Today’s
announcement of the Nobel Prize for
Economic Sciences (recognizing the
work of two University of Chicago economists and one from Princeton) reminded me of a chapter in the
book Behave! How to get 100% of your workers
fully engaged. This chapter
leverages insights from a winner of the Nobel
Prize for Economic Sciences, (a psychologist) to enable you to have the best internal weekly
meetings you can imagine. Psychology
plays a key role in managing effective human interactions, and that includes
your weekly meeting. I have excerpted
part of the chapter on structure, which talks about the weekly meeting. You should find it useful.
“Meetings
are where minutes are kept and hours lost.”
It
is politically correct in business today to express a dislike for
meetings. We often hear people say
things like “Meetings? I am so tired of meetings, they’re such a big waste of
time, we talk and talk and nothing gets done...”
While
we can be vociferous in our dislike for meetings, the attitude research shows
that our private view of meetings is far less negative than we pretend. But, it is still negative. We recognize that meetings can serve a useful
business purpose, and that they are social events too. Even though we actually dislike meetings less
than we pretend to, we still have negative feelings toward them. Your meetings going forward are going to
change that. We are going to leverage a
little psychology and some great tried and true business tools to get there.
Daniel
Kahneman is a psychology professor at Princeton University. He did something very interesting about a
decade ago. The Nobel Foundation is
charged with awarding Nobel Prize in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or
Medicine, Literature and Peace.
Additionally, thanks to a donation from Sweden’s central bank, since
1969 a Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences is also awarded.
What
Kahneman showed them was that while they don’t think they award a prize in
psychology, they actually do. Kahneman
is the only trained psychology professor who’s won a Nobel Prize for Economics. He is the father of Behavioral Economics and
won the prize in 2002. He and fellow
behavioral economists have shown us that the economic models predicated on a
rational decision-making model are invalid.
Humans, more often than not, do not make rational economic
decisions. What is interesting is that
while we are irrational we are predictably irrational. The predictive nature of that irrationality
is what enables behavioral economists to come up with predictive explanations
of economic behavior.
Kahneman
won the Economic Sciences Prize for the theory that he and his partner Amos
Tvesky developed called The Prospect Theory. Just prior to developing that theory the two
psychologists came up with a different theory called the Peak/End Rule (Kahneman, Fredrickson, Schreiber, & Redelmeier,
1993) . And it is this theory which will help us
remove the negative feelings we have toward meetings and replace them with
positive feelings.
The
Peak/End Rule says that the way we evaluate certain types of experiences is
based on the peaks we feel during the experience and how it ends with the
ending being the most important. The
type of experience is an episodic experience.
That is, it has a defined beginning, a defined end, and a consistent
middle. A whole day is typically not a
single episodic experience even though it has a defined beginning, you wake
up, and a defined end, you fall
asleep. The typical day has a great deal
of variety in the ‘middle’. Thus, it is
not an episodic experience. A typical
business staff meeting is an episodic experience. Under the Peak/End rule, the duration of the
experience does not matter, nor does the other information contained in the
experience. Although that other
information is not lost and we remember it;
it is not used by the brain in evaluating the quality of the experience. The Peak/End Rule applies equally to pleasant
experiences and unpleasant experiences.
Lots
of different experiments were conducted to demonstrate this rule. In one of the
experiments the participants were exposed to two unpleasant experiences, and
the order of the experiences were randomized.
First participants put one hand in very cold water for 60 seconds. It’s a painful experience. After a few minute of rest, the participants
put their other hand in the same temperature water, again for 60 seconds, then
kept that hand in the water for another 30 seconds as the temperature of the
water was increased by one degree, still painful, but most participants could
perceive the last few seconds as distinctively less painful.
Then
later, participants were given the choice of doing it again, but this time they
could chose either of the two ways. A significant majority chose the longer
one. Since both methods included 60 seconds of the same water temperature and
same pain, they were apparently choosing to endure more pain rather than less
by selecting the 90 seconds version.
Since
the Peak/End Rule works both for negative experiences and positive experiences,
we will leverage this insight to augment an already strong meeting methodology
in a positive way.
We
start with a well tested weekly meeting agenda and added Team Member Focus and the Epitome. The agenda is adapted from Verne Harnish and
Gino Wickman who’ve created a very effective and powerful
meeting structure. The structure has
been in use for more than ten years and has proven to be very successful. Here is the full agenda:
- Check-in
- The Numbers
- New Customer and Team Concerns
- Team Member Focus
- Concern Resolution
- Epitome
- Rate the Meeting
Verne
suggest that you schedule the meeting for the same time slot and same place
every week. The meeting should last an
hour and a half and as Gino Wickman requires, it should start and end on-time!
To
make the meetings run effectively several roles need to be filled. They are:
- Meeting Leader – keeps everyone on track.
- Scoreboard Keeper – Collects updates, brings
copies of the scoreboard to the meeting.
