The Problem With Laptop Farms
In my upcoming book, Invisible Leader, I introduce my readers to two brilliant corporate leaders, Jack and Mariana. When Jack attends meetings that Mariana runs, he is impressed by the energy, excitement and collaboration he experiences. Inspired, he wants to create the same results with his team.
While he expects productive outcomes, he quickly sees participants zoning out and before he knows it, his boardroom transforms into a laptop farm.
When was the last time you spent an hour in a laptop farm? Twenty20/tampatra
What is a Laptop Farm?
Laptop farms are the life-sucking, time-wasting, humanity-disconnecting portion of the work day where colleagues meet in a room with a shared agenda. Often, attendees do not know why they need to attend the meeting, nor do they know what is expected of them.
Participants who believe they know the content shared in the meeting slowly open their computers, hurriedly catch up on their email, status and other tasks. Even more laptops open up as other attendees remember urgent matters they need to work on. Soon, participation comes only from a small percentage of the room, while the rest of the attendees inattentively agree to important decisions and the sound of distracted typing fills the air.
Once adjourned, participants come back to life and move on to their next appointment, grumbling at the pointlessness of their time together. Days later, the halls of the workspace are filled with plaintive cries of, “What, no one told me this?!?”
Don’t Make Jack’s Mistakes
Like Jack, you want great meetings — the kind which feel productive and well worth the time. So why is it that you still do most of the talking and ask most of the questions, while your very smart meeting participants stay mostly silent and answer your questions with shrugs and lackluster nods?
There are many reasons meetings turn into laptop farms. They include ever increasing delivery demands, organizational happenings like team members leaving or recently released quarterly results, or just plain old hunger. They also include interpersonal dynamics, like how the group relates to you and even more subtle cues like where people sit.
With so many factors affecting the energy of a meeting, your preparation can’t only rely on on agendas and standard meeting planning checklists. Remember, time is ephemeral, the only resource that cannot be replaced. It is essential to keep in mind that not a single person in your group will get their time refunded. At the end of your meeting, each person is now that much closer to the hour of their death. Can they say the time was well spent?
To create well-spent meeting time that you and your attendees deserve, you need to prepare like our other leader, Mariana. She uses facilitative leadership to catalyze change, command meeting rooms, and guide her group to the best conclusions possible. Well practiced facilitative leaders, like Mariana, wield their skills so seamlessly that they become invisible to the untrained eye. Here are three easy steps to help you get there.
Three Steps To Prep the Meeting Experience
Facilitative leaders understand that every meeting is a learning journey. They begin creating the meeting climate as soon as they decide to call their meeting. They create that climate by clarifying the outcome, setting the meeting context, and priming their attendees. These three pre-meeting steps lay the foundation from which great results can emerge once the meeting begins.
Have a Clear Outcome
Defining your meeting outcome can seem like meeting prep 101 for many leaders, however it bears repeating here. If you ask someone for their time to join you in your meeting, respect them enough to clarify the outcome you intend to create before you send out the meeting invite. This means that before sending the meeting invite, ask yourself these clarifying questions:
What problem needs solving?
Who benefits from the solution?
Who are the best people to solve that problem?
Why would the best people feel compelled to solve this problem now?
The answers to these questions will help you rightsize your meeting, perhaps even revealing that you can create your outcome without a meeting. Sometimes the answer to the questions brings unexpected results. For instance, if the problem that needs solving is identifying the best next low investment/big win features to develop, the best person to solve it might be someone from the sales department, along with product team engineers. Other times, answers require input from key decision makers to clarify the outcomes and artifacts they expect from the meeting. Once you have your outcome understood, you can decide upon the context of the meeting.
Set the Context
Planning your meeting is not only about setting an agenda, but about setting an appropriate emotional mood, or context. We can define context as the unwritten and subtle cues which influence how individuals behave in a particular environment. Think about how people act in a popular nightclub versus the how they act in a house of worship, and you’ll understand context in action.
To set the context of your meeting, consider what moods and behaviors would best drive your group to the meeting outcome. Do you need a fast-paced meeting filled with innovative ideas, or do you need thoughtful and deliberate discussion around a core business function?
Once you decide on the meeting’s context, you can decide how you will help create it. Make your mood and emotions contagious so that they can drive your group in a positive direction. In their book, Primal Leadership, Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis and Annie McKee state this type of influence is the greatest thing a leader can do for their organization.
Prime Your Participants
Priming allows your participants early exposure to the meeting’s topic. This early exposure activates their brain and allows them to discover more creative ways to drive the meeting outcome. In this phase, facilitative leaders could see themselves as the hype behind the meeting.
Start with these action items:
Write an invitation which sets the context and supports engagement. Be sure the purpose, agenda, and outcome of the meeting are clear.
Follow up individually with some participants to keep driving the tone of the meeting.
Send out meeting teasers prior to the meeting. The teaser can come in the form of an email, an informal comment on the upcoming meeting, or even as an open challenge, such as, “if this quarter, we were tasked with reducing 50% waste out of our organization, how would we do it and when could we get it done by?” Ordinarily, teasers would be sent a couple of days before the meeting, but as long as participants have time to read its content, they are fair game to send, even up until ten minutes before the meeting start time.
Interview participants to understand the group dynamics. Some of the types of questions which could be asked include:
What do you think is the purpose of the meeting?
What would you like to get out of the meeting?
What might block a successful outcome?
Why has this problem been hard to solve in the past?
What support do you need for success?
Would you mind bringing up X because you were so passionate about it?
Look for patterns you see in the interview responses: they highlight areas of misaligned expectations that may need to be addressed before the meeting.
Making the Time
It may seem difficult to make time to prep the meeting experience. However, the lack of preparation provides fertile ground for laptop farms to flourish. While they may pose as productive meetings, they actually waste time and produce mediocre results. On the whole, meeting prep saves time.
These preparation steps form only a portion of Mariana’s facilitative leadership toolkit. To learn more, check out my upcoming book, Invisible Leader and follow along as Jack updates his own toolkit and thus, transforms his laptop farm into great meetings!