Do you have messy meetings? Don’t appoint a chairman to fix it.

Last week there was a discussion in one of my teams about how to keep people engaged during online meetings.

The problem of disengaged colleagues is very common in most meetings. And let’s be honest, we’ve all been there. I know I have. We check out, do some other work, check our mail, or work on a presentation we have later in the day.

Good statistics are hard to find, but one study reports that 40% of meetings with 7 or more people have below average or poor engagement, 24% of participants in a 3+ meeting size don’t say a single word in a meeting, and 28% of meetings have unbalanced participation.

In this case the problem was that some people disengaged because the topic wasn’t interesting, there were discussions between two people for extended periods of time, questions that were unrelated to the topic were asked and answered at length, or team members went off on tangents.

One of the solutions proposed was to appoint a chairman whose responsibility it is to keep the discussion on track and to keep an eye out for people who are disengaging.

Photo by ChurchArt Online: https://www.pexels.com/photo/boy-in-red-knit-cap-and-gray-crew-neck-shirt-13181038/

This makes sense at first sight. It’s nice to have someone who minds the process and who reels people in when they go off track.

But if you look more closely, there’s a problem. By appointing someone as chairman, everyone else is excused from speaking up when they feel disengaged. Basically, the team members discharge themselves from their own responsibility by saying to the chairman: “you are now responsible for speaking up when I’m disengaged”.

If you look at it this way, there are a couple of big downsides.

First and foremost, it doesn’t do much for psychological safety in the team. Everyone in the team should feel safe to speak up when they feel the meeting is going in the wrong direction, when the discussion isn’t helpful or when they have an opinion about something.
Psychological safety is the number one characteristic of high performing teams, according to research by Google. Having a chairman lowers the need for the team to learn how to create an environment where everyone can speak up.

Secondly, what happens when the chairman is pulled into the content of the meeting? We’re all human beings, and it will inevitably happen that the chairman is interested in the outcome of a tangential discussion. When the chairman gets pulled into the content, he is less focussed on the process, structure, and engagement of team members. Thus, he is less effective in his role.

Thirdly, people disengage at different points in meetings. For a chairman to keep an eye out for everyone is hardly doable. More importantly, the chairman will always be late. Before the disengaged team member will show his disengagement, he’ll probably be disengaged for a couple of minutes already. So when there’s a chairman, team members don’t need to learn the necessary skills to recognize their own disengagement and do something useful with it.

So, what are more helpful solutions?

There are a couple of more helpful antidotes to battle disengagement.

1. Work on creating a psychologically safe environment. This is a must-have. The easiest way to keep meetings on track is when everyone feels safe enough to speak up when they feel a meeting is going off course. All other measures are secondary to this. One very easy way to spot whether you have a psychologically safe environment is distribution of speaking time. In psychologically safe teams, all team members have more or less equal speaking time.
2. Make sure the goal for every meeting is clear. This means that everyone is on the same page with regard to the intended outcome of a meeting, making it much easier to spot discussions that are less useful or out of place. For example, the dynamics in a decision-making meeting are very different from a brainstorming meeting.
3. Use Liberating Structures to keep everyone active and participating. Liberating Structures are meeting structures designed to keep everyone engaged. They rely less on talking, and more on collaborative action. This works towards creating a space where equal speaking time is promoted through the structure of the meeting, as mentioned in point 1.
4. Promote giving and taking. Speaking up is not one person’s responsibility in particular. Encourage the people who are talkative to keep an eye out for people they haven’t heard and invite them to share their opinion. Similarly, encourage the silent crowd to take a chance and ask the ‘stupid’ questions.
5. Leave. If a meeting isn’t interesting anymore, and it won’t get interesting for you, just leave the meeting. You’re not adding any value to the outcome, so staying is a waste of time. In my opinion not enough people have the courage to take this step.

Is having a chairman really that bad?

Having a chairman can certainly be helpful in a number of situations.
In larger meetings where people don’t know each other (i.e., there’s low psychological safety) it can help to have someone who manages the agenda.
It can also be helpful in newer teams when they’re still learning how a certain process works. For example, when a team is new to Scrum, an experienced chairman can teach them how the events work.
A chairman can also be useful in the short term to keep meetings on track while the team is working on growing their psychological safety.

However, in the long run having a chairman that people rely on gets in the way. It’s far less powerful than having a psychologically safe environment where everyone feels safe to engage and speak up.

In conclusion

Using a chairman can be a viable short-term solution to the problem of meetings getting off track or taking too long, causing people to disengage. In the long term however, it’s more powerful to work on creating a psychologically safe environment and teach people the skills of interrupting without being harsh.