Episode 505: Rescue Your Project Meetings

In this episode, we transform your project meetings from dull to dynamic.

Hello and welcome back to the Project Management Podcast at pm-podcast.com.

I'm Cornelius Fishtner and thank you so much for joining us today.

Nice to see you. Oh, and talking about seeing you, this is a video episode.

So, if you're only getting audio, then please visit pm-podcast.com slash 505

or pm-podcast.com slash YouTube to play the video version.

And if you are on YouTube, then please do me the favor to like and subscribe to the channel.

It helps.

It really does help.

So, are meetings a necessary evil or a strategic opportunity?

We've all sat through our fair share of unproductive gatherings,

but what if meetings could be transformed into powerful tools for collaboration and innovation?

With me to discuss this option are Rich Maltzman and Jim Stewart,

authors of the book Great Meetings.

Build Great.

Great Teams.

And you can see the cover of that book here on the right.

And here we are, all three of us.

Hello, Jim.

Hello, Rich.

Welcome to the program.

Great to be here.

All right.

Wonderful.

You've been on the program previously, but for those among our audience who have never met Rich and Jim before,

here we go.

Rich Maltzman, PMP, has co-authored several books.

He's also co-authored several books on project leadership,

including Bridging the PM Competency Gap and the Cleland Award-Winning Green Project Management.

He's probably going to correct me in a second about the pronunciation of that.

He teaches a suite of courses in project leadership, serving as a master lecturer at Boston University.

And then on the right, we have Jim Stewart, also PMP, who has facilitated dozens of project meetings,

from kickoff to planning meetings to scrum events.

As an independent project consultant and agile coach, he advises on best practices, teaches project management,

and strategizes and executes on agile transformation.

As always, my first question is, what can our audience expect to learn from our conversation today?

Because, well, after all, we're talking about meetings.

Meetings are easy, right?

So, let's get started.

So, Rich, Jim, why should the audience keep listening to a topic that is really quite easy?

Yeah, meetings are easy.

Well, people might think they're easy, but what are your attendees of those meetings?

What are they muttering to themselves and, too importantly, to others when they leave?

What are they saying about the meeting?

What are they saying about the project?

What are they saying about you?

If you want those things to be positive things,

instead of, I don't know, things, then keep listening.

Keep watching.

All right.

Anything to add, Jim?

Yeah.

I think Rich and I have discussed this, and it's probably in the book as well.

If you can't run your meeting and it's a kickoff meeting, people may leave and say,

we've hired this person to or brought this person on board to run our project.

He or she cannot even run a meeting.

So that puts a conscious or unconscious thought.

So while it's a very fundamental, maybe even boring thing to some people,

it is fundamental and needs to be done well.

I think our conclusion, Rich and I, for many years of witnessing and running these,

is they're not running well.

It will improve your life as a project manager, if nothing else, if they are well run.

But you want people to leave with that good feeling that they're in good hands.

They have enough boring, lousy meetings.

We're trying to correct that.

All right.

If anybody who's joining us here, either on Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTubeX,

you have a question for our two guests here, then please do use the chat.

Just type your question into the available chat box on whatever platform you're joined us on

and send it over to us, and we will answer this live here during this interview.

All right.

I decided to have about five or six focal points here for our conversation,

and we start with the meeting problem.

Why are meetings so often unproductive?

So my first question is just about that.

What are some of the most common reasons why meetings fail to achieve their objective?

I think, Rich, you said you were going to take that, or was it Jim?

Go ahead, Rich.

I'll take that.

Sure.

All right.

Let's put you front and center here.

Sure.

In my opinion, some of the reasons that meetings become unproductive, as you mentioned, they're easy.

I'd say it's easy to run an unproductive meeting.

It's not so easy, and it takes some pre-work to run an effective meeting.

And I think some of the reasons that they – and I want to leave space for Jim to pipe in here.

But if you don't understand the culture of the company,

the culture of the project, the environment, if you don't know the attendees, who should be there,

who is there, how they tended to act in past meetings, how they would act here,

that's not always possible because it might be your first interaction with these folks.

If you especially don't understand yourself what you expect to get out of the meeting,

then just like that Lewis Carroll novel, any road will take you there.

You'll get whatever objectives come up.

And then in general, structure, the agenda of the meeting needs to be in place.

There needs to be a feeling of psychological safety so that if someone has a good idea or a strong warning,

they can raise their hand with that good idea or with that warning.

And you've established that kind of ground rule that it's safe to do that.

I think they fail.

Meetings fail to achieve their objectives when those things aren't true.

When there's no structure, when you don't understand the attendees and therefore the wrong people are there

and others that should be there are missing.

Those are the main reasons.

I'm going to hand over to Jim.

Go ahead.

You know, it brings up to mind an anecdote.

A friend of mine, this just popped in my head as you were talking, Rich.

A young friend of mine is getting married next year.

And one of his impediments to that was his fiancée wasn't good at handling money.

And she was just hiding.

Right.

She was just doing things and not telling him, you know, about these bills she had.

And I asked, you know, what was that all about?

She said nobody ever taught her how to handle money.

So she didn't know how.

I'm not sure if we said this in the book or not, Rich, but nobody ever teaches people how to run a meeting.

Yeah.

Nor do they teach people how to communicate.

This is really what it's about is communication.

Rich and I have talked about this infinitely.

People don't, the average person doesn't seem to know how to communicate, whether it's via email.

I have people.

I can call them, text them, whatever.

And I might get one answer to the three questions I've asked.

So people haven't learned how to run a meeting.

They go into the business world.

They've never run one or they run them poorly, whatever.

And that trend continues.

Go run this meeting, this kickoff meeting.

And, you know, it's almost as if somebody said, well, you have no financial background.

Go do a budget.

You have no shipping experience.

Run the shipping department.

Well, they take it for granted if you're a project manager.

You know how to run a meeting.

You might know how to run a project, sort of.

But if you have never run a meeting and don't have that skill set, then you don't know about facilitation and meeting management and timekeeping.

And to me, to answer your question, Cornelius, that's part of the problem.

They've just never been shown how to do it.

