How to get more outcomes out of meetings

I am thinking about a recent report I put together for a consultant client; he asked his client organization a set of questions about their executive team -- how well they worked at making good decisions, whether they based their disagreements on actual data, whether they were willing to challenge each other directly, whether they were able to come together after a decision and fully support the agreed direction. We compared their ratings on such questions across three areas: a) each executive rating him or herself, b) executives rating their peer team, and c) directors -- their direct reports -- rating the executive team.

The results showed that many crucial areas of challenge and confrontation were decidely low, even though each individual rated him/herself fairly high. That is, both the directors and executives agreed that the exec team as a whole was lacking in sufficient discussion of disagreements leading to a robust decision, and that the aftermath (poor outcomes) was not reviewed for organizational learning.

I think we might find similar results in many executive teams who are under pressure, and have not had time to become fully formed by trial-by-fire. The question of course is what to do in this situation? There are many reasons why this kind of stasis exists, and these reasons make it not so easy to simply 'make a change.'

My thinking runs to what mechanisms could then support a course correction in how the team works together.... here is some thinking from a couple of researchers writing on the HBR Blog (co-authors of a recent book on Heart, Smarts, Guts and Luck.) The short article is on the Courage to Be Direct.

So how could we develop more ways in which to facilitate direct input, especially when making a decision that counts? Well, if people have trouble saying things simply and directly in a meeting, we can always gather opinions online, in response to a couple of careful, direct questions. Then we see all the opinion in one place, individuals are not put on the spot, and can look at the differences together.

We can ask a series of confidence check questions, after we have supposedly made a decision. For each element of the decision, on a scale of 1 to 10, how confident are you that this plank in the raft will effectively help us reach our agreed destination? If you rated this item less than 8, what specifically would need to be changed to increase your confidence? In my experience, this will bring out the places where further discussion and data gathering should take place before acting.

Instituting periodic after-review of decisions can be another useful mechanism... again, this can be structured with online input, so that data already exists together when the group meets. Were we successful? was our decision correct? what elements did we miss? did we fully support the decision with resources from multiple areas? looking back, what should we change now?

Keeping an archive of such reviews and confidence checks allows us to determine patterns over time in our process and our learning.