Find the ‘We’

Interpreted from ‘Business Writing and Communication’ applied to meetings.

No we’re not talking about Nintendo Wii. Even though, those were pretty hard to find a few Christmas’ ago.

Finding the ‘We’ is all about finding identifying the shared goals between yourself and your meeting participants and finding a ‘participant’ focused way of orienting the meeting to those goals. How much better would your meeting calendar be- if every singly meeting was tailored to your own interests?

To accomplish this, there are two questions you might want to think about:

1. “To what community do I and my meeting participants both belong?” Are we stakeholders in the same company? Do we work on the same project or are we members of the same department or function within an organization?
2. And “Within this community, how are my fellow meeting participants and I alike and different?”

For this post, the community that we all belong to- is the community or people that meet in order to accomplish goals.

We’re a like in that we both see opportunities to improve meetings; we’re different in that I work for a company that makes software for better meetings, All In. But for you meetings are most likely a tool to accomplish a goal- not the end objective.

Why ‘We’ Matters

“There can be no communication if it is conceived as going from ‘I’ to the ‘Thou.’ Communication works only from one member of ‘us’ to another.” – Peter Drucker

If we make the mistake of focusing on I – what we as individuals want to accomplish- we lose sight that meeting participants are too utilizing this meeting to accomplish their goals (and sometimes their goal is to impede our own goals J) and, unless you speak to your meeting participants’ concerns, objectives, goals- your goals don’t stand a chance.

Imagine the business leader at the front of the room:

“I want everyone’s attention on this, this is my top priority.” vs. “from this day forward, our top priority is _____. Everything else is secondary”

Which is more likely to motivate you to action?

Action Steps

For agendas:

Write meeting goals considering:

• What is the action I hope to accomplish?
• What are my meeting participants’ current state/perspective
• What are our shared interests?

In practice your meeting goals would look more like this:

• Sign up for projects for the upcoming quarter
• Learn about company performance and its impact on our functional priorities
• Celebrate last quarter’s success over chips and dip

As opposed to:

• Plan goals and objectives for the upcoming quarter
• Company performance updates
• Review last quarter’s success

For meeting discussions:

When the meeting is losing direction, or doesn’t feel particularly progressive consider:

• Identifying a meeting participant and relating the current agenda topic to their function. “Jonah, can you give us some ‘accounting’ perspective. If we are able to brainstorm ways to deliver this product a month faster, would that align with your organizations top priorities?”

You might also bring the meeting back to points of agreement.

• So we all agree that we need to improve ___ in order to adapt to the current changes. Can each of us write down the three ‘causes’ that bring us here today- and one thing the team can do differently to improve your effectiveness by 10%?

And lastly know when to end a meeting early, if your meeting participants are currently dealing with fires that have them distracted, and we’ve all been there. Sometimes it’s a good idea to summarize your points and agree on a follow up in contrast to continuing the meeting.

Hopefully you find this information actionable. How do you find the ‘we’ in your meetings? Has this practice brought you success?