And so they flounder.

They fumble.

Let's make the connection.

Let's make the connection between what you said and the fundamental question.

What Jim has basically said.

What Jim has basically said is that you need these communications and facilitation skills to run a meeting.

Just like you need project management skills to run a project.

So the connection here is just like you.

And I hope our project managers understand this because this is one of the reasons I got into project management.

The idea that anyone can manage a project.

You know, Karen, you're a good project.

You're a good engineer.

So take this project because anyone can run a project.

And we realize that there are special skills for it.

Well, guess what?

It is.

It is a project.

So those same skills that you are applying on your project, why not put them in place for the meeting and have an agenda and have structure and have a plan for that meeting instead of just saying, okay, there's a meeting at 3 o'clock.

What's it about?

When does it end?

Who's coming?

What are the objectives?

These are kinds of things that a project manager would do for the project.

Just do them for the meeting.

Right.

I'm always surprised when I do a podcast episode about, you know, introduction to project management or basic project management skills, how well received it is.

Because sometimes as senior project managers, we tend to forget there are always new people coming up.

And these new project managers, they need the basic training.

So same here with this conversation.

This is basic information about how to run a project.

This is basic information about how to run a good meeting.

Rich, you told me before we started that you gathered some statistics about meetings.

Give those to us, if you would, please.

Sure.

The meeting that you're all in right now that, you know, Jim and Cornelius and I and any attendees who are in, that's one of about 11 million meetings today.

That's obviously an estimate.

No one's counting them.

But I have some statistics that are traceable to actually to Bell Labs.

There's about 1 billion of these meetings a day per year, I should say, when you do the math.

And guess what people are doing during the meetings?

Even in this one, 92% of people in meetings are spending some time at least multitasking, especially in virtual meetings.

96% of professionals have missed meetings.

Some of which they consider important.

52% of employees lose attention in meetings between 0 and 30 minutes into the meeting, which is something we'll talk about later in terms of the length of the meeting and when you appropriate breaks in the meeting.

So all these are traceable statistics that I can provide the links for.

And they're a little bit of a wake-up call, not just for the people sleeping at the meeting, but for the meeting facilitators.

So those are some of the statistics that I dug up for today's conversation.

Right.

Thank you very much.

I'm going to leave you.

Wait.

Sorry, Jim.

You were going to say something?

One quick thing.

It wasn't a statistic.

It was more about, as we talked about, these inexperienced.

Some people are very good at what they do.

As you're probably aware of, Caduceus, we have what we call the accidental project manager.

The person is nominated to be a project manager because they're a good chemist or a good developer or whatever.

And they say, well, I'm never running a meeting.

How hard can that be?

And what they don't, since it's their first meeting, they run this meeting with their stakeholders, not realizing that, you know, Joe is obstinate and Mary doesn't listen and et cetera.

What do I do now?

How do I handle this?

I thought everybody was on my side.

And they're fighting me and they're talking over me.

So I think what happens is expectations, the new project manager running a meeting expects everybody to fall in line.

But he doesn't realize.

Is that going back to what Rich said?

Is that person's X meeting of the week and they've had it.

And now you're trying to run a meeting where you're all eager and they just want to get out of there or they want to obstruct or whatever.

So I think that's part of what project managers understand.

Not everybody is as enthusiastic about your project as you are.

You have to overcome it.

All right.

As a reminder, everybody, we're still talking about the meeting problem, why meetings are problematic.

We'll get to the meeting solution in just a moment.

But my next question is for Jim.

And for that, I actually have to bring up Rich's video feed here.

Because, Jim, take a look at the bottom.

It says Rich Maltzman, not a goblin.

Okay.

I know this is a reference to your book.

Jim, please explain to us what a goblin is.

Obviously, Rich isn't one.

That's debatable.

But regardless of that, a goblin.

A goblin is someone, there's no textbook definition, Rich came up with it initially, but we expanded on it, is behavior that takes place in a meeting that's, I will say, inimical to the meeting.

Now, Rich and I have a little bit of a different spin on it.

Rich's spin, I hope I get this right, Rich's spin on it is that say you're driving somewhere and then somebody cuts you off and the goblin comes out of you and you yell at somebody, whatever might happen.

That's true.

But my take on it is a little bit more, and you can look at the difference between these.

There's underlying traits or behaviors within people that come out during the meeting, maybe other times.

So, for example, we've given these people names.

Billy the bully.

You know what a bully is.

He tries to bully people in the meeting, cajole them.

There's Tina the tangent taker, the person who takes you down a road.

I think it's Gio the garrulous.

So goblins are people.

And we'll focus on meetings.

That's what we're talking about here.

People in meetings.

You might have one of them.

You might have none of them.

You usually have at least one who, for whatever reason, subverts the meeting, preventing it from getting its objectives.

If a person hijacks your meeting, you're two minutes into it, and he or she says, we have a big problem here.

And maybe the rookie has a big problem.

Or maybe they're just a negative person, Debbie Downer, we call it from Saturday Night Live, who we have another name in the book, who says, oh, nothing will ever work.

These are people who derail the meetings because of either intrinsic personality traits or behavior that comes out during the meeting.

And they're completely inimical to a meeting.

And you have to figure out when you talk in the book about how to overcome those traits.

And, Rich, I'd love for you to sort of expand on that.

Sure.

Yeah, Mr. Not a Goblin, tell us.

So I'm going to pick up where Jim left off on Nadia the naysayer.

Debbie Downer is the character from Saturday Night Live.

On whom we based that.

Rachel Dratch, if I remember correct, who lives right near us here in Massachusetts.

So Nadia the naysayer shoots down every idea.

No, we can't do that.

We tried that last time.

It didn't work.

That never works.

What does that do to innovation?

What does that do to potential solutions you have or just ideas that you have?

If you were kind of bubbling up with an idea and you know it's going to be shot down, well, Nadia the naysayer does that.

Well, Nadia the naysayer is going to take care of that unless you as a facilitator recognize that, establish ground rules and say, Nadia, if you've got some examples of things that have gone wrong, we have a risk identification meeting coming up.

