Managing Remote Teams E-Book

Lukasz Szyrmer

• Herausgeber: Launch Tomorrow
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 299

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

This book will help you and your team of knowledge workers transition to a remote-only team format. By focusing on systematic re-alignment and patterns from flourishing remote companies. At all levels.

Leseprobe

Managing Remote Teams

How to Achieve Together, When Everyone Is Working From Home

Lukasz Szyrmer

Managing Remote Teams: How to Achieve Together, When Everyone is Working from Home, 6th editionPublished by LAUNCH TOMORROWWarsaw, Poland

Copyright 2020-2022 by LUKASZ SZYRMER. All rights reserved by LUKASZ SZYRMER and LAUNCH TOMORROW.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher/author, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. All images, logos, quotes, and trademarks included in this book are subject to use according to trademark and copyright laws of the Poland.

SZYRMER, LUKASZ, AuthorMANAGING REMOTE TEAMSLUKASZ SZYRMER

ISBN: 978-1-7817977-0-6BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Business Communication / Meeting & PresentationsBUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Organizational BehaviorSELF-HELP / Communication & Social Skills

QUANTITY PURCHASES: Schools, companies, and groups may qualify for special terms in bulk. For information, email [email protected].

Table of Contents

Introduction

Rethinking meetings

Quick challenge ideas

Why rethink meetings when going online

The impact of “Where” we meet online

Who needs to be involved

How to contextualize when remote

How to run successful meetings

How to move meetings online successfully

Top 15 tips when running your meetings online

What you can do now

Section takeaways

Rethinking motivation

Quick challenge ideas

Why alignment is linked with motivation

How to reduce ambiguity and why it matters

Forests, trees, and motivation

Why context drives people

Why department boundaries matter most

How to align or realign within a company

If the direct approach fails

How to break down silos in your company

What you can do now

Section takeaways

Rethinking productivity

Quick challenge ideas

So how do we know our people are working?

Why traditional productivity measures don’t add up

What we’ve got here is a failure to delegate

The wolf you feed

Given outcomes, teams can manage their own work

How to apply a team lens to output

Revisiting individual productivity

How to track productivity in real-time

When will the team be done?

What you can do now

Section takeaways

Epilogue

Appendices

Principles, quotes, and rules of thumb

Glossary

Bibliography

Resources

Notes

Introduction

Exploring an alternative way to achieve together–through others, who are all remote.

“So glad to see everyone on the call”

Work is fundamentally a social experience. As adults, we need each other to decide what is important, what finishing work ultimately means, and finally…to actually do the work. This ability to coordinate efforts socially was unique among primates; our ability to read cues enabled homo sapiens to build pyramids. The same biological and psychological messaging powered in-person collaboration in an office. While we lose much of this ability when working remotely, there are newer ways to collaborate as groups of humans over the internet. Highly effective and inclusive, these approaches also build upon how the human brain works, focussing more on cognitive ways to collaborate. Instead of taking a look at what makes remote work unique, this book examines what has stayed the same: how our relationships at work and the wiring of our brains help us define and achieve what’s meaningful–together.

As a tech leader, you’re no stranger to navigating uncharted territory and adapting to new realities. But leading remote teams presents a unique set of challenges that only the most cutting-edge technologies can’t solve on their own. These days, developers can get another job offer almost as fast as it takes them to commute into the office.

Gone are the days of impromptu whiteboarding sessions and lively discussions around the ping pong table. No longer can you rely on the serendipity of hallway conversations to gather insights, the energy of in-person workshops to generate ideas, or the visibility of being in the same room to keep your team on track.

Now, you’re tasked with keeping your team aligned, motivated, and productive across a matrix of Jira tickets, GitHub commits, and endless Zoom calls. It’s daunting.

Yet it also presents an incredible opportunity to redefine what leadership looks like in the digital age. To leverage the best of what technology allows with “follow the sun” progress across time zones. To connect and achieve, despite spending most of your time alone in your home office. To find new ways to listen to your customers, collaborate with your team, and drive your product forward – easily taking into account the complexities of a distributed workforce.

