Key Ingredients for Effective Cross-Functional Working Meetings

As operational excellence professionals and solutions designers, we face the inevitable challenges of leading a series cross-functional working meetings. These meetings exist for a distinctive purpose and must be run in a distinctive way. They can either be great or they can be like Kryptonite. 

Typically these meetings are comprised of people who represent their respective function in the organization and we are the designated leader. The corporate champion of the cross-functional effort deems this group a "team" at a kick-off meeting and routinely vanishes, as she should, for the duration because of more pressing executive priorities.

Team? Hardly. The reality is that at the onset the newly formed ensemble of free-agents is anything but a functioning team. This particular group has never worked together before.

The aspirations of the effort rest on the shoulders of the leader at the onset. As the person leading this effort, it is imperative to address the immediate challenges to build and maintain engagement while actually getting things done.

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Wholehearted Meetings: The Buzzing of the Hive

The ideal meeting is characterized by full engagement. You know it when you see it and it's a delight to lead and participate in meetings where you see people.

• fully engaged
• leaning forward
• interacting with one another instead of just the facilitator
• energized
• learning
• sharing
• creating
• having fun
• laptops closed
• actively looking forward to participating in the next meetings 

The tone of the meetings are characterized by a wonderful "buzzing of the hive" quality, as my friend and ally Gary Evans refers to it. I love these meetings.

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Half-Hearted Meetings: The Dirge

In contrast, the other kind of meeting is sheer drudgery and you can recognize it when you see people:

• disengaged
• passively observing without participating
• interacting with their email or smartphone
• tired
• bored
• sleeping
• drained
• grandstanding
• complying
• checked-out
• only speaking when spoken to
• relying on the leader doing most of the talking
• ​praying for the meeting to end early or for a fire drill

These meetings are agonizing. I would rather rush out on the campus lawn and empale myself prostrate on a sprinkler head than to have to lead or be part of these kinds of meetings. Really.

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Key Ingredients That Affect Team Engagement

As a leaders of these work efforts, we must do everything that we can to shift the atmosphere of these meetings. I offer the following key ingredients that a leader must intentionally manage in the meeting experience in order to get the design flywheel spinning:

• ​Trust
  As a participant, I feel safe, understood and respected
• Velocity
  As a group, we collectively understand how progress is to be made and we are actively contributing to that work effort
  
• Learning
  As individuals we are learning new things that contribute to our personal growth and organizational effectiveness
• Fun
  As a group, we have a special alchemy that doesn't occur unless we are together

These sound like platitudes. But, the responsibility is on us as leaders of these cross-functional work efforts to conduct them in a way such that people contribute their best and so that the organization benefits, learns and adapts from the work done by the group.

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Suggestions for How To Lead

There is no one silver bullet, however, over the years, I have developed a variety of techniques that have proven to contribute to a trusting, fun and higher-velocity meeting environment. Some of these might work for you.

Things To Say (At the Onset and Often)

• "I am committed to leading the team as effectively and efficiently as possible and will rely upon your contributions to produce the deliverables expected of us."
• "We make progress when we write things down and capture ideas."
• "I acknowledge that we all have responsibilities beyond this team. We have our day jobs. Yet, we need your participation. I look forward to having a lot of fun, hard work, organizational learning and personal growth in our time together."
• "We come into this meeting wearing the hat of our particular organizational function. I'm going to ask you to take your hats off in this meeting and, to the degree possible, speak to what is best for delivering to the needs of the organization as a whole."
• Ask open-ended questions and be comfortable with the dead air that follows. If the participants have deer-in-headlights stares or hesitate, say, "This isn't a guess-what-the-leader-is-thinking question. I truly don't have an answer in mind. We want to know what you think about this." Never, ever, ever answer your own question. Letting participants answer questions helps to foster their sense of ownership rather than relying on you to do the thinking for them.

Things To Have

• Co-leader, if at all possible, for the duration of the meetings. A diving buddy is a tremendous asset in leading these efforts and doing effective discovery and future state design meetings.
• Bring food and coffee to the first few meetings, and every meeting if possible. It expresses a graciousness and welcomeness that is distinctive and genuine.
• Bring toys and thingies for people to manipulate. My personal list includes a travel-size Etch-a-Sketch, pipe cleaners, Silly Putty, Slinky, squishables, squeezables, rival fish, Nerf balls, spinning tops, splat balls, Tangles and hand sanitizer. Just keep them in a "bag of tricks" that you bring your meeting. Lay them on the table at the onset of the meeting. People will figure out what to do with them.
• Bring snacks for afternoon breaks.
• Yellow stickies and Sharpies.
• Whiteboard and at least four colored erasable markers
• Projector for reviewing work products as a team
• Smartphone for taking photos of whiteboard work and emailing them back to yourself to have a crisp memory of what was discussed/discovered corporately
• A sense of humor, humility and vulnerability. Having an aura of over-confidence and wanting to be right all the time is a trust killer and stifles the kind of vulnerability that leads to creativity and positive change.

Things To Do

• At the onset, be intentional in helping the team to get to know one another in a way that helps in self-awareness and other-awareness, while providing the opportunity for personal growth. The time you spend here up front in developing awareness and having some disclosure will contribute to success down the line. I am a huge fan of the True Colors assessment and recommend using their card sorting exercise in the meeting room. Teams refer to this True Color reference point again and again throughout the meetings. It's an effective harmonizer and contributes to authenticity and vulnerability in order to develop trust within the team.
• Observe the energy level in the meeting. When participation wanes, take a break
• Sit in someone else's seat, literally. Break up the routine from meeting to meeting by intentionally taking the seat where somebody else sat the last time. This helps guard against people settling into a routine from meeting-to-meeting.
• Consider half-day meetings, to maintain high energy levels and to respect people's other priorities.
• Create a high-level agenda of the meeting, just bullet points, with the desired outcomes of the particular meeting. Share that verbally at the onset of the meeting and then manage to it.
• Tag team with your co-leader. One of you facilitates while the other scribes. You lead some meetings or portions of the meetings. They lead other meetings or portions.
• Have a de-brief time with your co-leader (or time of personal reflection, if you are leading by yourself) immediately following your meeting to reflect upon what worked well, where tension and opportunity exists in the room, and where to go next.
• Send out a "thank you email" shortly after the meeting to thank people for their contributions and participation, to reinforce good progress and to affirm their good work. Keep it simple and informal and end with "I look forward to our next time together". Genuine attention and appreciation go a long way in reinforcing good teamwork.

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What's In Your Bag of Tricks?

If you have found this to be helpful, have a comment, or if you have other ideas for that make for exceptional cross-functional meetings, I would love to hear from you.

​- Chuck

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