FEAR: F#©% Everything And Run

If the thought of change instills the FUD factor in you (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) you’re not alone. Fear of change keeps people in relationships they’ve outgrown, jobs they don’t like, and even hairstyles that no longer suit them. Likewise, organizations suffer fear, uncertainty, and doubt over change, even when they understand that change is necessary if they are to add value and remain competitive. Fear that they may fail. Uncertainty about how to change, or rather, what actions will lead to successful change. And, finally, doubt about whether all the time, money, and effort it takes to implement the change will be worth it.

That’s where you come in. The truth is people don’t change their minds, they make new decisions based on new or added information—and sometimes frequently. This new and added information accelerates change by influencing decision-making in both individuals and groups.^[i]

The Servant Leader

With that in mind, a servant leader (like you) does not change people’s minds, but rather, makes it easier for people to choose appropriate change supported through more informed decisions. By speaking with people rather than at them, servant leaders create environments that foster breakthrough solutions. The problem is, in most organizations this change begins during meetings. Yet, meetings often fail for one of three reasons:

1. The wrong people are attending (rare)
2. The right people attend but are apathetic and don’t care (rarest)
3. The right people care but they don’t know how to conduct an effective meeting (bingo!)

We know that groups can make higher quality decisions than the smartest person in the group, so why don’t we invest in learning how to run better meetings? Part of the problem can be found in our muscle memory.

When part of a group or team, we are more attuned to taking orders than creating collaborative solutions.

The Servant Leader Solution

As the workplace transforms, leadership techniques change. Today, instead of dealing mostly with individuals (one-on-one conversations), servant leaders work frequently with people in groups (ceremonies, events, meetings, and workshops). Instead of supervising hours of workload, they help their teams become self-managing. Instead of directing tasks, they motivate people to achieve results. Facing consecutive days of back-to-back meetings, meeting participants value the importance of well-run meetings that stay focused on aligning team activities with organizational goals. Professionally trained facilitators solve communication problems in meetings or workshops by ensuring the group stays focused on the meeting objectives while applying meeting designs that lead to more informed decisions. Yet, while modern leaders exhibit many of these positive traits compared to traditional or historic leaders, a further shift is required to be truly facilitative, so that teams and groups realize the full potential of their commitment, consensus, and ownership.

Characteristics of the Servant Leader Difference

Modern Leaders	Servant Leaders
Communicate and receive feedback	Structure activities so that stakeholders and team members evaluate them and each other
Content experts, based on position and power	Context experts, based on credibility, genuineness, and inspiration
Effective interpersonal skills	People savvy, but also group-focused
Have some meeting management skills	Skills that use groups to build complex outputs by structuring conversations based on a collaborative tone
Involved in directing tasks	Facilitate plans and agreements based on group input
Remain accountable for results	Transfer ownership so that members are highly skilled and accountable for outcomes
Value teamwork and collaboration	Focus on removing impediments while providing procedures that fortify self-organizing teams

 

Have you ever led a meeting? I’m going to assume you have. So, ask yourself, when the meeting was over, what changed from the moment your participants walked into the meeting? As a servant leader and meeting facilitator, you become the change agent, someone who takes a group from where they are at the beginning to where they need to be at the conclusion. All leaders must know where they are going. They must know what the group is intending to build, decide, or leave with when the meeting is done. Effective servant leaders also start with the end in mind.

A Servant Leader Takes Command of the Questions

The servant leader does not have answers, but rather, takes command of the questions. These optimal questions are scripted and properly sequenced. If you were designing a new home, for example, you would consider the foundation and structure long before you decide on the color of the grout. By responding to appropriate questions, meeting participants’ focus, and generating their collective preferences and requirements. A neutral, meeting leader values rigorous preparation, anticipates group dynamics, and designs the meeting accordingly. The meeting leader becomes responsible for managing the entire approach—the agenda, the ground rules, the flow of conversations, etc., —but not the content developed during the meeting. Therefore, effective meetings result from building a safe and trustworthy environment, one that provides “permission to speak freely” without fear of reprisal or economic loss. Ironically, the more structured the meeting, the more flexible you (the meeting facilitator) can be. Without structure, meeting design, or a road map, you can never tell exactly where you are, or more important, how much remains undone. With structure, you can take the scenic route because you have a plan that references your original design.

Whereas groups without structure who take the scenic route get lost, or worse, cannot agree on where to go next.

Benefits of Embracing a Facilitative Leadership Technique

When organizations support skilled and facilitative leadership for product development, project management, and others, they are allocating human capital to ensure the success of their single most expensive investment—meetings. They do this by ensuring that when . . .

• Context is carefully managed, and teams are free to focus on higher quality and value—quality being defined as satisfying customer expectations and value being defined as exceeding customer expectations.
• Staff are treated like partners and collaborators, and commitment and motivation increase.
• Stakeholders’ ideas are sought, and meetings become collaborative, innovative, and vibrant.

