Galactic Activity 25

Challenging meetings require the chair to have a
firm grasp of meeting procedures and good people management skills. It’s important to be seen as firm but fair and to ensure that the meeting stays focused on its purpose and doesn’t get side tracked by other issues.

Activity 25 – Run a challenging meeting

Duration: 10 – 20 mins
Applicable Streams: Personal challenge, Leadership, Learning & Development, Workplace skills, Education, Technical, Sales, Meeting Skills

Aim

In this activity you are aiming to:

Run a challenging meeting where a conclusion is reached

Objectives

To do this, you will need to keep the following objectives in mind:

  1. Follow meeting protocols.
  2. Manage meeting attendees.
  3. Ensure all opinions are heard.
  4. Coach the attendees to achieve a resolution or conclusion amicably.

The Why…

Running a challenging meeting, keeping it on track and achieving a conclusion or resolution is a frequently needed skill in both the business world and the community – one could even argue that it’s a skill needed at home too!

A ‘challenging’ meeting is one where any or all of the following exist:

  • Hecklers or people being deliberately obtuse
  • The content is extremely complex or confusing
  • People are not disciplined or focused:
    • wafflers,
    • going off on tangents or throwing in red herrings,
    • playing on phones instead of listening
  • The meeting is regarding a contentious issue the room is divided over

Where do I start?

If this type of role is unfamiliar to you, do some reading up on ‘dealing with difficult personalities’ and ‘negotiating and problem solving’. A lot of the challenge in this activity is about navigating difficult personalities and awkward disagreements so ensure you have some tactics up your sleeve for ensuring that everyone feels heard and has a chance to give their opinion, but also feels like the resolution is a compromise that everyone has ownership over.

The How

Specific guidelines on how to tackle this activity.

The Program Director will:

  • Set up a challenging meeting scenario where the ‘Chair’ of the meeting will be told what the Context or Issue is that needs to be resolved, and who the meeting attendees are (ie how they’re connected to the context. For example, it might be a COO meeting where 3 owners are against the new exterior paint quotes and colours, and another three who are pushing for it).
  • Give roles and personalities to the ‘meeting attendees’ only – ie, the ‘Chair’ will not be privy to this information before commencing the ‘meeting’.
  • Examples include roles such as (but not limited to):
    • 1 Heckler
    • 1 Waffler
    • 1 Disinterested constant phone checker
    • 1 Red herring (try to divert onto different subjects)
    • 1 Crier or highly emotional person
    • 1 Blocker – we’ve done this before and it doesn’t work – ‘Say no to everything kind of person
  • The aim is to:
    • reach a conclusion,
    • not to be over the top frivolous/entertaining, but reasonably realistic

Variations:

  1. Run meeting formally using meeting procedures
  2. Run meeting informally like a board meeting

Tips and traps

TRAPS:

  • Letting difficult personalities run the show.
  • Allowing meeting attendees to argue with each other, or trade insults or hearsay.
  • Shutting people down prematurely instead of letting them have their say.
  • Taking ‘sides’.

TIPS:

  • Stay firm with difficult personalities and have clear boundaries around who has the floor and for how long before thanking them, reminding them of time constraints and moving around the room.
  • Stick to the facts.
  • Keep a resolution as the sole focus of the meeting and keep reminding attendees of that if needed.
  • Stay as neutral as possible so that all attendees feel like they have an adjudicator rather than someone they need to ‘win over’ to their side of the story.

Guidelines for Program Director:

  • It’s important that the Chair explains to people that the aim is not to be over the top rude, funny or obtuse – but to portray a reasonably realistic scenario that any of us might find ourselves in in real life.
  • Remind all members that the aim of this activity is to give the person chairing the meeting exposure to and experience dealing with difficult people in difficult situations.
  • When assigning people roles to play in the meeting, try not to make the roles stereotypical, and don’t let the person chairing the meeting for this activity know who has been assigned what roles, or even what roles you’re assigning.
  • Pre-prepare the roles onto cards that you hand out to ‘meeting attendees’ in this activity so even the meeting members don’t know what roles each other have been assigned.
  • The Chair of the Rostrum meeting does not have to be the person who is acting as the Chair of this meeting for this activity (but there’s no reason why they couldn’t be).