- 90 Day Goal Keeper – Collects updates and
brings copies of the 90 Day Goals list to the meeting.
- To Do’s Keeper – Maintains the list of
open and recently closed To Do’s.
- CIPIO List Keeper – Maintains the CIPIO
list and brings copies of the list to the meeting.
- Sage – Performs the end-of-meeting
Epitome.
The
most challenging role is the Sage role as we’ll describe shortly. In selecting the first person to play the
Sage role in the Rated 10 Meetings we recommend looking for the person with the
highest level of emotional intelligence (EQ) in the group. If you think of emotional intelligence as a
continuum (below), you are looking for someone on the far right of the line.
When
we think of stereotypes; engineers, computer geeks, mathematicians will
typically be on the left side of Psycho Normal and salespersons, nurses, social
workers on the right.
The
way to do this selection is have everyone on the team anonymously write the
name of the person they think has the highest emotional intelligence on a slip
of paper, and assign the Sage-role to the person whose name appears most
frequently.
The
Meeting Components
We
already talked about the Check-in. It is
the piece each of personal and business good news that everyone reports at the
start of the meeting. Over time, the
personal good news portion of the Check-in causes people to become closer and
builds stronger bonds.
We
also talked about the Team Member Focus in the Peer-to-Peer Accountability section earlier. This is where you help a single member of the
team deliver the right behaviors and find good Identity and Meaning in
their work.
The second part of the weekly meeting we also
take from Verne. In this part of the
meeting you are reporting ‘the numbers’.
Every team should use a scoreboard[1]
to track their key performance indicators (KPI).
These are SMART[2]
goals. For the team as a whole there
should be five to fifteen measurable weekly goals. Every employee should have at least 1
measurable. For each individual, the
Scoreboard numbers they are responsible for are added to the Colleague Letter
of Commitments.
To
the extent possible, these numbers should be predictive in nature. For example, imagine it is the salesperson’s
goal to close 2 deals per week. That
means they must have 4 face to face meeting, 8 phone calls, and 16 prospects. The predictive measureable is the number of
prospects contacted during the week.
Scoreboard goals display the state of the business or
department for that team. Each
measurable has a weekly target number.
Each number must have a single person who is responsible for it and
accountable to the group for the behaviors that deliver that goal.
Every
KPI on the scoreboard belongs to a specific individual. No KPI’s are shared. Sharing goals translates into no
accountability. The Behavioral Advantage™ model is based on rigorous accountability. When you establish the KPI you want to
specify the behaviors that drive that KPI.
In the Behavioral Advantage™ model we hold people accountable for their
behavior. The performance against the
KPI is an indicator of the employee’s delivery of the defined behavior.
This
is a key distinction. Since behavior is
all you get, you want to hold people accountable for the behavior. When a KPI
is missed we use the CIPIO redress
methodology described below to determine if the employee isn’t producing the
prescribed behavior or the behavior itself needs modification.
In
the scoreboard portion of the weekly meeting the responsible person reports the
number as “met” or “did not meet”. In
this part of the meeting it is reporting only.
No discussion.
Gino
Wickman uses this methodology as well as part of his
Entrepreneurial Operating System.[3] Anytime a target is missed, it goes up on a
list. We call this the CIPIO List.
This
is also reporting only. Any concerns, issues, problems, ideas,
opportunities that have arisen during the past week are captured on the CIPIO List. In turn, you go around the table and ask
participants to list any customer concerns
or any team concerns. You do this quickly, no discussion.
These
are action steps that come out of the CIPIO
redress process described below. You
simply report these as well as “Done”, or “Not Done”, or “Not Done but On
Track”. If a To Do is reported as Not
Done, it goes up on the CIPIO List.
No discussion.
These
goals come out of the Quarterly Goal Setting Meetings (see below). The reporting here is “On Track”, “Off Track”
or “Done!” If a goal is Off Track it
goes up on the CIPIO List.
We
described this process in the Peer-to-Peer
Accountability chapter earlier. If there are concerns that arise through the discussion, they go up on the CIPIO List. After you’ve spent a few minutes focusing on
this week’s team member and evaluating their behavior and motivation, you move
into resolving concerns.
CIPIO redress
You
begin by prioritizing the top three items on the CIPIO List. You need only prioritize the top three items because
you may not get through the whole list and you are better off using the meeting
time to redress concerns. Moreover, some
of the items on the list may not represent a level of concern to warrant
redress yet. For example take the
scoreboard goal for your salesperson to contact 16 prospects per week. Suppose that team member reports, “Did not
meet,” and the actual number is 15 on
the report. As an isolated incident,
missing the goal by one may not warrant any action by the peer group. However, if the target had been missed three
weeks in a row, the priority would likely be higher.
The
top priority concern is taken down
from the list and put on the table for redress.
Your objective is to redress the concern
and permanently remove it from the Weekly CIPIO
List (which carries over week to week).
When
solving a concern you want to first
follow the causal chain to find the root cause.
