GA 535 | Transforming Meetings with Evan Unger

Getting a group to make the best decision and getting maximum buy in. And that's what we believe a great leader does. They tap the expertise of the group, they help the group make the best possible decision, get them to buy in. Because if they buy in, they go implement, and good facilitation skills are going to get you going.

Today I'm excited to welcome Evan Unger to the show. Now, Evan is a consultant who does a lot of training and specializes in helping organizations run better high stakes collaborative meetings. And so during the episode, we sort of talk about, first of all, like, what is that? What's an example of a high stakes collaborative meeting? And then we just sort of dive into, like, what goes wrong and what happens when these meetings aren't successful, what are some of the root causes? And then we go into some. Some practical advice and some tips that we can be using to, to improve these high stakes meetings. And I would argue that many of the things that Evan talks about are going to be applicable no matter the level of the meeting. So even if you're a frontline, you know, continuous improvement practitioner running a kaizen event and you got to bring 20 people together to make something better, I think many of the things that Evan is exploring are going to be applicable to you as well. So a lot of good stuff to hear in this episode. So show notes can be found over@gembapodcast.com look for episode 535. Again, Gemba podcast. And look for episode 535. Okay, enough from me. Let's get to the show. Evan, welcome to the show. How are you?

I am good. Thank you for having me, Ron.

All right, so where are you calling in from?

I'm in Denver, Colorado. Okay. Beautiful day here.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Very good. That's a beautiful part of the country. So. All right, well, hey, I'm excited to have you onto the show today. I think we got a cool topic to explore, but as you know, Evan out of the gate, we like to get started with our guest, Sharon, a quote. So what do you have?

Well, I don't know if you've ever read Lao Tzu, sort of the ancient philosopher. Yeah, yeah. My favorite quote is, you know, the best leader is the one who, when the work is done, the people say, amazing. We did it all ourselves because that's what we do is really try to teach people an art of leadership. And so that quote has always resonated with me since I was very young. 18 years old.

Yes, yes. A lot of wisdom in that. All right, well, hey Evan, tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell us about your background and how you got into this line of work and what you're up to these days.

Yeah, I suppose. You know, I got out of business school and like a lot of people, I didn't really know what I wanted to do and joined Merck Large pharmaceutical company. They put me through a series of rotational leadership assignments, like what I was doing and then literally invented a job for me called the Director of Change Leadership and Development, which was a fancy title for. I had no idea what I was doing. I was three years out of business school and we were doing change and transformation projects. The first one I worked on was a procurement re engineering project. And back then, I don't know if you go back that far, but Michael Hammer was sort of one of the gurus with re engineering and it went really well and we were doing as part of that because I worked on the cultural side of it was teaching people high stakes facilitation skills. And back then there's no webex, there's no Microsoft Teams, there's no zoom. So we were teaching people how to facilitate high stakes conversations sitting in a room together. It was a workshop, 12 day, or excuse me, 12 person to instructor intensive. It went really well. We ended up training lots of people who end up doing continuous improvement work because they have to facilitate a lot of complex meetings. So that's how I got into this. This is back in 93 I think.

Okay, and what are you up to these days?

Then he's like, well, what I do now is, you know, part of what I work for a tiny firm called Schwartz and Associates. And what we've done for 30 years is support small to medium sized organizations in large change in cultural change and transformation processes. Now as part of those initiatives we always are facilitating multi day workshop type meetings with senior people to try to change the culture. And as part of those interventions, we would always train people how to do high stakes collaborative facilitation themselves. Because another quote that resonated with me, I don't know if you've ever read Patrick Lencioni's the Five Disruptions of Teams, but his first book was Death by Meeting. And one of the quotes he had, I won't get it perfect, was bad meetings almost always lead to bad decisions, which is a recipe for mediocrity. And so meetings from our perspective are in many ways the building blocks of the culture performance of an organization. And so what we've done as part of our interventions is always train clients how to run high stakes workshop meetings. And literally if we change the culture of performance at the meeting level, we can begin changing the culture performance of the organization itself. Because we're going to be in so many meetings.

Okay, so. Okay, so are you talking about like any meeting? Like, you know, We've got a 10 o' clock meeting with our stand up, you know, morning huddle or is it more the C suite guys are getting, gals are getting together to, you know.