This is where we really need you.

Right?

So these negativity, this negative energy is actually quite helpful when you're trying to identify threats.

But if you've got an opportunity.

Nadia's got her AK-47 out there shooting them all down.

So we're not going to talk too much about solutions yet.

But that's in rough form what a goblin is.

Why don't we go to the solutions?

Because so far we've talked about the meeting problem.

Right?

And we've identified a few.

So let's move on to my next slide, if I ever can get it.

There you go.

The meeting solution.

How we can transform them into more solutions.

How we can transform them into more productive, engaging, valuable experiences.

Do you want to take on a few of the problems that you mentioned until now and see how those can be turned into opportunities?

I'd like to take a step just before that and then turn it over to Rich.

Right.

So what happens is in these meetings, let's say you have X number of meetings in a week and you talk to your boss.

Or say you go home to your significant other.

And to your significant other you say,

Boy, another meeting ruined by such and such.

And at some point if your spouse is savvy or significant other is savvy, you say,

Whose meeting is this?

Who's running this meeting?

Well, I am.

Oh.

But you're blaming the people who are hijacking it.

So there's something in there.

You can throw your hands up and say other people are, it's like other people are ruining your life.

If people insult you or cajole you and take that seriously, it's on you that you're sort of accepting their reality.

So who does it come down to to make sure that the meeting doesn't get hijacked?

You, the project manager, the person running it.

It's our meeting, but it's you who are running it.

So Rich, with that in mind, or other things in mind, you want to take a goblin and break it down?

Well, I'll say that this is kind of for all the goblins.

The principles that will help avoid this, and Jim, you're right on where people say, hey, whose meeting is this anyway?

You should be saying that to yourself.

It may take a significant other to point that out.

But you need to be self-aware that, hey, this is my meeting.

And just to reinforce the idea that it's also reflective of how you are as a project manager, how you're viewed as a project manager.

If you're not, and I'll let Jim use these words more later, but if you're not large and in charge, you're perceived as someone who may not be able to run the project, never mind the meeting.

Just assume.

It's a small one-hour gathering.

So we have some specific ideas.

And Cornelius, I hope you prompt us to remind us to give some specific tips here.

But core principles that will help the goblin behavior be muted.

Structure.

So having the meeting established with a set of objectives.

Having a purpose.

Here's why we're here for this meeting so that everyone gets that.

Setting ground rules.

Let's say things like no bullying or tangents will be, you know, we can explore tangents, but we're not going to go down the full path.

Now, that said, I want to give a quick exception to that rule.

If there's something, the so-called 800-pound gorilla, if there's something in the room that needs to be said that clearly overrides the objective of the meeting because something is urgent and important.

Both urgent and important.

Tear up the agenda.

Actually, make a statement.

You can actually physically do that if you have a physical copy.

Tear up the agenda and say, you know what?

I'm taking charge here.

You know, Anul is right.

This is something we have to talk about this now.

We're not going to take the agenda.

We're going to take this tangent intentionally.

But make it intentional.

It's like scope creep.

Right?

Scope creep is unconscious accepting of the agenda.

Right?

Scope creep is conscious acceptance of extra work in the project.

Right?

Upscope is conscious acceptance.

So similar in the meeting, you know, consciously say, we're taking this tangent.

So ground rules, willingness to provide this purpose and objective of the meeting.

And then continuing to monitor that.

Right?

Because you set the ground rules.

But during the meeting, they're going to get broken or bent.

And you're going to have to do some actions.

Again, in the book we have details of specific physical things in some cases you can do to

even macro body language tips to move to a particular area of the room to squelch some

of this goblin behavior.

And last comment, if it's really egregious, if a goblin behavior is significant, it's

time for you to stop the meeting and take that person aside.

And we have some tips about how to handle that situation in the book.

All right.

You asked me to prompt you, so here we go.

You mentioned both ground rules and core principles.

Okay?

I don't know who wants to take this, but are they the same?

And let's focus on the core principles maybe.

Well, maybe ground rule is a core principle.

Ground rule is how we behave.

One of the things I thought about when Rich was talking was the idea there's no dumb

idea.

There's no dumb questions.

Let's throw that out there, even though they may seem that way sometimes.

So, the core principle is respect for each other, listening.

Those are deeper even than things like having an agenda.

Having an agenda is a good idea, a very good idea.

But I think respect, listening to each other, good ground rules, we'll do this, we won't

do that.

So, those are key for me.

And to take off to one other thing.

And I don't mean to digress from that, but that Rich said, that large in charge idea.

You know, Rich, interesting, I was searching through the book today.

The word assertiveness doesn't come up nearly as often as it probably should.

And I think there's a psychological dynamic to this as well, Cornelius, and everybody

who's listening.

It's not easy to get up in front of, most people, what do the studies show?

Most people would rather die or something than be in front of a group, right?

So, you get up in front of a group, they're not used to asserting themselves, and being

assertive, being large in charge.

Assertive, being large and in charge means, oh, no, we're not going down that path.

Sorry, we talked about that enough.

We're going to move on to something else.

It's hard, especially when there are people that sometimes are going to push hard to see

what you're made of, right?

And to speak to what Rich was talking about, I'm a firm believer in having an agenda and

following that agenda, tearing it up when necessary.

If somebody's a naysayer, that's one thing.

But if they say, they raise their hand and say, I don't think it's a good idea.

It's a good idea to send the submersible down to the Titanic right now because of X, Y,

and Z reason, we should stop and listen to that.

Sometimes we don't.

We have meetings where that gets glossed over, or that person won't speak up.

So, we need to pull things out of people.

It's funny, it's paradoxical.

Sometimes the people that speak the loudest have nothing to say, and the person that knows

something gets shut out or whatever.

So, I'm thinking of a couple of things here, but my core principles are respect, listening,

and there's no dumb or bad.

What would you say, Rich?

Yeah.

So, from the principal's perspective, going up 50,000 feet, assuring that the meeting

is necessary.

Could this have been an email?

So, an overarching principle is don't have the meeting unless you need to.

Don't have the meeting because of muscle memory.