The root cause is the real source of concern. Often an item on the list will be described
as a symptom rather than the real nature of the concern. You can utilize
the 5 why’s technique here as well. Keep
in mind that the root cause will link
back to behavior most of the time. This
is a time for open, honest dialogue with everyone around the table getting an
opportunity to contribute to the discussion.
It is not about blame.
Once
the team agrees that you’ve identified the real nature of the concern you should know what caused
it. It could be an unanticipated
external factor got in the way of the person doing the right behaviors for this
deliverable. It also could be bad
luck. It could be that the person
responsible did not perform the desired behaviors for this KPI. If the person did exhibit the right behaviors
and the results were not as expected, then perhaps the definition of the
behavior needs to be re-evaluated.
Whatever the cause, you go around the table with each person
contributing to the discussion on how to redress the concern.. Usually, the
resolution of a concern results in
additional to-dos. All to-dos are SMART goals assigned to specific individuals.
Once
the first concern is resolved you
move on to the next one until ten minutes remain in the scheduled amount time
for the meeting. Any item left on the CIPIO List is carried over to the next
meeting. You may remove an item from the
list either by resolving it or by agreeing that it is no longer a concern.
Next the person responsible for the To Do list reads each added item and
the team ensures that each To Do is a SMART goal.
Recap
the Meeting
The
team member responsible for performing the Epitome has two jobs. First the Sage pays careful attention to what
takes place in the meeting. The Sage
looks for important, unusual, thoughtful, or relevant things each attendee
contributes to the meeting, and selecting one or two from each person for the
Epitome.
When
we install Behavioral Advantage™ in
the third day of training (8th week) we establish the desired
Identity and Meaning for each member of the team. A good Sage will keep in mind a persons
Identity and Meaning when look for incidents to highlight in the Epitome. The Sage will describe the incident in a way
that can be tied back to that individual’s Identity or Meaning. Those are the best kinds of things to include
in the meeting Epitome.
The
second job is to deliver the Epitome.
The
objective of the Epitome is to create a peak for each individual in the
meeting. By highlighting something each
individual contributed, we hope to create the peak. However, here is where the job of the Sage
becomes more challenging.
Research
has shown that the power of a peak is dependent upon how active a person’s
brain is during the peak moment. Other
research has shown that the brain is four times more active when we are talking
than when we are listening. (Almor, 2008) Thus, it is best to create peaks for people
while they are doing the talking. The
Sage’s job is to do that.
Here
is an example of how the Sage accomplishes this piece of magic. Suppose the Sage selected an anecdote Sally
told as her highlighted contribution to the meeting. The Sage might say something like: “We had a
productive meeting today. Sally, you
made a great point about the marketing initiative and really brought your point
to life with that wonderful little story.
Remind us what was that story about?”
Sally then would say a sentence or two about the story. The psychology suggests that her peak will be
a stronger peak because she was talking at the time.
When
teams have a good deal of experience with the weekly Rated 10 Meeting, they
tend to jump in and contribute whenever they can. Eventually the need to have an individual
Sage goes away, because every member of the team is able to contribute
something about another team members in the Epitome. Keep it short and sweet.
Clearly
the core agenda makes for very useful meetings because lots gets done in the
meeting. Putting the Peak/End on top of
that helps each attendee walk away with a positive feeling toward the meeting
and toward the people participating in the meeting.
Verne
Harnish suggest you end the meeting by going around the table asking each team
member to sum up the meeting in a word or phrase. We prefer Gino Wickman’s method. You rate how the team did in the meeting on a
scale of 1(waste of time)-10(great meeting).
If a team member scores the meeting below an “8”, it’s a CIPIO item for
the next meeting; capture the reason for the low score. You want the meetings to be 10’s for
everyone.
We
have clients rate our Behavioral Advantage™
training sessions using this method as well.
Before
you schedule your first Rated 10 meeting, you ask team members to rate the
effectiveness of their current staff meetings on a scale of 1 to 10. Typically, honest answers will rate the old
meetings somewhere between 3 and 6. The
goal is to achieve ratings that approach 10s, hence the meetings are called
Rated 10 meetings.
One
team, in honor of the movie Spinal Tap, changed the scale used from 1-10 to
1-11. They were having a little fun when
they said they were going to have even better meetings than mere ‘10s’. We encourage you to have some fun in these
meetings. Most of our clients look
forward to these meetings each week; they get stuff done, and it is an hour and
a half of good camaraderie. Make them
enjoyable!
End
the meeting on time.
(Copyright
2013 Bill Burnett)
[1] We
use “Scoreboard” rather than “Scorecard” because a scoreboard is what
professionals use. It is out there in
the open. A scorecard is something you
can keep in your pocket. Accountability
requires a more public display of your professional accomplishments.
[2]
SMART is an
acronym for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely.
[3] We
recommend every company have installed a disciplined operating
methodology. Gino Wickman’s EOS is the best one we’ve
come across and we like to install it with clients.
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