Who am I to be talking about this?

My name is Luke Szyrmer. I’ve worked and managed remotely over a decade to date. I’ve successfully led teams spanning multiple continents, time zones, and industries. I’ve seen what works and what doesn’t, in large companies and in fast growing startups. When building and when selling.

While I respect the value of rigorous testing in academic research, I’m a classic practitioner. I only care about theories that explain what’s going on, and that produce results in practice. This book started as an experiment, to solve specific problems I faced with slow progress on a distributed software team, trying ideas sourced from research to address my teams’ challenges. A lot of them weren’t useful or relevant, but this book contains the ones that are.

In practice, my secret sauce was leading teams by enabling them to thrive and collaborate, rather than extracting as much ‘value’ from each ‘human resource’ as possible. As a result, few of my team members wanted or needed to leave. In fact, I’ve had many employees return to my team after leaving for a competitor, rather than just leave. This mindset has remained effective as I’ve worked across a few different industries, as well as supporting startup executives across even more with similar challenges.

Instead of only looking at what makes remote work unique, this book examines what has stayed the same: how our relationships at work and the wiring of our brains help us define and achieve what’s meaningful–together. While it’s true we lose many of the cues we’re used to as human beings working in person, we can coordinate the efforts of tens or hundreds of people using techniques like collaborative editing in ways that were impossible offline.

This book is your guide to unlocking the full potential of your remote tech team, especially if you are involved in creative or innovation work requiring learning and experimentation to speed up delivery. Drawing on practitioner insights from agile methodologies, lean principles, and the latest remote leadership research, it offers a framework for building high-performing teams that can innovate, iterate, and deliver value faster than ever before.

In the chapters ahead, we’ll dive deep into three key areas of remote leadership through a tech lens, covered in 3 separate sections:

rethinking meetingsrethinking motivationrethinking productivity

Whether you’re a seasoned CTO adapting to a fully remote model or a newly-minted tech lead looking to build your remote leadership toolkit, this book will equip you with the tools and frameworks you need to lead your team to success in the new world of work.

The journey ahead may be uncharted, but with the right mindset and approach, the destination is within reach: a thriving, high-impact remote team that achieves extraordinary results together, no matter where they happen to be located. By embracing the principles and practices outlined in this book, you’ll be on your way to building a remote tech team that is resilient, innovative, and ready to tackle any challenges the future may bring.

Let’s get started.

Rethinking meetings

In which we focus on where the action is and ensure that everyone can execute effectively

“Now that we all agree, let’s get on slack to discuss why it will never work at our company.”

Quick challenge ideas

The fastest way to learn something new is “learning by doing”. To introduce change to your teams, you need to start by trying something new yourself to figure out what might work.

The following are specific things you can try, to figure out if there might be a better way for you and your team to work. Put the book aside, and try doing one of these before you continue reading:

If scheduling a meeting, schedule it for twice as much time as needed. At the beginning of the meeting, suggest that you might not need all of the scheduled time. If you finish early, you’ll have that time to catch up on non-meeting work or just recharge.Send an email suggesting a no meetings day policy for one day per week for your team. Trial it for a month. I like Wednesday, personally. If you already use an online whiteboard, try running the whole meeting using the pen/pencil tool. Minimize the use of text. Draw your agenda as a pie chart. Draw options other people propose as you listen. And so on.If someone says they haven’t had the time to prepare for a meeting, give everyone 10 minutes to prep during the meeting. For example, if you’ve prepared a report, give everyone time to read it before you discuss it.If you have a data connection and the weather is nice, grab your phone, make sure you have your company’s meeting app installed, and take a walking meeting. Or work on your chat app as you walk.If you have your company’s meeting app installed on your phone, work for an hour or an entire day from your phone only. Feel free to walk around the house, lay down, etc.

The aim here is to step slightly outside of your current routine(s). It might feel somewhat uncomfortable, but you’ll realize you have more autonomy than you assume.

Feel free to email me with any observations at [email protected].

