The Problem
As the referee, a facilitator, product owner, or scrum master, in your company, how do you create and maintain a safe and productive team environment?
The Solution
Prepare an Agenda – All meetings must include an agenda that the facilitator distributes to participants before the meeting and uses to keep sessions on track.
Maintain the Schedule – Meetings are often intense. Productivity depends on keeping meetings short or at least with many breaks. While an all-day meeting is eight hours, actual meeting time is six hours when accounting for four breaks and lunch. Schedule meetings for less time instead of more. The clock pressures everyone to stay on point and it is much more productive if you hold a series of short meetings instead of a single marathon session.
Respect your team by starting and ending on time. The first meeting must follow this regimen to immediately set an example. Arriving late or leaving early only says you think you are more important than your teammates. Remind participants about the impact of their behavior, specifically a pattern of late arrival and early departure. This behavior undermines the power of mutual respect, critical to collaborative success. However, be sure to let everyone know that reasonable exceptions are acceptable, e.g., emergencies and requesting permission to arrive late or leave early before attending a meeting.
Track Open Issues – The facilitator records open issues to avoid getting off track trying to resolve problems immediately. Record each problem in front of the team so they can contribute to documenting the issue correctly. Participants often resolve these issues in subsequent sessions. The facilitator should report critical issues to the project manager or sponsor(s) to ensure immediate attention and resolution. The facilitator is also responsible for distributing any remaining open issues to appropriate parties, tracking resolution, and reporting results to session participants timely.
Require Attendance – Occasionally a participant will send a substitute in their place. This is not allowed except under special circumstances. Participants, such as a project team, join these sessions for the duration of the project. Substitutes do not work because it forces delays while they learn about collaborating with instead of contributing to the team. Participants that repeatedly fail to attend or send a substitute require attention. The facilitator needs to meet with them, find out why they are not attending, and resolve the problem.
In those special circumstances, when a substitute replaces someone who is no longer available, the facilitator meets with and educates the new participant both in advance of the first attended meeting and after each meeting until the new member fully integrates into the team.
Summarize the results of the current session at the end each meeting and document and send a summary to everyone, including absentees, before the next session.
The team takes over and the dominator complies because of the team not the facilitator. The facilitator’s strongest ally is the team. Peer pressure is the most powerful tool available to the facilitator. The team quells the dominator and the facilitator remains neutral and objective from the dominator’s perspective. This also takes advantage of good suggestions often offered by dominators without letting them control the session.
Stop Digressions – The facilitator needs to keep the session on its agenda. Use participants’ names when talking to them. This tends to startle digressers into improving their attention. Use name tent cards during initial sessions to help participants remember the names of fellow members.
Alternatively bring a treat like high quality chocolate to distribute as an informal break and keep people attentive.
Conduct Purposeful Interruptions – The facilitator should monitor discussion and know when to interrupt. Participants repeat themselves. This usually indicates it is time for the facilitator to summarize the decision, ask for team agreement, document their decision, and move to the next agenda topic.
Awaken Shy Participants – Each participant attends these sessions because they have something to contribute. If a participant is shy, the facilitator needs to ask them direct questions to ensure the team benefits from this participant’s contribution.
End Distractions – Participants send email, text, engage in side conversations, and so on. These distractions diminish team effectiveness. Sometimes there are legitimate interruptions, for example, the transplant surgeon must leave the meeting because the long-awaited donor just arrived. However, legitimate interruptions are exceedingly rare.
Source
Coplan, Scott and David Masuda, Project Management for Healthcare Information Technology, McGraw-Hill, Inc., New York, NY, 2011.
