For Effective Meetings, Match your Personality to this Clock
Posted: August 19, 2017 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Communication, Organizational Behaviors, Personality Leave a commentSet-up successful meetings by transitioning your communication style
I recently talked about Communicating to Personalities, where it is advisable to understand your audience. A meeting transitions through a few phases: Welcome & Connect, Discover & Dream, Decide, Attend (see Let’s Stop Meeting Like This). Your ability to communicate in each of the phases is a reflection of your personality and commitment to the goals of the meeting.
The Game is to match your style to the task at hand.
Let’s say that your meeting starts at the top of the hour, the minute hand is on the 12. This is the Welcome & Connect phase. You will want to turn up your Influence style. Talk with the people at the meeting about their topics. Inject your own experiences. The goal is to build a relationship on common ground.
About 10-15 minutes in, the meeting turns to the Discover & Dream phase. You will want to transition to Steadiness. This style focuses on the team’s perceptions. “How do we feel about the results?” “What do we need?” This is where we talk about the past and our vision for the future.
Close to the bottom of the hour, the meeting shifts to the future, Decide phase. You will need more Conscientiousness. These are the rational, technical discussions. You need to present facts and data as part of the persuasive argument. The data of the past will predict the future. This phase is likely to last until someone forces the end of a meeting.
At less than 10 minutes to go, the meeting is in the Attend phase, whether the participants like it or not. You must turn on your Dominance by asking for a final review of WHO does WHAT by WHEN.
You can win by helping the meeting organizer (or yourself) through these phases.
I structure my agendas around this premise because I am Conscientious. I like a consistent format, and it makes it easy to prepare an agenda ahead of time.
Recently, I was explaining both meeting structure and the communication styles. Before then, I had not put these two concepts together. However, since then, I have used this very effectively in teleconferences — where body language is non-existent and you must have some verbal cues.
- Welcome & Connect: “How are you today? How was your weekend?“
- Discover & Dream: “What is going well for us? Where are we having issues? What should we do about it?“
- Decide: “How can we make that happen? When have we been successful at this?“
- Attend: “Who is doing What by When?“
Rule book
- Communicating to Personality, How-to know your audience’s style and to modify yours.
- Let’s Stop meeting Like This, How-to be a good meeting participant.
- Color Wheel and DISC graphics, PowerPoint by Brian Suyat
See this and more posts at What’s The Game, whatsthegame.wordpress.com.
Use “The 4 Disciplines of Execution” to Defend Against the Whirlwind of Distractions.
Posted: August 12, 2017 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Book, Daily Accountability, Lean, Organizational Behaviors Leave a commentSet Up your Storm Shelter.
I received this book from a manager who does not like to read books. He said, “I am too busy to read this. Let me know if there is anything good in there.” This turns out to be my Go-To book for Project Management. I believe the theme of this book can be defined as, “Defend yourself from the Whirlwind of activity.” Read the rest of this entry »
“Let’s Stop Meeting Like This”, and start meeting like this…
Posted: August 12, 2017 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Book, Daily Accountability Leave a commentSet Up: We all have meetings that we do not like.
I worked with the author, Dick Axelrod, a number of times. He helped a group I facilitated to troubleshoot their meetings. The participants were manufacturing supervisors with many experiences with poorly run meetings. He helped the team to break through the bad behaviors they have seen in the past — disorganization, domination, work avoidance. I know of two supervisors who went on to make great improvements with their teams and results. Read the rest of this entry »
This Categorical Rating Tool can help you make complex decisions.
Posted: August 12, 2017 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Decisions Leave a commentSet-up a simple spreadsheet to make a complicated choice.
Let’s say that you want to make a choice. The choice is not like “Tapioca or chocolate pudding?” which is a choice between two options that relies on one factor, taste. Let’s say that the choice is from among a variety of options, and you need to rate them on more than two criteria; so the tic-tac-toe method will not work. How do you do that?
There is a way if you don’t mind a little spreadsheet (I already formatted it) and you can make some decisions up front. Read the rest of this entry »
Which is Better? Deciding between two options with slightly asymmetrical criteria.
Posted: August 12, 2017 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Decisions, Game Leave a comment
Set-up your choice box like Tic-Tac-Toe
Let’s say that you want to make a choice. The choice is not like “Tapioca or chocolate pudding?” which is a choice between two options that relies on one factor, taste. Let’s say that the choice is from among a variety of options, and you need to rate them on two criteria. How do you do that?
For decisions such as this, you can use a quick tic-tac-toe grid. Read the rest of this entry »
The Book of Five Rings
Posted: August 12, 2017 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Book, Business Leave a commentSet Up
In a recent post, I reviewed a few popular teachings from U.S. Navy SEALs. I remember a time when required business reading included The Book of Five Rings, by Miyamoto Musashi, which essentially encouraged excellence in all things. Read the rest of this entry »
Lessons from U.S. Navy SEALs
Posted: August 8, 2017 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Book, Business, Manager Leave a comment
Set Up
There is a recent infatuation of business managers studying the U. S. Navy SEALs for lessons on organizational behaviors and achieving success. Like all of the military’s special forces, Navy SEALs are highly capable individuals who practice execution within a team. Their high profile exploits are achieved through specific tools and behaviors that we can relate to. Read the rest of this entry »
AI Collaborator
Posted: August 1, 2017 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Game, Lean Leave a comment
What’s link between The Twilight Zone and Garry Kasparov? Artificial Intelligence.
Image from Patrick McCabe Makes
Set-up
On early morning television, I watched the classic Twilight Zone episode The Brain Center at Mr. Whipple’s (Season 5, Episode 33). The short IMDB description is:
A heartless CEO completely automates his factory and lays off almost all of his workers over the objections of his employees.
The episode presents a depressing view where improvement means elimination of jobs. I am sometimes mistaken for this guy because help people improve their workplace.
Immediately after I listened to this podcast from Harvard Business Review, How AI Is Already Changing Business, (HBR IdeaCast: 586). This interview discusses all of the good things that are happening with AI, and helps us put the technology in perspective by highlighting what it cannot do — that is, create.
Interestingly, both sources come to the same conclusion, as Mr. Serling says:
The point is that, too often, Man becomes clever instead of becoming wise; he becomes inventive and not thoughtful; and sometimes, as in the case of Mr. Whipple, he can create himself right out of existence.
Game Rules
While Mr. Whipple was trying to integrate automation into his factory, what you really see is ersatz Artificial Intelligence over 50 years before the current conversation. We have been worrying about the machines taking over for a while now, yet we continue to persevere.
On the one hand, we wish that AI would take over some forms of information management, like SIRI or ALEXA. On the other hand, we do not want to become obsolete machines in the next industrial revolution. It seems that we are trying to strike a balance between freeing AI and properly subjugating it to our will.
Win Condition
A colleague of mine is working to create a knowledge base that helps machine operators make associations regarding what the machine is telling us, what I call the telemetry (he calls it by a corporate acronym). The system that we are working to implement is more like that described by Grandmaster Garry Kasparov in his TED Talk, Don’t Fear Intelligent Machines. Work with Them. Kasparov is probably known more for his losses to the machine Deep Blue than for his wins against Anatoly Karpov to become World Champion at the age of 22.
In his TED talk, Kasparov contends that the greatest innovations to come are from a collaboration between people and computers where the collaboration is more or less equal with humans providing the creativity and machines providing the raw processing power.
This is how I expect to win with computers:
I don’t try to automate anything that I cannot already do. I try to automate things that I can do and a computer can do better.
What's the Game? 