Why rethink meetings when going online

To say the least, I was taken aback. I was noticing a pattern of silence in calls, even though we’d just returned from a productive in-person workshop with the whole team.

an old meme

One day, an operational standup call had over-run to about twice the scheduled length. During the call, my boss, an architect, and I were metaphorically “pulling teeth”. No one wanted to say anything. The architect even explicitly referenced the teacher played by Ben Stein in the 80s movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off saying, “Anyone? Anyone?”

Immediately after we hung up with the team, I called my boss to do a quick post-game analysis.

“You see what I mean, here, when I said they don’t seem involved,” I started.

“I don’t get it,” he said. “They aren’t saying anything unless we ask them directly. We pay them, and it’s part of their job to participate in meetings.”

My stomach tightened.

“I think we’re missing something here, but I don’t know what it is.”

It wasn’t a team quality issue. The team was composed of people who were probably the best in the company. I had a lot of respect for each individual’s expertise from when I worked alongside them in the trenches. They were locking up exactly when they could contribute the most to the conversation and decisions. And I was pretty sure they were keen to be part of it. The new product initiative was started with a lot of fanfare. And to be honest, it was already almost an honor to be part of the team.

“But I don’t think it’s a question of pay or anything formal,” I continued. I had a team of 14 allocated full-time to this initiative. It’s not like anyone was pulling them off to different priorities. “It’s almost like they are just really distracted, and this distraction even shows up during meetings. And presumably, it’s the same thing throughout the day. Or maybe they were afraid to speak up.”

I couldn’t fall back on peeping to see what people had on their monitors, which worked for in-person workspaces. All I had to go on was what I saw happening. And what I heard during meetings. The intuitive mirroring of others’ emotional states didn’t work online. Feeling connection through physical touch, like a handshake bolstered with oxytocin, wasn’t there anymore. Granted, I was only meeting with the team as a whole for a small part of the week due to time zone constraints.

This was primarily about going remote. The human dynamic fell flat. It caught me off guard, and I didn’t realize how big of a task I had ahead of me. Instead of lacking empathy, I was overwhelmed. In the words of Erica Dhawan, author of Digital Body Language, I “didn’t know what empathy meant anymore in a world where digital communication had made once-clear signals, cues, and norms almost unintelligible”. If non-verbal communication in person makes up 90% of what we communicate, and only 10% is about the content of the message, then we are missing the building blocks of connection: posture, proximity, smiles, pauses, yawns, tone, facial expressions, and volume or losing it depending on the speed of our internet connection. For example, one research study found that with intermittent delays of 1.2 seconds, people were more likely to be rated as less attentive, friendly, and self-disciplined than if there was no delay.

Skip rethinking meeting dynamics at your own risk. Offices become less important, even if they are distributed. And meetings and company culture are woven into people’s personal lives and vice versa. All participants’ experience of meetings changes significantly in that case. This is true regardless of the symptoms you are seeing:

A lack of engagementA company culture that doesn’t support changeAn inability to finish things

Meetings are the first and easiest place to start diagnosis. They are practical and specific. Everyone is there anyway and sees what happens. This is particularly true for recurring meetings.

If you can fix one meeting, the positive impact accrues over many future months of work. For this reason, recurring meetings have a highly leveraged impact on productivity: a good one pulls it up a lot, and a bad one can drag it down. While they are not a “silver bullet” that magically makes all of your problems disappear, getting your meetings right means it’s easier to make decisions together and hold everyone accountable for them. With solid meetings, it’s a lot easier to dive deeper into motivation, productivity, and several other factors.

And once I improved online meetings after a lot of experimentation, the team came together. I didn’t need to organize meetings myself anymore; they were happy to convene without me if needed, but included me when they wanted my input. Team members supported one another. They owned the work they picked up. And with all of that working correctly, it made it possible to go after more ambitious goals.

Before moving on to the how-to details, let’s dig into why this worked for me in the following chapters.

Key takeaways

When moving online, meetings change significantly because of how we read body language and tone of voice.Be prepared to rethink meetings from the ground up, to get them to work for you, your teams, and your company.