Yeah, it's, it's a high stakes meeting. I mean I would invite. Most organizations need to think about stopping a lot of meetings, but these are meetings that have to happen where we're making decisions, we're designing, you know, how we're going to rol something out, coming up with a new strategy, visioning what we're going to do, deciding what's in and out of the budget, things where we really need to make major business decisions. There are status update meetings, those, you know, daily or weekly meetings with the task force. We do help people to some degree learn how to run those better. Many of those should be stopped. But we're talking about a high stakes workshop type meeting where it might be multi hour, maybe even multi day, where you're trying to get a group to come together. And part of those interventions often involve team building with teams. So we would be wrapping team building around changing something about the business itself. So really high stakes workshop type meetings.

Ron, I got you. All right, so what do you see that's going wrong with some of these meetings that aren't doing it correctly?

Well, I think the biggest thing that's going wrong is, you know the metaphor we often use is a plane flight. Right. You can think about it. Where are you based, Ron? I'm in Denver. Where are you?

In Keller, Texas. Right outside of Fort Worth.

Okay, so if I were flying to you, I'm flying into DFW here from, from Denver, you know, dia. And you can think about a project this way or a meeting. It always has three parts. Right. Takeoff, which is where most plane crashes take place. Right. Small planes, once the plane's in the air, we're going to get to DFW airspace. The second place we have crashes is on landing. So I think the first place high stakes meetings go wrong is whoever's leading it has not done the due diligence before they show up to get crystal clear on the destination, why we're doing things and what we're trying to get done. Because if I really don't have a sense of the destination, we're going to end up somewhere, you know, maybe in Houston. Right. And so because I can't really think about how I want to run the high stakes meeting if I don't know what I'm trying to get done, which literally is the flight plan. And I've got to think about, you know, another problem is if we're not clear what we're doing, we over invite. There's too many people there who really don't need to be there. Yeah. And so most of the problems in meetings start before you ever show up because the leader has not really thought through why they're there, what they're doing, how they want to run the meeting, who should be doing what, and then the interpersonal dynamics that have to be managed in the meeting.

Okay. So I mean, is it as straightforward and I'm sure there's more to it, but like understand deeply what problem are we trying to solve by gathering these people and then how and really coming up with an agenda.

It's not an agenda, just an agenda. That's the flight plan. Right. That's the steps of how we're going to get to dfw. It's really being clear why are we even having the meeting? What to your point is the problem we're trying to solve, which is context for the meeting. Right. And what is it we're trying to get done? We're not trying to just discuss. Right. We're trying to make a decision. We're trying to design something. And so it has more or less to do with the agenda because the flight plan will get you there if you know the destination as being crystal clear why we're doing things, what we're trying to get done, which then allows me to design good process architecture to run a high stakes meeting and actually get the results we want.

So is not knowing the problem we're trying to solve or the purpose of this gathering, would you say that is a, is a potential root cause for ineffective meetings?

Yeah, I'd say that's one of the biggest root causes is we're fuzzy. Right. On the why, the what. Right. And if we're fuzzy on that, then the whole meeting is going to be fuzzy. You know, if you think of say with this plane flight metaphor, Amelia Earhart, when she took off in the beginning might have just been a slight fraction of a degree off on takeoff, but as she flew over the ocean, that gets magnified. Magnified, Magnified. By the time she's 1000 miles there, there's no place to land like 2% fuzziness in the beginning, very quickly you can become 22% fuzziness if we let the group start flying the plane and they don't know why we're doing things, what we're trying to get done.

Got it, Got it. Okay, so what do you suggest that organizations think about and consider as they're approaching these collaborative meetings?

Well, I mean, this is where good facilitation skills are really important. In a high stakes meeting. It's all the work, as you know, that happens before we show up, the planning, the interviewing of the key participants, getting clear in many ways with whoever the senior sponsor is, why they want to do it, what they want to do and do good contracting. Because in many ways we're teaching them not only high stakes meeting facilitation, but these are basic consulting skills. These are basically change management skills. And we end up training a lot of six Sigma type folks because they're in roles where they're trying to improve performance. And that means they're going to be facilitating groups and teams at times. And so the first thing I'd say to organizations is one really, you've got to create a culture where the only meetings that happen are ones that people really need to attend that couldn't be dealt with as sending out information. That's the first thing we got to get rid of unnecessary meetings. The second thing then is you've got to skill up people to know how to truly facilitate real conversation, real collaboration. And that's what we train people to do, is the real art of what we call collaborative leadership. Getting a group to make the best decision and getting maximum buy in. And that's what we believe a great leader does. They get groups, they tap the expertise of the group, they help the group make the best possible decision, get them to buy in, because if they buy in, they go implement and good facilitation skills are going to get you there.

What's your, your perspective on the personality of the, of the leader, Their charisma, their charm, their. Are they winsome? Are they, you know, does that matter?