Every Wednesday at 2 o'clock, we have this meeting.

That's just going to encourage people to not come to the Tuesday, whatever day I said,

meeting.

Don't have the meeting because it's just a meeting that takes place regularly.

Another principle, and I think Jim and I talk about, I know we talk about it amongst

ourselves, is think about the last really good meeting you attended where someone else

ran a meeting and you were saying to yourself, this guy or gal or person runs this meeting

so well, I have to take some notes.

Actually, take those notes and actually do that.

And the opposite applies.

If you went to a really awful, dreadful, unfocused, long, boring meeting, do the opposite

of what that person has done.

Emulate the characteristics that you like and avoid the characteristics, consciously

be aware as a facilitator, you're a lifelong learner.

So, you go to a lot of meetings as an attendee, observe what the facilitator, which may or

may not be the project manager, by the way, which is another topic in the book.

Observe what that facilitator is doing and learn from it, good or bad.

One last comment while I have the floor.

It's really real.

Jim made this example with the submersible.

There are several disasters we could talk about ad nauseam, really ad nauseam because

people were getting killed, where people need to raise their hand and say, I've got a problem

with that, or I don't think we should do that.

But they don't feel it's safe.

They don't want to raise that issue.

So, principle-wise and ground rule-wise, both, it's really important for you to say that

this is a safe space.

We need to hear from you if there's an objection or a problem with this.

Now, you may want to have that focused for risk identification and not necessarily in

a, let's say, a status meeting.

But you want Rosie the reticent, that's one of our goblins, who wants to know what's

going on.

Who won't raise her hand.

We want Rosie to raise her hand, and there are some specific tips we have for getting

her to either raise her hand or to talk to her after the meeting.

So, really, really important principles and ground rules.

Instead of drawing a line about what's a principle and what's a ground rule, I think we should

listen to both.

Jim mentioned that he likes to have an agenda, and my agenda says that we are now moving

from the meeting solution over to building strong teams through meetings.

And earlier on, we talked about tangents and hijacking the meeting.

And as we were talking, I suddenly had this thought, and let me just throw out a completely

new question for you here.

The title of your book is Great Meetings.

Build Great Teams.

That's kind of what we want to look at and how that happens at this point.

But let me flip that around for you.

Would it not also be true to say that great teams will have great meetings?

So, in some cases, the people who you bring together, if they work well together, if they

know each other, the meeting will become a great meeting, even if you ignore everything

else, because they work well together.

I would agree with that 100%.

I think they go together.

And we didn't want to push it so far as to say it's just great meetings that build great

teams.

You have to have great meetings, but there's other factors to that.

But if you think about it and take it a step further, your meetings could be team building

meetings, on or off site.

So, I think as people work together, have psychological safety, trust each other, trust

is the big word.

Trust each other, know that they have each other's back, and look forward to the meetings.

It builds a camaraderie that happens organically.

They don't sit there and say, gee, we're building a great team, but they start to feel good

about this entity that we're building.

I think that's the payoff in that.

But that takes a concerted effort, because as you're probably familiar with, Cornelius,

and maybe for those who don't know it, the Tuckman model.

Bruce Tuckman and norming, forming, storming.

There's various stages that teams go through to become a team, and you help facilitate

that and move them through the various stages.

For those who don't know it, look up Bruce Tuckman, T-U-C-H-M-A-N, psychologist from

the 60s, who actually studied reports on teams and not teams themselves.

And the second stage is called storming.

Storming is where we hit the sharp, what I call the sharp elbows.

People are jockeying for position.

Some teams stay in storming forever.

You need to move them along so that they're a performing or high-performing team.

So these teams, if you're lucky, can cohere or come together just because of the very

personalities involved.

But in my experience, it doesn't just work that way.

It takes a concerted effort to make sure that it happens, make sure people trust each other,

hopefully like each other, and work well together.

It's a well-oiled machine.

And to Rich's point about sometimes people ask them to lead the meeting, sometimes they

don't.

Sometimes you ask them to lead the team.

So I think they do go hand in hand.

It isn't just the one factor.

It's one of many factors.

Yeah.

I'll add in that we wanted to add to the book title, great meetings build great teams and

vice versa.

But the publisher said that's one too many hyphens.

Anyway.

So I'm going to make a, we're just coming off the Olympics, so I'm going to make a basketball

analogy here.

Yeah.

So your point is, your epiphany there, Cornelius, that great, wait a minute, great teams make

great meetings.

When you see a basketball team kind of come together and get it so they can pass behind

the back because they know where their teammate's going to be, you have that team cohesion.

To Jim's point, that's this performing stage where you don't even need, you don't really

even need a leader at that point.

The team gets it, right?

Right.

So I would say it's kind of a chicken and egg.

So great meetings help build the great teams, which in turn, yes, will come back and end

up with that behind the back, no look pass, like we saw a little bit in the Olympics with

the, well, at least with the American team, perhaps with others.

So I agree.

I think great meetings build great teams and great teams yield better meetings.

In some cases, no meetings, a la the no look pass.

Right.

You don't even need the meeting.

Right.

We can skip next Wednesday's meeting because we get it.

We're performing.

So really good observation.

All right.

Wonderful.

Thank you very much.

And just to be absolutely clear, other Olympic team sports are available.

We're still talking about building strong teams through meetings here.

And Jim, you did mention the Tuckman model of team development.

I put that in the comments here, both on YouTube and on YouTube.

Both on YouTube and Facebook for those joining us there that you know the name and how

it's spelled.

And conflict is part of team development.

And it is often during meetings that conflict comes out.

So what do I have to do?

What can I do as the facilitator, as the owner of the meeting to help build strong teams?

Through this meeting, even if the conflicts are bubbling up?

I want to parse this one a little bit because it isn't just where our book mentions Agilus.

And there are two philosophies, if you will.

In the traditional project management, it's command and control.

You as the project manager have tools.

One of them is a Thomas Kilman model for dealing with conflict.

You would resolve that conflict where the team members cannot.

In an Agile team, nobody's in charge but the team.

Right.

So you as a scrum master don't get to play those conflict management roles.