The impact of “Where” we meet online

When I was organizing an offsite for a team that seemed to be coming together after some struggle, I needed to get the flight details from everyone. Eighteen different people were flying into the target location from multiple airports and time zones. My boss asked that I put together a spreadsheet with all of these details so that we don’t lose anyone upon landing. It was totally understandable, but it felt like I needed to embark on an initial request, followed by a few days of chasing emails, until the last straggler would finally send me their flight times so that I could organize it in a spreadsheet. Just thinking about it made me tired. Instead, I had an idea. Even though Microsoft was the company-preferred supplier of internal tools, I created a Google Sheets workbook in my personal account and dropped the share link in an email to all the workshop participants. Within two hours, I had 18 individuals’ accurate flight details for both the flight in and out, along with several additional comments. Each person was the “expert” on their own flight. I just created a structure in which we could interact productively. I made it possible for them to contribute in parallel, and as a result, there was much less work overall.

I felt surprised, even energized, by this experience. At the time, it was the first visible step toward the team taking ownership of their work and output. It felt like a symbolic beginning of a larger shift.

The team members were stepping out of a company leadership style that was highly centralized. They were accustomed to having someone think for them, tell them what to do, and then nag them until they did it. Instead of directing them, I ensured they had the right environment and trusted they did the right thing (because it aligned their goals with the company’s). A supportive environment instills good habits that are repeated many times over and gets rid of destructive habits that undermine positive interactions.

My role was to optimize this environment to help the team achieve high productivity. In this case, my deliberate choice of a tool that allowed everyone to edit at the same time created exactly the right environment for collaboration. We could quickly get through minutae, and have more time for deep thought and discussion.

Structuring team interactions

Structure affects behavior and, ultimately, productivity. Ask any architect who’s worked on a building with office space. If you want people to bump into one another, the shapes of the rooms influence how daily interactions happen. The environment indirectly affects group habits. Certain tasks are easier to perform, so they’ll happen more often and vice versa. Any behavior, including a habit, has an implicit goal. You are better off designing or choosing the behavior you want to promote than just leaving it to the defaults of human nature.

One approach is called activity-based working. Figure out all of the activities people want to perform, prioritize them by frequency and importance, and then design a building that seamlessly supports these activities, even down to the details of the IT infrastructure. For example, when a guest comes to visit, she can just plug into the network and have seamless access to shared resources like printers.

Once people move in, seating layout and interior design add another layer. Having a team sit together physically helps them establish a rapport that helps them do their job more effectively. These can be functional teams, like the accounting department, or cross-functional teams, such as a project delivery team. At a micro level, the frequency of interaction builds better working relationships over time with the people physically close to one another.

To some extent, we lost this office context when going remote. Instead, all that’s left is what we see on our screens. The software we use serves as an “architecture” for collaboration or workflow.

For example, check out the Google Sheets video by Common Craft 1 or search “google docs in plain English” on Youtube. While the examples look a bit dated, even at that point, it was clear that the added value of Google docs over other office suites was the ability to work in parallel. Word and Excel were silos. If you wanted to collaborate, you worked individually and then engaged in document ping pong.

In a digital environment, the computer screen is the two-dimensional place where work “happens”. How much screen real estate do you use? How many screens are hooked up to your computer? How much time do you spend interacting with specific co-workers? How do you experience their “presence” when you are collaborating? How do you manage version control, especially when multiple people work together on the same document?

Tools and mediums structure the context of the space where online meetings happen. An interaction over email can feel very different than a quick chat message. Originally, most office software ran locally on your computer or phone. Nowadays, software is increasingly running in the browser, and it’s easier to integrate and share with others.

Apologies if this sounds grandiose, but the software you use to work is your digital architecture, the digital “space” in which you work. Having been a developer in previous years, I know how much thought goes into designing features that help achieve user goals and are “functional”. And most importantly, this architecture can help you or hold you back.

