How to change a meeting you're not leading

I managed to improve meetings in my highly sceptical team and so can you.

 
When I ran a team of 20 in my own business, we had a LOT going on. Sometimes 60-70 client projects at one time. 

People working on strategy, people working on copy, people working on design, people doing digital. Everyone trying to be expert in their discipline and collaborate seamlessly with others to produce client work at speed and scale.

We HAD to get our s*** together. 

We bought agency management software - didn’t help. 

We divided the business up functionally to make roles and ownership clear. Didn’t really help. There was still so much stuff.

We had a washing line each with our clients pegged to it - actually that was pleasingly visual and did help! 

Eventually I created a rhythm of meetings and collaboration points similar to agile sprints - based on what I’d learn from our brilliant client Unboxed and GDS blogs. 

It was heavily resisted. A Carrie-Thing. Too weird, too annoying, too restrictive. I persisted, jiggled things around.

I knew we needed something. Just winging it was getting us into massive hot water. 

Cut to 6 months down the line. I heard one of my colleagues explaining how we worked to a potential client.  "Yes, we always run it like this - it's fast, transpareny and centred on humans."  Oh right, wow!! She summarised the approach I'd been trying to cultivate perfectly, won them over and won the business.

Wow, we’d got there - or we'd got somewhere anyway! 

Fast forward 8 years and I used a similar approach at another company. I engaged them differently in it they got it straight away. They were flying.

The point is there is a curve to go round and it's this:

Changing ways of working is caught not taught. It takes experimentation, practice, reflection, improvement and persistence. 

Push a new way onto people and they will resist. 

Here's what I learnt about redesigning ways of working without creating a tonne of resistance.

- Can you create simple and obviously helpful changes your team are ready for? How might you give them a great personal experience of something different and better?

- What are your moments of change? A new project, a newly formed team, a new financial year. Any natural turn of the page will help people accept a shift.

- Could you position as an experiment? “Let’s try this for a month and then review.” Explain that you’ll take a few laps of the track before you’ll decide as a team if it’s helpful or not.

- Changing one thing will likely impact something else - so how can you get ahead of that and make those unintended consequences visible so you can fix them next? This provides an excellent continuous improvement pipeline. The next two provide ways you can make these visible.

- Can you introduce a ways of working reflection meeting (it doesn’t have to be an actual meeting) every couple of weeks to help shake out what’s working and give everyone a voice on what could be improved? 

- Do other people have ideas? Encourage them to experiment too and support their experiments with feedback that is supportive of the individual and candid about the change.

And from someone at my FrictionFree workshop last year: "Don't look for complete. It's always messy. Making smaller changes that land may take longer but is better than resistance". Amen.

Hold your nerve. 

Be patient.

Trust the process.