The team has to resolve its own conflict.

But for the sake of discussion right now, I'll talk about the waterfall traditional project management side.

Traditionally, for resolving conflict, whether in a meeting or whether outside the meeting, we'll talk about outside the meeting for a little bit.

You try to have the team members resolve it themselves.

And if that can't be, you can step in and you can try to compromise.

You can try to withdraw.

Have people go to neutral corners.

You can try to have them, you can try to force the issue.

Now, if it happens in a meeting, you sort of, conflict is not a bad thing.

We used to think years ago, conflict is normal.

If people are having conflict in a meeting and so what I would call a negative conflict and they're sniping at each other, you might have a cool down period or take a break.

But if there's a healthy conflict and two technical people are discussing it, I'm always a fan of letting that go for a while.

And see where it goes.

I've never been in a meeting, personally.

People got up and started throwing things at each other.

So it's really a question of observing as the facilitator.

I observe and see what's happening here.

I'm the new guy.

I'm an independent person, independent consultant.

I may be brought in.

I may be told some of the personalities involved, hopefully by the sponsor.

I might see how far this goes.

I might look at the other attendees.

Are they rolling their eyes because Bob and Ahmed?

No.

Do they always do this or are they nodding and listening?

Which, by the way, somewhat puts you at a level of psychologist, body language expert.

And I would take it as far as that's an interesting concept.

Talk about those.

So if it's positive, what I'll call positive conflict, they disagree on a technical issue, let's say, that's fine.

If it's negative, I'm going to stop it and say, okay, this is nonproductive.

It's part of being assertive.

And let's move on from here.

And I think that's perfectly okay.

And, again, just to state.

On the Agile side, it's more challenging.

The team owns that.

And the team in the Tuckman model has to get to performing and stay there.

They have to learn how to resolve their own conflicts.

They may come to you as a scrum master, as an Agile coach and say, I have this problem.

You discuss it with them one-on-one.

They might ask you to step in.

But it's more challenging in an Agile environment until the team becomes a good self-organizing team.

I'll jump in as well.

I think that getting to yes.

Getting to yes fits here as well.

In fact, these two things, Thomas Killman and getting to yes, you can put that in the show notes, really work together well.

There are two of four getting to yes principles I'll very briefly talk about.

One is separate the people from the problem.

So this is the throwing things at each other piece, right?

You're an idiot, Tom, is not as effective as I don't think Tom's idea is very good.

Right?

So if you take the latter approach, you're focusing, you're separating on the problem, on the idea, and not, you know, obviously a confrontational approach.

And this is where you have to, as a facilitator, this is where you are watching for personal attacks and reinforcing ground rules that say we are after success here.

And that means it's perfectly legitimate.

It's perfectly legitimate and encouraged to criticize ideas, but don't throw it at the person.

Don't throw something at the person.

And the second one is to focus on interests and not positions.

We as humans tend to really like taking a stand and say I'm not moving from that stand, right?

And then now we have to dig ourselves out of the trench we gave ourselves.

We've dug our position, literally dug a trench for ourselves, and we now would have to climb out of that to give up that trench.

This is what, you know, to give up that trench.

Right?

To give up that position.

So focusing on the interest.

What do I really want?

Is it a certain amount of money?

Is it a certain design?

Or is it do I want the project to succeed?

Is there a higher level interest that the facilitator can keep pushing people towards and allowing people to lose face by not necessarily, you know, gluing themselves into a position or digging themselves a trench?

That book is outstanding, by the way.

Getting to Yes.

What's amazing to me is it was written by.

Harvard professors.

And it's still only this thick.

And it has a lot of really good advice for personal project organizational negotiation.

So you can use that for your own personal ambitions as well as for how you can make your project succeed.

And I only gave you two out of four of the techniques that are in getting to Yes.

All right.

Thank you very much.

As a reminder, we're still talking about building strong teams through meetings.

And we do have a comment that came in here from Pat Henninger, who joins us via LinkedIn.

He says, agreed on the note that great teams have great meetings.

I would add the corollary, I always read that wrong, that sometimes teams in the workplace are just groups of people.

But not an actual team per se.

If that's the case, building the group into a team needs to be a priority.

I sort of heartily agree with that.

Because in my experience, I used to work as a consultant in a company and we did customer projects.

So you go to a customer and every time you meet with a customer, you have another team behind you.

Sometimes the same, similar people.

But never really for a long time.

Three, four weeks.

Then you go to a new customer.

You have a different team, a different group of people.

And the challenge there is getting the people to work well together.

The only way to do that really is company-wide.

So you have to have the appropriate company culture as a consultant to build a team, a company team, so that you can take people out.

Put them in.

Put them on a project.

And they still work well together as teams.

Jim, Rich, what do you see?

Who wants to take on this?

I'd definitely like to jump on this one.

I know Rich's ideas.

Team-building exercises.

We want to build a team.

Now, the problem with team-building exercises, when I talk about it, I teach P&P.

Like I'm teaching at the end of this month.

Well, we can't afford outward bound.

Nobody said anything about outward bound.

You can do team-building exercises within your team remotely.

Or in getting together.

First of all, it should be fun things.

Right?

But also, the actual nature of the work.

For the record, how this book that we did came into being was several years ago, many years ago now, I was working with a woman who is, Rich and I both know, who does work for life sciences companies.

She is a great facilitator.

And she brought me there.

I learned a lot from her.

And we were doing these big two-day planning session meetings that had WBSs and risk registers and everything.

And we found, or we reestablished, people were coming from all over the world.

Because pharmaceuticals, they all come to Chicago or whatever.

And we found just doing the nature of the work.

If I'm doing my work breakdown structure, if you want to put a link to that, that's fine.

For marketing, one for packaging, and one for regulatory.

People are walking between the various stickies.

We're doing on the wall.

And they're collaborating and working together.

So just the very nature of working together collaboratively formed a team in a way that was over and above the nature of what we were trying to do.

So I would say trying to figure out if you can build a team anywhere from that down to going to Boeing together, down to having coffee together.

And if you're all remote, it becomes a little trickier.