Screen real estate

Before digging into the details of the software your teams use, consider the hardware on which it’s displayed. According to Microsoft UX Research, one of the few definitive ways to improve work-based productivity is to increase the physical screen space available:

Significant benefits were observed in the use of a prototype, larger display, in addition to significant positive user preference and satisfaction with its use over a small display. In addition, design guidelines for enhancing user interaction across large display surfaces were identified. User productivity could be significantly enhanced in future graphical user interface designs if developed with these findings in mind. 2

This is an option that a keen employee can afford to spend themselves, but smart managers will arrange this for everyone who wants it. It’s also less of a change for employees than changing software. Alternatively, if monitors larger than the ones you already have are expensive, increase the number of screens:

[Test subjects] edited slide shows, spreadsheets, and text documents in a simulation of office work, using each of the display arrays. Performance measures, including task time, editing time, number of edits completed, and the number of errors made, and usability measures evaluating effectiveness, comfort, learning ease, time to productivity, quickness of recovery from mistakes, ease of task tracking, ability to maintain task focus and ease of movement among sources were combined into an overall evaluation of productivity. Multi-screens scored significantly higher on every measure. 3

Laptop docking stations, for example, are one way to increase the number of video feeds. Despite long lists of suggested gear shopping lists appearing online in March 2020, large or multiple screens were the only research-backed finding about “working from home” gear at the time.

By having multiple screens, you minimize context and task switching. People can physically move a mouse quickly across multiple screens while working on one thing. It’s more in line with their actual thought processes. As a result, there is less distraction. Personally, I find it helpful to work from 3 to 4 screens because two of them always have communication channels open, e.g. Slack and MS Outlook, and then the other two are for whatever I happen to be focused on. Or it’s helpful to see more of a virtual whiteboard in a workshop.

Collaborative editing

the construction equivalent of screen sharing

In the context of remote and hybrid work, the most important feature of office software is the ability to edit collaboratively in real-time. 4 The software keeps track of individual changes. They are propagated to everyone else on the network and show up on their screen as soon as they arrive. Google docs was one of the earliest success stories in this space. Nowadays, many other tools that also give you the ability to edit collaboratively, like whiteboards or internal company wikis operating like Wikipedia, for example.

From a technical perspective, collaborative editing product needs to be designed and built this way from the ground up. This is a difficult nut to crack technically, due to network delays and the need to coordinate versions of work simultaneously.

The main benefit is that you don’t need to have a separate step of assembling everyone’s contributions into one whole. When collaborating in real-time, it’s possible to use one another’s contributions as further inspiration for more ideas. In an office environment geared towards collaborative editing, you shouldn’t need to screen share when working together. Each person can see what’s happening on their own screen, and also interact with it. This is why collaborative editing is better than having one person screen share and the rest watching.

The key difference is that:

The tool can be used by the group simultaneously.They can each interact individually, and it’s smart enough to prevent overwrites, for example.You don’t fall back on having one person using it and everyone else watching over a screen share.

If everyone can add or change what they see and hear, they can contribute without necessarily needing to hog the horn. If you allocate the time for a meeting, use tools that enable everyone to participate at once. Don’t default to letting the vocal drown out the rest.

Summary

Activity-based working requires you to rethink working from home holistically, based on what you want to achieve as a company. In addition to the obvious security elements of working from home, the above-mentioned IT policy line items are the equivalent of the conference or meeting room where a meeting happens. Encouraging employees to use collaborative editing tools, and providing them a WFH allowance or buying extra monitors in the office mitigates the downside of not being physically together. It even provides additional benefits like the ability to save, copy, and work on a variation or working on a shared document in between “meetings,” which wouldn’t otherwise be available.

Key takeaways

The software you use to work is your digital architecture, the digital space in which you work.Screen real estate affects how productive you are.Collaborative editing helps speed up the pace of office work.

Who needs to be involved

Ulaan Bataar, the capital of Mongolia, was physically mobile until the end of WWII. This was actually to their benefit during the war, as it was difficult to attack a city, if you didn’t know exactly where it was–physically. Imagine needing to coordinate hundreds of thousands of tent owners to pack up and move 15 km west, because the greenery ensured better feed for the sheep and goats. And it was best for everyone.

This thought always makes me feel relieved when I need to implement change at a client site. In an established company, implementing changes (such as changing strategic direction) are like convincing an entire village to move, not a whole city. Everyone has their concerns, needs, and dependencies. From a social engineering standpoint, this is roughly the same level of doggedness that’s required to overcome company inertia.