I, I would say, look, you have to be bold enough to hold if you're doing this face to face the room. But we're teaching people now because most of our clients are working hybrid. But I'd say anyone can be a really good facilitative leader because whether they're an introvert, right? As long as they're comfortable owning the process, knowing how to really be, give direction to people. And I would say there's not a, you know, you don't have to be this charismatic leader, to be a great leader. In many ways, we come back to that quote. Oftentimes really good facilitative leaders or collaborative leaders just know how to hold space for all voices to be heard. And that's what we're doing, is people helping people hold space. So any leader can be a great collaborative leader. And in many ways, this is a very minimalist style of leadership, because if the group made the best decision and got maximum buy in, what difference does it make what your actual style was if you got the right result?

Yeah. Okay, so can you think of any examples of where you don't have to name names or companies or anything like that, but maybe describe organizations that do this? Well, and what does that look like?

Well, I mean, I go back far enough to. And a lot of what we do, GE Workout, General Electric, Workout, when Jack Welch was there. Right. And you know, I think there's different perspectives on Jack Welch. Right. I mean, but he, you know, he, you know, really embodied the notion of we've got to take out the bureaucracy of the organization. That's what Workout was. And there was something they did called ramp, right. Which was they were looking for unnecessary reports and approval processes and metrics, protocols or processes. And the other rampant was meetings. And they had discipline on this. Like everything they did from the C team down was about this discipline of. And this really was continuous improvement. And so where GE is now, I don't know, but that's really where I was trained in that model. Right. And so I would say that's an organization that does this, did this really well.

Yeah. I would say their leader now is even better, in my opinion. So, yeah, he's got a very strong, lean background. So. Yeah. So, yeah, what, what practical tips do you have for folks that are like, this sounds good, I want to try to, to get better at this. Are there just some takeaways that somebody listening right now? Perhaps they are a, you know, they're running a high stakes meeting two weeks from now. What can they be doing?

Yeah, so let's come back to that. And we call it the Popper model, which stands for purpose, objectives, process. Right. Roles and agreements. The first thing they can be doing is making sure they can answer for themselves why we're here, what we're doing, how we're going to. And then think about how I need to design the meeting and then what roles really need to be there. And it's also important to think about who shouldn't be there right now. There's fomo, right we have fear of missing out. We over invite people, they think they are now part of the decision. So we really need to be clear based on the objectives, who should be there. And so the first tip is get clear yourself. And then the second tip is you've got to spend time on takeoff getting the group clear. So many times what happens is we assume the group's clear, we throw them into the meeting and we just bounce off other people's agendas, other people's objectives for the meeting. That's a simple tip. Don't have a meeting unless you can answer those questions and then make sure you answer them for the group before you let them fly the plane. Another very practical tip for holding space especially it's only in virtual meetings, is what we use a lot to hold space from a diversity inclusion standpoint is what we call a simultaneous chat. People just don't take advantage of the fact that, that you have this chat feature there. We often pose questions to groups and we ask the group to wait before they hit enter on the chat so that everyone's sitting there looking what the senior person, the hippo, wants to say. So by posing the question and asking the group to wait and type their answer in the chat and then submit everything simultaneously, it holds space for all voices. And you can then pull people in that might not speak those people speaking English as a second language, right? All the categories of diversity. And that is a simple tip people use the other tip, leave time to land. We jam packed the agenda with way too many things. The second place we get major plane crashes is on landing. And the trap we get into, let's say we have seven agenda items and we only got through the fifth and we're in the middle of the sixth agenda item. What starts happening is instead of landing, people try to get through the sixth and seventh agenda and people drop off the call, they're gone, they have a three o'. Clock. And again, staying with that plane metaphor, you know, if the plane's running out of fuel and time is fuel, we don't say to the pilot, fly faster. What we say is find a field and land. So the third tip is land. Because if we let people drop off our meetings, unclear who's going to do what by when, right? So there's a clear action plan. Then we had even if we ran an elegant high stakes facilitated meeting, right? The whole meeting was a plane crash because people escaped. And there's nothing happening between this meeting and the next meeting of the task force or the project team.

Got it? Got it. Good stuff, man. So maybe as we're wrapping things up, I'm wondering if you could. We have a lot of like, you know, say what we'd call practitioners who aren't necessarily leaders who are listening to this right now and they're like, yeah, that sounds great. My leadership stinks at this. What do I do? So maybe speak to that person. Like what, what are some things that they could do to potentially, you know, gently influence their leadership?