The value of embracing the servant leader, facilitative leadership technique extends beyond meetings to benefit a widening circle of people:

You Benefit By . . .

• Earning respect and recognition for being one who leads better meetings.
• Increasing your leadership consciousness, facilitation competence, and meeting design confidence.
• Learning how to modify and adapt proven agendas, procedures, and various information-gathering, analyzing, and deciding tools.

Your Organization Benefits By . . .

• Expediting the output of highly sought deliverables.
• Improving the culture and team spirit while enabling outstanding individual performances.
• Reducing the cost of omissions, issues subject to normal oversight.
• Reducing the cost of wasted meetings and wasted time in meetings.

Your Community Benefits By . . .

• Encouraging shared planning efforts to improve the distribution of resources.
• Improving volunteerism.
• Increasing decision transparency.
• Solidifying shared ownership.

All Society Benefits By . . .

• Increasing eco-effectiveness when reducing wasted time and resources.
• Improving the likelihood of win-win scenarios.
• Motivating hitherto unused or underused intellectual capacity.

“Meetings That Get Results” aims to shift your thinking from facilitation (as a noun or a static way of being) to facilitating (as a verb or a dynamic way of doing)—truly making it easier for your meeting participants to make more informed decisions. Leading is about stimulating and inspiring people, and facilitating skills epitomize the DNA of servant leaders.

Facilitation Liberates Leaders

In the past, leaders needed to be content experts. Today, organizations already employ and engage a wealth of subject matter experts. What they need are leaders who know how to be facilitative while managing context. In the past, leadership was about giving answers. Today, leadership is about leading with precise and properly sequenced questions while always providing a safe environment for everybody’s response. Imagine the following scenario. Your team needs to develop a plan that will solve employee burnout in the cybersecurity department. To assess the value of proposed solutions, they’ll need to know the purpose of the cybersecurity department, and why it exists.

Which of the following makes better sense . . .?

A ‘presenter’ might access the cybersecurity department charter from HR (Human Resources). In most organizations, this would take from fifteen minutes to five hours or longer. Then spend another fifteen minutes building their PowerPoint slides. Then take five minutes to present the slides and another ten to twenty minutes managing Q & A (questions and answers) about the content on the slides. Call it one hour total (minimum). At the conclusion, the presenter still owns the content they showed on the slides.

Alternatively…

You, as the meeting leader, can use a procedure, such as our Purpose Tool. The Purpose Tool distills a consensual expression about the purpose of the cybersecurity department directly from the subject matter experts who understand both the purpose and the problems within the department today. In fifteen minutes or less, you can lead the team to build an expression of shared purpose using the Purpose Tool.

Most importantly, at the end of the fifteen minutes the meeting participants, not you, own the results.

A structured technique bestows your participants with ownership right from the beginning. But here is the real joy—once you understand how to use a tool (i.e., how to manage the context), you can use it repeatedly. Additionally, you don’t need to have detailed expertise on specific content. You only need to have a conversational understanding of the terms being used. “Meetings That Get Results” will raise your consciousness around the roles of meeting designer, meeting facilitator, and meeting leader by helping you understand how to . . .

• Apply facilitator skills such as precise questioning, keen observing, and active listening to improve meetings
• remain content-neutral, passionate about results, yet unbiased about the path
• think separately about facilitation and meeting design, and 
• understand that the roles of meeting coordinator, meeting documentor, meeting facilitator, and meeting designer are not persons, but rather, positions, that are frequently performed by the same person

~~~~~~~~ ^[i] For the past thirty years, most ‘changes’ have been both digital and dynamic, constantly shifting—based on stuff that is ‘in-formation‘. With ‘in-formation,’ change is both inherent and inevitable—only growth is optional.

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Don’t ruin your career by hosting bad meetings. Sign up for a workshop or send this to someone who should. MGRUSH workshops focus on meeting design and practice. Each person practices tools, methods, and activities daily during the week. Therefore, while some call this immersion, we call it the road to building high-value facilitation skills.

Our workshops also provide a superb way to earn up to 40 SEUs from the Scrum Alliance, 40 CDUs from IIBA, 40 Continuous Learning Points (CLPs) based on Federal Acquisition Certification Continuous Professional Learning Requirements using Training and Education activities, 40 Professional Development Units (PDUs) from SAVE International, as well as 4.0 CEUs for other professions. (See workshop and Reference Manual descriptions for details.)

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Go to the Facilitation Training Store to access proven, in-house resources, including fully annotated agendas, break timers, and templates. Finally, take a few seconds to buy us a cup of coffee and please SHARE with others.

In conclusion, we dare you to embrace the will, wisdom, and activities that amplify a facilitative leader. #facilitationtraining #MEETING DESIGN