adopted a theory about when to jump in and when to just stand there. We committed to a philosophy based on accepting people as we found them, not as we wished them to be.

Along the way, we poured our early experiences into a strategic planning book we called Future Search (Weisbord & Janoff, 2000). There we told how we dropped one by one most of the meeting procedures we once relied on. Some of our changes were heretical. We did away with hallowed concepts like conflict...

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Verlag
Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Erscheinungsdatum
2007
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1576754251
ISBN 13 
9781576754252
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
216
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Eu comply OÜ
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Pärnu mnt. 139b-14
Tallinn
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