And I always want to address that.

Because what if we're entirely remote?

Maybe you can do sessions where your meeting is a half hour.

And I had one interesting meeting where we had to create information about ourselves.

And then somebody else would present the information.

Jim lives in Massachusetts.

He has a cat.

Whatever.

So we had ways of getting to know each other, which is some interesting icebreakers as well.

I will say this.

If you're going to do team building exercises, make sure there's space.

Make sure they're specific and to the point.

And that you follow through.

I don't have time to explain the entire thing.

But I did one team building exercise at a company everybody would know where even though they set the team building exercises up and we were off site, they subverted everything by the way they did them.

And we came away knowing less about each other.

So do those.

Make sure that exercises people enjoy.

And then that spills over into the project itself.

So, Rich, maybe you want to talk about our famous team building exercise.

Do you want to talk about our famous icebreaker team builder?

I guess it's a team builder, the one we like.

It is.

I'll start with just the concept.

And there's a gentleman named, you can put this in the notes as well, Chad Littlefield, who talks about connection before content.

Right.

And this is also somewhat cultural, as in some cultures will have in their meeting 30 minutes of chitchat before they get to business.

And other cultures, especially northern Europe, tend to want to get to business.

So especially in those cultures, you want to build this connection before you get to content.

Because knowing the team, knowing the context, the people is important, is as important at least as the information that's going to be exchanged in the meeting.

So one of the things that I use is called human bingo.

And many of you know the idea of bingo and many may even know human bingo.

But it's actually interesting.

It's actually a really good way to get people up, active, moving around the room.

And this can be done, there's a way to do this virtually as well.

I think in the book, I know that in the book, we provide an example of a human bingo sheet where you try to get a row, column, or diagonal based on things that are on the bingo card.

Like I've been on a scary roller coaster or I've climbed a mountain.

And what I do.

And I've done several consulting gigs where I've done this, and I do it in my classes as well, is customize that.

Make it very much tied into the region, the company, the products, the company, and services that the company sells.

So human bingo is outstanding.

I've had huge success with that.

So that's one.

And then during the meeting, if there's a need to come up with ideas, you know, just sitting around the table and shouting out ideas is not a good idea.

Right.

So just putting out ideas is not as good as engaging folks with simple post-it notes on a flip chart.

And overseeing, again, physical movement of people in the meeting is a way to keep people's attention.

And oh, by the way, as Jim said, this can be done perfectly well with virtual meetings with tools like Miro and Mural and Google Jamboard.

I've run classes this way.

I've done this online with consulting gigs.

And you can make online meetings also physically active with tools like that.

All right.

Thank you very much.

I have to follow up on this one because I am not quite sure I understood the concept for human bingo.

So you create bingo cards?

Yes.

With background information?

With background information of the attendees?

Yes.

Like roller coaster?

I've been on a roller coaster.

Skulking, whatever it may be.

And then the person who speaks has to say, by the way, I like roller coasters.

And then everybody who happens to know.

It's pairwise.

It's pairwise conversations.

So people get out.

Oh, I see.

They meander through the room.

The instructions are on the way we've designed this.

And you have to buy the book.

Okay.

To find the sheet.

There's an example there.

And the instructions are, there's enough room on the 8 1⁄2 by 11 where the instructions are there as well.

So it says get up.

Yes, actually get off your seat.

Walk around the room.

Find someone to talk with.

And see if you can get their initials on one of the squares.

And then you will give them one of the initials.

So I'm left-handed.

Are you left-handed?

No.

Oh, shoot.

I needed that square.

But are you a member of PMI?

Oh, you are?

Okay.

That gives me the square.

Ah, I get it.

Okay.

I play the piano.

Maybe that's one of the bingo squares.

Okay.

It's really easy to explain.

My students are heavily international.

I don't mean that they've eaten a lot of food.

I mean that many of them are international students who haven't even heard of bingo.

And yet within five minutes when we start this, the room gets noisy.

There's laughter.

There's smiling.

I have photos to prove this.

Right?

I'm taking pictures.

Five minutes after everyone's just sitting there like this, like there's a professor

talking in a lecture.

No, we're not going to lecture you.

You're going to get off your seat.

We're going to walk around the room.

And you can translate that from a classroom situation, and I have done this easily, to

a meeting.

All right.

Wonderful.

Thank you very much.

And for our international listeners, eight and a half by 11, it's an A4.

A4.

Yes.

I know.

Two years in Holland.

I understand.

Yeah.

So we have talked about the meeting problem.

We looked at the meeting solution.

We talked a little bit about how to now get this into the construction constructive realm.

Now we're moving from the present into the future.

We want to talk about the future of the meetings, how the evolving work environment is going

to impact meetings, remote work, technology, artificial intelligence, those kind of things.

So, Rich, Jim, what trends in meeting technology do you see emerging?

How can they be leveraged to enhance meeting effectiveness?

How can that help me make my meeting better?

I'd like to start with one, maybe go to you, Rich, and I'll end with something that's kind

of interesting.

The obvious one is the one that's out there, but not everybody's using, which is the fact

that we're working remotely like this.

We can use AI to record our meetings.

My first inkling of that was, you know, ChatGPT hit like a thunderbolt, and all of a sudden

there were a million things.

And the first time I noticed was a product called Otter, O-T-T-E-R dot A-I, which was

transcribing as we spoke.

Now, if you go into, say, Zoom, and we're not in Zoom right now, they have an AI transcriber.

So Rich and I will often use it for our meetings, like if we're preparing for something like

we did with you, Cornelius, and we'll turn that on.

We don't strictly speaking need it, and I'll read the notes it comes up with, and they're

pretty good.

Sometimes things are laughable, but you're not going to take that and send it out to

somebody, so, you know, at least without looking at it and making sure it's accurate.

So the transcribers, if your folks aren't familiar with it, there's one built into Zoom.

There's others that are out there that just transcribe while you're talking.

They'll summarize the meeting, and then they'll come up with some detailed notes from that,

which you can then edit.

It will email it to you right away.

So my first thought is...

