What happens to your internal meetings when you encourage debate?
It’s true, no-one really likes conflict…
However, when you are making high-stakes decisions you don’t want passive bystanders who just readily approve of everything you say, especially if deep down they don’t agree.
You DO want to encourage healthy debate…
In your business meetings, do you welcome opinion, encourage debate?
How often does healthy conflict occur in your meetings about important, high-impact decisions?
Remember, even in meetings where the stakes are high, you have already made the preliminary decision and may end up having to make the final decision.
Al Pittampalli in his book ‘Read This Before Our Next Meeting’ suggests a simple meeting process for high stakes meetings:
- Share the issue only, avoid sharing your preliminary decision. You then avoid people readily agreeing with you to avoid conflict
- Get attendees to share their thoughts, do this before you share yours
- Reveal your decision, invite and encourage disagreement
- Provoke debate if it is not forthcoming by using questions
- After robust debate, seek agreement.
- If there is no agreement, then you make the decision and let everyone know
Most people shy away from conflict but, when you encourage opinions and debate you increase the likelihood of a good decision and avoid catastrophic decisions and actions, or worse, no decision or action.
Click here to learn how to use this process within your business to have great meetings, great decisions and buy-in from your people too.