“By closing the door, you create the room.” –Priya Parker in The Art of Gathering

When preparing an effort to align across a company, the single most important question is, “who needs to be involved?”

If you don’t involve enough of the right people, you will face pushback, due to a lack of buy-in.If you involve too many, some participants may disconnect and disengage, feeling it’s not relevant enough to their responsibilities and interests, and they become discussion deadweight for the actual participants.Besides representing themselves, each participant voices the concerns of groups like a department from which they hail.

Even if you don’t ask all the right questions, you will generate a lot of value for everyone by ensuring that all relevant perspectives are represented. Because this often establishes working relationships among people who would otherwise never need to talk. And forcing these conversations helps create productive intra-company connections.

The meeting purpose serves as the single most important filter for deciding who needs to be included. By default, I made the mistake of trying to be too inclusive, thus unnecessarily pulling in people who didn’t want to be in meetings. When I restricted down to three or four participants, with the expectation that we would inform the rest of the company afterwards, I suddenly had a lot of eager participants hoping to be involved in a meeting.

Decision-makers

Alignment requires the participation of decision-makers, because they make the final call. Usually, it isn’t obvious what that final call should be beforehand. Even if participants might not fully agree with the approach, most will agree that a choice is necessary. And the company’s decision-makers need to be involved enough in the details to be confident that everyone affected can stand behind the reasoning, even if it’s inconvenient in the short term for them personally. Before you reach a conclusion, decisions often require an interpretation of how the principles driving the company can be applied to this particular situation. The purpose of exploring problems embedded in a situation is to identify how tradeoffs are being made currently, to figure out how to improve the tradeoffs in the near future.

The group’s highest “ranking” person will own the decision by default and be on the hook to defend it later. Ideally, decision-makers make space for others’ opinions. It’s best to delay sharing a personal view until others have had the chance to speak from their own perspective. Instead, the decision-maker should be spending the first half of the meeting asking questions. This way, participants feel comfortable sharing their perspective. It’s more likely they will feel heard, and you will avoid shutting down a discussion prematurely.

Later on, executive “air cover” is critical when the company needs to implement difficult decisions afterwards. The other senior figures in the company need to understand why certain decisions were made. The attending decision-maker can articulate the reasons underlying a decision to other senior people who might not have the full context, but whose teams are affected by it.

Without a sponsor behind a decision, an alignment effort may fizzle. It might be seen as a handful of corporate guerrillas who make a lot of noise, without any long-term positive change. The guerillas can’t operate in a vacuum, separate from the helm of the company.

Representatives

Every major stakeholder group should have at least one representative involved. Pre-existing informal networks in your company will largely determine whether the change succeeds or not; you are best off tapping into this explicitly.

If you decide something amongst yourselves, each representative(s) will need to go back and convince their peer network of your decision, and talk through how it can be implemented in the current context.

One of the most common alignment traps is successfully aligning within one department, but then being unable to execute on that agreement due to resistance from other departments. You prevent that issue by preemptively including a representative from that department, so that he can “translate” any decisions for his co-workers. For software development teams, this can be a shared team like a “Release” team for the organization, or an “IT security” team that needs to sign off on new products before they go out to market.

Including teams you depend on will address the most common failure condition with alignment according to Harvard Business Review5. Alignment emerges faster on an intra-team level, as internal frictions are addressed as they come up. But it can fail to emerge across teams that have differing incentives. And executives are too far above and removed from the details to be able to address this systemic problem. So make sure the relevant voices are represented.

Doers

Also, it’s important for the future viability of the whole effort to have a good mix between executives, managers, and “doers”. To clarify, “doers” aren’t an official title. It’s just a term referring to anyone actually doing the work, who has their sleeves rolled up, and who is actually in the details of making something happen. In the case of building software, this refers to the technical staff, who have a very different perspective than managers. In other contexts, it would be anyone performing the key activities of the company (which depends on what the company sells).