Yeah. I mean, you're talking now about the broader change and transformation process in an organization where a Jack Welch at the C team level.

Yeah.

He took something and it doesn't matter, right. Whether you're using, you know, lean or agile, you. The, the organization has to embrace it from the C team on down. So it is hard for me as a practitioner in a giant bureaucracy to have that influence. And I can only influence so much. Now one of the things I can do, and people sit in meetings run by senior people who are not very skilled. And people don't hate meetings. Right. What they hate is wasting time. Now another tip, if I come back to. And this gets to continuous improvement at the meeting level, there's continuous improvement. So one of the things I always want to do with the group in landing the plane is bring the group's attention to its own dynamic process wise. Right. Do an after action review. Some people call it A plus delta. Now where I'm in other people's meetings and this takes some leadership courage. Asking the senior person running the meeting, would it be helpful to you if I offered some feedback and coaching after the meeting where we could look at this? And so they may say no, but most of them are like, yeah, I'd like to be better. And so if we do that and we are put ourselves in a position where we can be doing the feedback and continuous improvement, at least we're trying to shift that meeting. Now at the broader level, I don't have a lot of control on that. But what I can control is the meetings I lead first and foremost and then the meetings I attend. I can be a collaborative participant. And that's what we're training people to do, is really change the culture of performance at the meeting level. Because if we do that, we can transform the organization.

Well, even the example where you give on the chat and simultaneously hit enter like the frontline person could say, hey or whisper it to the leader. How about we try this?

Okay.

And then. Yeah, there you go. You just made a positive impact.

Yeah. And we're training people now how to fly the Plane using mural and shared spreadsheets. Because there's five core things we're really teaching people. One, framing. Takeoff that Popper model, right. We've talked about to the art of holding space. Right? So using things like storyboarding and mural, we did this all face to face. Or people don't realize what they can get done in a shared edited spreadsheet. And having good process structure ensures we're going to get the right decision made. The third thing, and this is hard to teach, the art of handling challenging people. Unfortunately, people show up at our meetings and we're all, you know, dysfunctional human beings. And so it is not easy, especially with senior people, to know how to engage the group to manage the challenging people. The fourth thing then, of course we're teaching them is landing the plane. And the fifth thing is good design before you show up. And so really those fundamentals and we keep it very spartan and simple. If you know how to do that, you can wow people because the bar is low. I mean, we've asked two questions of people for 30 years. One is how many meetings take place in your organization in a giant company like GE that there could be 500,000 in a day? Right. And the second question, which is based on scale, actually not based on the size of the organization or scale, is what's the percent of effectiveness of the meetings that you attend? And I can't tell you how many times people say 50% or lower. And I sit here with clients, I said this is insane from a straight productivity performance standpoint because senior people spend at least 50% of their time in meetings. And the math on that is if they're going to spend 50% of their time in meetings and only work eight hour days, they will literally spend a year's worth of their life in meetings in under nine years. I do not know how organizations tolerate this from a straight productivity and performance answer perspective. And that's what we're trying to target is continuous improvement at the most fundamental level of the organization, which is a high stakes workshop meeting. Love it.

Fantastic. Well, Evan, if folks wanted to connect with you or learn more about your services and whatnot, what's the best way?

I just go to my LinkedIn page, right? I mean, our website's a mouthful. I mean, you can, you know, Google Evan Unger Schwartz and Associates and I'll pop up. Or I think there's only, I look last time, I think there's only six Evan Ungers on there. I'll be the one with the goofy grin and a blue shirt. But if you, if you look on my LinkedIn page, our website is there and we always invite people to give our program a trial and deeply discount it for them because we know, you know, people are a little skeptical. If you learn this set of skills, this will help you being a great Lean or Lean Six Sigma leader because it's fun. Fundamental to being, you know, continuous improvement is just being good at facilitation and collaboration.

Love it. Fantastic. And we're going to link everything up in the show notes. Everybody knows the drill to scroll down on your app, whatever you're listening to and go connect with Evan and, and yeah, man. Hey, I appreciate you coming on. This has been a lot of fun, Ron.

I really appreciate it and it's great meeting you. Thank you.

All right, take care. Thank you. Thanks for listening. Whether you've been on the continuous improvement journey for many years or perhaps you're just getting started, Gemba Academy is here to support you. And while we're best known for our more than 1500 lean and 6 Sigma teaching and virtual tour videos, we also have a team of experienced Lean and Six Sigma practitioners available for one on one coaching, as well as a variety of Lean and Sigma Sigma certification options. To learn more and to schedule a demo, head on over to gembaacademy.com.