And this is, by the way, as an inveterate meeting minute taker, they don't do that so much

in Agile, but in the waterfall side, I love it, because I would always want to make sure

the ideas were expressed and sent to everyone who may not be able to attend, and even those

who were able to attend.

So my first thought is the transcribers are a good help, a great help.

Rich, do you want to build on that, and I'll come back with another idea?

Yeah.

I have a very short prepared statement.

AI in meetings is already here.

I don't know if StreamYard is doing this to us right now, but it's already here.

It's just going to get better and better at being an assistant, and that's an important word.

It's not doing the job for you.

It's assisting you in doing the job, and that's where the human in the loop comes in.

And as Jim said, you've got to look at what it records, because it could easily misunderstand,

especially with cliches and expressions.

So I'm going to go ahead and start.

So I would say be wary, be worried, be prepared, but let it help you.

It's out there.

These tools are out there and getting better and better.

Let it help you, but always, always have a human in the loop.

You need to look at what comes out of AI.

It can be, I'll just say, quite odd.

Yeah, thank you very much both for that.

So first of all, just to clarify for our listeners, StreamYard is the tool that we're using to stream simultaneously.

To stream simultaneously to all these online platforms.

And no, StreamYard does not have, at least not yet, built-in AI capabilities.

Because if it had, I would have told you, Rich and Jim, that at the beginning.

I recently gave a presentation over Zoom to a PMI chapter around the world.

And as I was starting my presentation, suddenly the pop-up comes.

The meeting organizer has stirred the AI companion on.

Without telling you?

They didn't ask me.

They did not ask me ahead of time if it is okay to do that.

Right.

So the only thing that StreamYard does is it will give me a transcript of the conversation.

That's the only AI that is running on this one here.

So in my opinion, yes, AI is fine.

But you have to make sure that people know about it.

Rich, do you want to talk about the photograph, the screenshot that you sent?

Before he does that, I wanted to talk about one thing.

You're absolutely correct, Leonidas, because legally you have to tell people they're either being recorded or AI.

Here's an interesting thing that you may or may not have thought about.

And I have a few notes here.

Can AI run a meeting?

Or will it be able to?

Several things it can do.

Agenda management.

Create and manage meeting agendas.

Scheduling.

Find the best time for meetings by analyzing participants' capabilities.

Checking participants' calendars.

Facilitation.

AI can guide the discussion, ensure the agenda is followed and time is managed effectively.

Note taking.

We talked about that.

Follow-up.

Setting up summaries.

Data analysis.

Provide insights.

And language translation.

Where did I get that list?

I asked AI.

That whole list just came from AI.

So I just want to talk about that.

Can it get to the point where it can actually run the meeting for you?

Rich talks about human in the loop, right?

And he's absolutely right.

But could AI run a meeting?

It is replacing a certain job.

Let's be honest about it.

Should it?

I don't know.

There's a lot of things that AI can do that maybe we don't want them to do.

But that's an idea, a trend.

So I want to turn it back to you.

I have to say this for comic relief.

So if AI is running a meeting and Jim raises his hand and says, I'd like to have a break now.

And AI says, I'm sorry.

I can't do that, Dave.

Thank you.

Don't worry.

We'll keep bringing that up.

Bob Bain D'하신.

Rich and I will watch that movie together one day.

We're only 30 something years out of date.

That's 2001 for those who are not paying close attention.

Rich, the picture.

You want to bring the picture up or discuss the picture?

I believe Cornelius will put a scary picture.

Yes, I will bring the picture up.

And just warning for everybody, it looks a bit creepy in the beginning.

This is a screenshot.

ricardo vargas here let me give you the the link to his website it is ricardo hyphen vargas dot com

and rich tell us about this yeah so first of all ricardo vargas is a pretty well respected

innovator leader in project management thinking i finally got to meet him in atlanta he did not

look like this uh there was very little green on his face um and no egg on his face um he um

he has recently i mean within the past week or so released a newsletter this is a screen capture

from me reading and getting creeped out by his um posting in this newsletter um where

ai is now uh capable um of reading emotion so you see a little key there it's hard to

read but it says anger disgust fear happiness um sadness surprise and neutral um so right now

it's reading happiness um it might be nice to know i mean you have to read the room

well ai might be able to help us read the room do we want it to these are these are some

philosophical questions but as you see cornelius is pointing out these and you can see now that i'm

smiling in reaction to him doing that and i could detect that i was happy with that as opposed to

you know

catching someone rolling their eyes right instead of catching someone rolling their eyes because you

happen to be looking in that quadrant of the room ai is going to report to you that henry

is not happy with this idea now does henry want that do you want to know that is that

too much information is it accurate so these are all questions we have to answer but the

capabilities are coming so we're talking about the future of ai and meetings this also obviously

generally goes into the future of ai and meetings but just as a reminder that we are working with a

AI and project management. But you can see and get creeped out by things like this because it's

coming. And I think Ricardo is probably going to be very happy about this, because if you look at

the top of those words, it says male 49. I think he's older than that, if I'm not completely

mistaken. I think he's in his 50s. So it made him younger. All right. Thank you very much.

We are moving on to the end of our conversation here. Normally, at the end of my interviews,

I ask for a few takeaways. But this time, we're mixing it up, because at the back of your book,

you have meeting rules that are fit for framing, if I remember that phrase correctly. And I would

like each of you to pick a couple of those rules. I believe you have 18 rules.

And tell me why you picked those. Why are they important? Why should our audience follow those

rules from your book? Who wants to go first here? I'd like to go and have Rich fall. For the record,

I don't know if you're familiar with that suitable for framing statement. It's a bit of a satire.

I would always say that in a book, suitable for framing. So we just put that in as sort of a joke.

We have a lot of dad humor in the book. There are a number of rules. And I think you've asked for

it.

I think you asked at one point, maybe you're asking that for our two favorite. Was that the

question?

Yeah. Top two rules.

Yep. I'll pick two. I'll pick the second one in the first one. The second rule is timekeeping.

