How My Team Transformed our Team Meetings

 It all started when I read an article (not this exact article but an article like it) about Psychological Safety and I noticed that I usually dominate meetings and needed to stop. I'm passionate, full of ideas and energy and think a mile a min. I also am not afraid of a deep conversation or even an argument. Growing up, the dinner table at my house was like a court room where we would debate tough issues and often play devil's advocate to explore topics in depth. I thrived in liberal arts classes in college and I'm often a hit at late night coffee filled dinner parties. However, after reading this article on psychological safety I decided to have two goals going forward for all team meetings. 

1. I would only talk in proportion to others talking. 

2. As a leader and facilitator of the team meeting, I would aim to have everyone speaking in equal amounts as this is the number one measure of how to know you have created psychological safety. 

This led me to many conversations about diversity in how people like to share in meetings. Some people are introverted and they like to perhaps think about things in advance of the meeting and write out their thoughts on a meeting agenda document. I had always taken notes but this was more of a shared agenda document. There was already a great template for this at my job so I used the template to create a meeting agenda outline and invited others to add to the agenda. I always tried to put team member agenda items before my agenda items as the manager. This mix of making sure items were on the agenda at least 24 hours ahead of time made room for diversity and inclusion for different work styles in our meetings.

The Template for meetings

Agenda Item Title

TL;DR;

More Details (A paragraph describing the item):

Supporting Data and References:

Outcome:

Another thing about measuring psychological safety is how safe and free people feel when giving feedback to each other. As a leader, getting feedback from your team is very difficult. The idea came to us to have a once a month meeting run by the team where the manager, myself was not present. One representative of that meeting would have the task of bringing feedback and ideas from the group to me after the meeting. I actually received resistance from my leaders about this "Managerless Meeting" and that surprised me. But I received feedback from my leadership team, my boss and my boss's boss that this was not a good idea, that it would lack structure and become a complaining session that would not result in anything. I disagreed. I pushed forward to having these meetings and I was right. Some months there were not any strong feedback items, but about once a year, I would receive a laundry list of everything I was messing up and getting wrong. And it was given to me by the one representative so I could not know who had said what, which I think made people feel safer giving the feedback. The results of this were that when the company survey's came out each year, I ended up scoring the highest as a manager at the company. The reason for that was that I had already asked for and applied the feedback from my team. I was doing that on the regular so the survey was not the first time I was getting the feedback. 

I my 1:1's with my direct reports, I always asked for feedback. However, usually in a 1:1 people do not have feedback for the manager. I think people are scared to give the boss feedback. The managerless meeting created a safe way for people to give feedback and also compare notes with others about what I needed to do better. This was GOLD for me and drove a lot of psychological safety as well as feedback loops. 

The last thing I'll say about this is that measurement of psychological safety is critical in order to create it. If you are relying on your perception as a manager to know if it exists or not, then you may be really off base. You can think you have psychological safety and you can think you are easy to talk too and that people are telling you when you have gum on your shoes but unless you measure it, you could easily fall prey to your own perception errors. 

I decided to measure it in terms of who was speaking in the team meeting with a broad definition of "speaking" such that if someone introverted wrote out a lot of ideas on an agenda, that was an example of speaking. And also, I measured it by the level of feedback that was flowing from the team to me as a manager. Was I getting feedback? These were the two ways I measured it. I feel like I only scratched the surface and I have much more to learn, but just these alone did drive a lot of success in culture building.