“Doers” are often under-represented in decision-making meetings if they aren’t managers. They often have a very practical and detailed perspective that senior decision-makers lack. Their presence helps ground the discussion in practicalities, to minimize the gap between strategy and execution. Doers need to understand and buy into the new vision. After aligning, they also address doubts and answer questions among peers, which means you have buy-in at the execution level.

Other roles

The brain: usually highly intellectual and rational, able to think deeply about details on their feet, and willing to be blunt in the service of the truth. In software, these are often good techies with a high sense of responsibility for the organization. The animal spirit: this is someone who is highly attuned to the political and organizational reality of how things happen in the company. Ideally, it’s someone who knows the teams involved personally, but it can also be an external coach or advisor with lots of experience navigating organizational change.The scribe: in some organizations, it’s useful to have someone note down minutes, to have something to refer to in the future, particularly with respect to agreed responsibilities, tasks, and deadlines. Sometimes the facilitator can do this, but often it’s helpful to delegate this to free up the facilitator to focus on the conversation.The timekeeper: having someone responsible for timeboxing different phases of the discussion. When you aren’t sure how much time you need to explore a topic, a timekeeper helps make sure that the meeting doesn’t wander aimlessly.The taskmaster: one person assumes responsibility for clarifying what the agreed actions are, who is picking up each one, and by when it’s being done. This can be the note-taker, but sometimes it’s worth splitting out this role to ensure there is enough focus on making things happen after the meeting.The cheerleader: Keeps the meeting fun and helps motivate everyone. This is usually hard to ‘recruit’ for, but easy to support if you see someone already doing this occasionally.The benevolent troll: pushes back where relevant, ideally based on facts, helps counter groupthink, and is useful during competitive games.The photographer: takes screenshots and photos of highlights for inclusion in notes later, useful in visual workshops.The health nut: make one person responsible for ensuring that everyone is comfortable, there are enough breaks, and that no participant impacts another participant’s physical or mental health.

All of these are optional, and it will depend on who is actually in the meeting and the number of participants. Once you decide on specific participants, think through who can serve these roles in your efforts. They can also overlap, with different participants playing multiple roles to keep the resulting discussion snappier (due to fewer participants).

Case Study: How the roles play out

For example, the company has declared innovation and cautious cash flow management as values in their public annual reports. As a company, do you value innovation more than cash flow as an organization?

A good brain would start by asking clarifying questions. If the innovation was a new color of an existing product and the cash inflow was $10 million, you would give a different answer than if the innovation was a high growth product in a new product category and the cash inflow was $1,000.

An animal spirit would be able to suggest who to talk to for more information, when to do it, and how to broach the subject. Different people will be able to help make decisions, based on their experience, and help out.

A senior decision-maker would be able to define criteria for a decision and also drive for a decision once there is enough information on the table to avoid analysis paralysis.

Having the perspectives help figure out either how to apply the strategy in a particular case, or if the strategy itself needs to be changed. If everyone at the meeting has the same role (of participant) and the same perspective, e.g. from the same department, the meeting is likely to be less productive.

Case Study: Quick buildup meetings

Sometimes the guest list at a meeting is too large. You want to decide and iterate fast. So you can split it up into a series of shorter meetings with a tighter crew. Robert Bendetti, the CFO of LifeCycle Engineering (LCE), calls this informal approach a “buildup meetings” approach.

Here’s his take:

If it’s something big and strategic, and let’s say there’s a team of four or five working on some bigger strategic idea. You can break out into pairs of two people. And so those two call and speak. And then maybe you’re adding another resource real quick.

“Oh, I really think in 2023, we need to be thinking about this market.”

“Jessica is the leader in that market. Let’s get Jessica on the horn.”

So boom. You bring her up on the camera and boom, you’re talking to Jessica.

“Jessica, I’ve been thinking about such and such. Can we do that?”

And Jessica says, “That’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard. We don’t do that. We tried that 10 years ago. That totally didn’t work. Remember when we lost a million dollars?”

“Oh Jesus. Yes, I do. Okay. Yeah. That was really dumb. Sorry about that. Okay. Thanks.”