That's why I say second and priority. People will, I've seen this over and over again,

whether it's any kind of a meeting. If we're doing one right here, and you had asked the

attendees to work on something, you gave them 30 minutes. They'll spend 10 minutes getting ready,

discussing whose role it is. Next thing you know,

the time is over. People will look up and say, what happened to the time? So somebody, if you're

running the meeting, ideally give another person in the meeting you could point to and say, would

you mind being a timekeeper? If not, you need to be that timekeeper and say, 10 minutes have gone

by. Really? 15 minutes have gone by. It's very important to do that, especially with people

working on exercises. But my number one, we'll use a couple. We have Rich and I haven't mentioned

yet. Another one is being large and in charge. We talked about that. It's your meeting. But then what

I really want to emphasize is that it's not just about the time. It's about the time. It's about the

time. I want to emphasize, I don't know if it's a rule, forget if we put it as a rule, but it's

important. And it's this. If you're more worried about whether people like you personally, then

about running the meeting, there's a problem. Even with you being a project manager, we all just need

to be liked. So if a person is hijacking the meeting, I don't want Fred to dislike me. The

problem is the other time people are looking at you saying effectively, can you move this meeting

along? You have to be with them. You have to be with them. You have to be with them. You have to

be willing, ready, willing, and able to assert yourself and say, Fred, or whatever name I just

said, that's very interesting. It's a great story. Can we save it for some other time or whatever,

and then move along? So those are my two or three rules I think are the most that I try to remind

myself of, because I have to remind myself to be assertive. And I think that's really important.

Okay, good. So I'll do a couple as well. I'll start with culture.

In the book, we say, when in Rome, do as the Romans do. When in Schenectady, do as Schenectadians do.

My quick anecdote from that one is I learned from my first visit as a young project manager to

Germany that when you're done speaking, if they like your presentation, they thunder on the table.

I thought- Rattle on the table, yep.

So you're familiar with that. Oh, yeah, yeah. We do the same in Switzerland, yep.

Not familiar with this at all.

I jumped a mile. I had just finished my first international flight. I thought I had said

something terrible. And they could see it on me. So they were like Ricardo's face there.

They could see it. And they said, Rich, Rich, it's okay. We liked it. Because I was, I mean,

I jumped. I literally jumped. So be aware of culture. Be aware of, and that's also organizational

culture. So engineers think differently than marketeers. So be aware of,

the fact that, you know, engineers are going to be problem solvers. They're going to want to fix

everything on the spot. Just be aware of your attendees in general. And then the second one

is the overarching one. And I've mentioned it already. And that is, is this meeting really

necessary? Right? Could this have been an email? Now, let's take this podcast. This meeting was

necessary. You can't just send out an email that says, yeah, make your meetings better.

Having a conversation between the three of us,

I selfishly think, was much, much more effective than had this been a posting by Cornelius on his

website or an article in the newsletter. Because it's about body language and gestures and back

and forth in conversation. So yeah, this meeting, this podcast was necessary. But there are some

meetings that are not. And you should have the will to actually make sure you understand the

message. You should have the will to actually make sure you understand that this email may be,

that should be a meeting, or this meeting should be an email. So that's what that's about.

Well, in fact, Rich, using this as an example, Rich and I met several times prior to this to

discuss what we're going to discuss. And late in the last week, I think it was, Cornelius sent us

an email. And we were going to talk, get on the call and talk about it. And Rich texted me and

said, maybe there doesn't have to be a meeting. So he wrote me some notes. I wrote back. And he

wrote back to Cornelius. We didn't spend time talking. We didn't spend time talking. We didn't

spend time arranging a meeting or whatever. We had been far enough down the road that we could

do that by email. You have to know when is the appropriate time. You don't want to be sitting

in a queue next to somebody emailing them. You got to know when the meeting is appropriate and

when it's not. But in that case, it wasn't. Because Rich and I were able to, and if we

couldn't have, we would have jumped on the phone pretty quickly. That's a perfect example. Because

literally, Rich just used that expression with me last week. So it's fresh in my mind.

And people, I know, we can close with this if you want. Although you don't

only

want people to like you personally. People will like you if you give them time back.

So if you take a one-hour chunk of their time every Wednesday at three o'clock, and you say,

you know what? We're up to date here. We don't need Wednesday's meeting. They will think well

of you for two reasons. One, you've given them time back. And two, you are in control. You're

large and in charge. You're big enough, smart enough, and good enough. Another Saturday night

reference. And people will like you. So I don't know.

And in a perfect world of both like and respect you. But if they don't like you as much, then

they should hope that they respect you. Because that's what you need in the workplace or in

the world to get along. Nobody's going to hire you and say, I'll make sure that you're

liked. That's the last thing. Then you're not trying to be a jerk. It's just that you

need to make sure that people respect you in that meeting. They'll just walk all over

you.

Wonderful. Thank you so much. Thank you, Rich, for being on the project.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for being on the podcast for the eighth time.

It's really much appreciated. And I believe, Jim, this was your third conversation with

me, I believe, if I'm not totally mistaken.

I think I do five more without Rich. So we can schedule those whenever you like.

He's got to catch up.

All right. Gentlemen, thank you both for being here today. Much appreciated.

Thank you. It was our pleasure.

Thank you.

All right.

Happiness.

Once again, the book is...

It's called Great Meetings Build Great Teams, a Guide for Project Leaders and Agilists.

It is written by Rich Maltzman and Jim Stewart. It is published by Business Expert Press,

and it has 220 pages. And you can obviously find it in any good local or online bookstore.

And to kind of whet your appetite, it includes...

It includes apologies to the Beatles, apologies to Pink Floyd, apologies to Robert Plant,

and apologies to Martin Scorsese.

And if you want to know what on earth I was just talking about, well, you're going to

have to get the book.

Please visit pm-podcast.com slash 505 for show notes, transcripts, and PDU information.

You can get about one PDU in the category of...

Our email address is info at pm-podcast.com.

And almost finally, we have this here.

Meetings, the practical alternative to work.

But now that you have learned all these great ideas from today's interview,

let's end on a more positive note.

Therefore, which means...

That finally, we have this.

Here's to turning meetings from borefests to scorefests.

Until next time, everyone.

Bye.