How can you advance or shift the meeting's focus, when you're in the middle of a meeting?
Recognize that team members contribute (or detract!) during meetings in any of three dimensions: task, maintenance, and procedural. The research presents some variation in typologies, but I find these three types of tasks useful to consider.
You may find that you tend to focus on one of these three aspects of how the meeting is going. Being aware of this can be useful, because you can try playing different roles (to develop your own skills), rebalance or reorient your group if it is too focused in one domain, and appreciate the work that your colleagues are doing.
- Task behaviors accomplish work, move the group towards desired outcomes
- Accomplished by participants, scribe/recorder, note taker
- Maintenance or relationship behaviors address the group's ability to perform, work together, participate
- Accomplished by participants, facilitator, observer, leader, note taker
- Procedural or process behaviors guide the group's focus, use of time
- Accomplished by timekeeper, meeting caller
Let's suppose that you'd like to bolster one of these domains in a team meeting to avoid a knock-down, drag-out team storm. The key is to inject the right kind of shaping comment into the discussion. If this kind of thing doesn't come naturally to you, it's useful to have a few options already up your sleeve for how to make such a contribution during the meeting that's helpful to the group discussion. I've listed some ideas for such comments:
Relationship/Maintenance Contributions
"I need to catch up to where you are. Please say again how you got to that conclusion."
"Have we heard from everyone? Who else would like to contribute?"
"Yes, and...." (instead of comments that include "but...")
"How will doing things differently affect us?"
"What would we need to put in place to make this work?"
"What doesn't feel right about this?"
"Thanks for sticking with the process. We had a lot of give and take, which is what we needed to come up with the best ideas."