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Ground Rules Can Make Your Meetings Better

26 July 2016

Allison read 8 Ground Rules for Great Meetings and found herself nodding her head as she read another good article about how to improve meetings by Roger Schwarz.

Tags: allison read, communication, meetings

When I teach my clients how to run effective meetings, I have a lot of suggestions, but perhaps the most important one is to generate ground rules for the meeting. This is easier to do in a group’s very first meeting, but it’s really never too late even for groups that have been meeting for a long time. While creating ground rules can feel a bit forced and awkward initially, I think most people will agree it’s much better than the status quo… wishing and hoping for a better meeting, but suffering in silence during the meeting and then complaining about the meeting or individual participants in small groups later. (We’ve all been there.)

Start by asking each meeting participant to quietly make a list of ground rules that would make the meeting more effective. If they look at you blankly, you can suggest a few like, start and end on time, listen carefully to one another, etc. This helps your more vocal participants to be patient and not immediately offer their ideas while also allowing your quieter participants to collect their thoughts. It also avoids premature focusing on one idea.

Then go around the group and ask people to give one idea at a time. Record each idea on a flip chart. You may have heard this process described as a “round robin” whereby you take one idea serially from each participant rather than letting the first participant give all of her ideas at once. Instruct participants that if one of the ideas they wrote down is said by someone else, then they don’t need to repeat the idea and can just say, “pass.” Go around the group capturing each idea until each participant says, “pass.” (e.g. “I don’t have another idea to add at this time.”) If a participant says “pass,” they can still chime in the next time it’s their turn if they think of a new idea. Do not discuss the ground rules until every participant says, “pass.”

This almost always ensures that everyone in the meeting contributes at least one ground rule and allows people to think of new ideas as they hear other people’s ground rules. Once all of the ideas have been generated, then the group can get clarity on each one and discuss whether these are rules they can live with. This won’t solve all the problems in your meetings, but it will allow the group to have some sense of what a good meeting looks like and will give them a way to evaluate their behavior.

Going forward, I’ll also be encouraging teams to read 8 Ground Rules for Great Meetings by Roger Schwarz. Schwarz puts forward rules that are more nuanced than most groups will generate on their own. Additionally, they have the added benefit of being research-based:

• State views and ask genuine questions.
• Share all relevant information.
• Use specific examples and agree on what important words mean.
• Explain reasoning and intent.
• Focus on interests, not positions.
• Test assumptions and inferences.
• Jointly design next steps.
• Discuss undiscussable issues.

It's been my experience that generating ground rules using the round robin technique is just as important if not more important than the actual rules the group generates. It ensures that everyone has a say about the ground rules and that they belong to the group as a whole rather than the meeting leader. Therefore, my new ground rule advice will be to have groups generate a list using the technique I describe above. Then they should read Schwarz’s article. After that, the group can decide whether to update the ground rules they developed with some of Schwarz’s ideas.

Additionally, Schwarz has good advice on how to ensure the team adheres to its ground rules:

• Explicitly agree on the ground rules and what each one means.
• Develop a team mindset that’s congruent with the ground rules.
• Agree that everyone is responsible for helping each other use the ground rules.
• Discuss how you are using the ground rules and how to improve.

By generating rules as a group and discussing Schwarz’s short article, I believe participants will do a better job of holding themselves individually accountable and have a safer way to give feedback to one another when things don’t go well.
 

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