How to Hold a Decision-Making Meeting
Decision-making meetings work best when they’re preceded by behind-the-scenes prep work. Here’s how to make your decision-making meetings go smoothly.
Meetings! I just love meetings! No, I don’t. I hate meetings. Especially meetings where we have to make group decisions. My friend Bernice’s new store, Green Growing Things, is growing like gangbusters. Her lima bean plant has sprouted a beanstalk that’s vanishing into the clouds. The cute little plant she calls “Audrey 2” is already the size of a small dog. She’s raking it in and with all that money comes the need to invest.
Don’t Make Decisions at Meetings
Bernice has called a meeting. She, her colleagues Europa, Melvin, and I must decide what to do with this year’s profits. Decision-making meetings can get ugly. The Oreo Ice Cream Cake might end up planted on top of someone’s head, instead of resting deliciously in our tummies. That would be a waste.
Fortunately, you can make decision-making meetings go smoothly by getting the decision made before the meeting. Then the meeting itself becomes a recap of the factors leading into the decision, the rationale, and the decision itself.
Prepare with One-on-One Meetings
You get the decision made in advance by talking one-on-one to everyone who has a stake in the decision. You first want to know each person’s position, the plan of action they favor. You may find that there’s already consensus on the best plan of action, and the meeting will just ratify the decision everyone has already made.
Europa has confided that she wants to invest the shop’s profits in a Certificate of Deposit. Melvin thinks we should build a new greenhouse. And Bernice told me over lunch that she wants to donate our profits to a charity for bunny rabbits. She thinks they’re cute.
Knowing each person’s position, it’s pretty obvious there’s no overlap. If we all walk in and state our position, there will be conflict, bad feelings, and possibly ruined Oreo Ice Cream Cake.
So we need to get one level deeper: we need to know everyone’s underlying interest.
Know Each Person’s Position and Interest
The underlying interest is why someone holds their position in the first place. You can find the interest behind a position by asking, “What will you get by taking that position?”
I ask Europa, “What will we get by investing in a CD?” She argues that a CD will give us safety. We’ll preserve capital, which we can use to buy food if society collapses. If society doesn’t collapse, we can collect interest and grow the money as a hedge against other disasters. Plus, she say we’ll be, er, well-positioned for world domination. If necessary.
I ask Melvin, “What will we get by building a new greenhouse?” He says we can expand inventory and offer a greater variety of plants. His intern Aurora points out that ivy-covered trellises will be a big seller. There’s nothing like a nice, long nap in the shade of the ivy. Also, he points out, ivy is good for camouflage if we ever need to be well-positioned for world domination.
When I ask Bernice what we get by donating to bunny charities, her interests become clear: She likes bunnies and thinks the world should have more of them. Right as my hand touches the door to leave, her voice carries over my shoulder, “I’m not stupid Stever. Bunnies eat lettuce. More bunnies equals bigger market for lettuce, which equals more business for us. Bunnies are the path to world domination.”
Start from the Overlap
We now have enough information for a highly productive meeting. Though there’s no overlap in our positions, we can all value the interests behind our positions: cash flow flexibility, expanding our supply of product to meet demand, growing that demand as much as possible, and being prepared for world domination.
We’ll start the discussion by listing those interests on the whiteboard. I’ll put an asterisk by “world domination” to show it’s already a point of agreement. Then we’ll all discuss the interests on the board and get agreement on which ones are important to us as a group. Shared goals make us bond as a group. Then we can choose a plan of action that meets our collective interests.
Partition Off Divergence
Sometimes we fundamentally disagree on an interest. Europa cares about safety, Melvin may not (after all, he installs the latest Windows upgrade the day it comes out). In that case, ask the group to choose whether that interest is best addressed with the current decision or whether it should become a separate issue for a different time.
Beware of workplace politics! Interests will often diverge when politics lurks beneath the surface. At Green Growing Things, no one is empire building. No one is trying to seize control, take revenge for past wrongs, or make someone fail. In other companies, however, people have these motives, and they’re not likely to bring them up in your one-on-one meetings. In this case, you’ll have to be politically savvy yourself and intuit their political interests. Then as you guide the discussion of plans of action, do your best to make sure you factor in the politics as well.
Thanks to our pre-meeting one-on-ones, we were able to anticipate conflict, concentrate on shared interests, and make a decision that meets all our goals. We’ll be investing in bunnies. They provide safety, since they can be eaten if society collapses. They can be put to work building new greenhouses for expansion without being subject to labor laws (I’m not sure how I feel about that), and they create a market for our new lettuce crops. And of course, zombiefied bunnies make a zombie army that can nibble its way to world domination. As everyone knows, Killer Rabbits are so terrifying they can even take down a Knight of the Round Table.
I’m Stever Robbins. I’m an executive coach who helps leaders craft strategy, deal with tricky interpersonal issues, and have a life while they do. If you want to know more, visit Stever Robbins.
Work Less, Do More, and have a Great Life!
One-On-One Meeting and Bunny image from Shutterstock
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About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.
