Along with a mattress store that is NOT having a giant sale, I have found it near impossible to encounter a professional who has never been to a poorly run meeting. Meetings can account for a healthy slice of the typical workweek pie chart, and it’s virtually inevitable that a clunker comes along within the mixture.
While good leadership is recognized over the long run, an aspect of it can be crystallized in the context of a forty-five minute meeting; good leaders know how to run a good meeting.
While good leadership is recognized over the long run, an aspect of it can be crystallized in the context of a forty-five minute meeting; good leaders know how to run a good meeting. And while there are numerous skillsets that contribute to the capacity to do so, I’d like to suggest one simple tack – minding the minutia.
Now this may seem counterintuitive at best, entirely misguided at worst, but there are some windows of inquiry that minutia can offer to leaders as they find themselves amid it within a meeting.
A critical component of good leadership is the capacity to step outside the immediate context – to fishbowl it. Minutia gives us a prime chance to do this as we find ourselves within it in a meeting. If, ten minutes into said meeting, those at the table have become stuck on a specific detail, ask yourself the following important question:
Is this a field of weeds we're in or a field of flowers?
As much as we’d all like to think we are well calibrated in our determination of this, in truth there is no out-of-the-box litmus test for what distinguishes essential from nonessential. Attempting to do so can challenge you to more fully understand your preferences and biases here. An understanding of two Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) preferences can sharpen your perspective as a leader within this context.
Extraversion and Introversion (E/I)
This is the outward-facing preference differential that can be fairly easily discerned in group conversation. Those with a preference for extraversion can commonly talk to think; sometimes they don’t know what they think until they hear what they say. They are often in process as they contribute. In this way, they can introduce greater levels of tangential input to the conversation.
Alternatively, introverts think to speak, so they have an innate capacity to have processed an idea before bringing it out to the group. Their contribution is commonly more of an end product than a prototype. However, the time they take to fully form their ideas may come at the expense of a lost opportunity to share them.
As a leader at the table, it helps to know people’s tendencies within this preference pair. When you do, you optimize the group dynamics and foster a more balanced, purposeful exchange of ideas.
Sensing and Intuition (S/N)
Here is a more latent but nevertheless fundamental preference differential that can hugely impact how people are drawn to or resistant to details. Those with a preference for sensing appreciate details as they represent things that can be experienced. Those with a preference for intuition prefer patterns and models instead, and they are often withered by specifics. Sensing types love gazing at the stars, while intuition types love finding constellations.
If you have a preference for sensing, you may find it challenging to keep meetings from drifting into the weeds, perhaps even directing the conversation into a tidepool. This can be particularly common when you yourself have a content knowledge background that causes you to keel toward it within a broader conversational context.
Conversely, if you have a preference for intuition, you may be dismissive of specifics in the conversation that actually merit consideration. This latter preference is common among high level leaders, who are typically characterized as future-focused, big picture people. Their preference for this keeps them breathing steadily in the rarified air of the 30,000-foot purview, but it can make them disengage or become impatient with what they perceive to be pointless details. With that comes the risk of conflating uninteresting with unimportant.
Now these are just two of many facets that can be examined as a checkpoint. Any more than that and you’ll be adrift from the group and the matter at hand. Simply stated, this is a call to take a moment, in the moment.
Getting people at the meeting table on the same page but out of the fine print is a delicate and demanding task, but, hey, it’s a capacity of good leadership. Making the determination between the significant and the insignificant can challenge you to more fully understand preferences and biases, including your own. So next time you find yourself at the helm of a meeting that seems mired in minutia, consider the dynamics at play, both interpersonally with the group and internally with yourself. Doing so will help you more fully understand yourself, the others at the table and the true composition of the conversational field you’re in.
In the interest of brevity, let’s close here. I’ll share more on minutia in a subsequent post so as not to delay you, as it’s probably time for your next meeting.
