Is Your Team Meeting Full of Arguments?

Photo by Shane Rounce on Unsplash

A Tool to Help Build Consensus

Leaders have to find ways to create psychological safety for their teammates. Otherwise, the team stops being willing to try innovative ideas.

Psychological safety is a belief that no one will be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concern, or mistakes. — Amy Edmondson, “Building a psychologically safe workplace” (TEDx Talk)

I recently worked as a Product Manager on a project where I didn’t know my teammates well, and I sensed it was impeding us from brainstorming ideas openly.

The solution? I made us all read.

After learning about how Amazon runs meetings in the book Leading Change at Work (2019) by Adam Braus, I decided to take a new approach before each meeting on our team.

As simple as it sounds, I want to share this technique because I believe it might just become your superpower to increase the creativity and consensus on your team as well!

The “Narrative” Technique for Team Consensus

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

Here are the steps to follow:

1. Before the meeting, go to each member individually. Ask them one-on-one what their ideas are on the topic you’ll be going over.

2. Collect all the team members’ input — feedback, ideas, concerns, questions, etc. — in a document.

3. Then, write a 1-page “narrative” for the meeting, in the format of an SBAR document:

• S — the Situation. What’s the meeting even about?
• B — the Background. Why is this topic important?
• A — the Assessment. Here you can place the agenda of the meeting. This helps show yourself and others how what you’ll be doing in the meeting, is actually related to solving the issue at hand.
• R — the Recommendation. This is where the ideas you have gathered from your team belong. What does each of the team members think should be done about the problem?

4. At the start of the meeting, you must ask all team members (including yourself) to read the narrative you wrote, silently.

Here you may wonder, “is this really necessary? If so, why can’t I just have my teammates read the narrative on their own, before the meeting?”

This is a perfectly valid question, and I must admit I asked it myself.

The short answer to this concern, is a definite NO. Because let’s face it, people don’t read.

For the long answer that gives more insight, look to the following clip (you only need the first 30 seconds), coming from none other than Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos:

Your teammates are busy people. Even if you write the narrative, chances are you will need to make time specifically for them to read it.

5. Now, use what you have learned about each teammate’s opinion, to ease the group into talking through whatever disagreements there may be, on the best way to move forward.

Your intention here is not necessarily to force a decision, but to facilitate collaboration. Part of the job as a leader is make people feel that their ideas have been heard and respected, and this is easier to do now that everyone knows each other’s opinion, and where the diagreements lie.

In his book, Braus suggests a few example phrases you can use to open up the conversation(page 144), in a way that’s both non-confrontational and productive:

• “Matthew shared with me an interesting idea…”
• “Alison had more to add to that idea…”
• “But, Cory, you didn’t think that Matthew’s idea would work, can you walk us through your concerns?”

You’ll find that most of time, your team members and you will be much more thoughtful when discussing new ideas.

How to Get Started With Narratives

Once you have experienced what it’s like to work on a team with psychological safety, you’ll see it has all kinds of beneficial effects:

When people feel safe, they take on more new ideas.

When people feel safe, they’re better at making others feel safe.

Even stormtroopers need to work on teams. Photo by Saksham Gangwar on Unsplash.

When I implemented this on our team, the other teammates loved it and it became a standard practice. This technique helped us through some of our most heated debates with actionable to-dos, and remembering that when we disagreed, it was with the other person’s ideas, not the person themself.

I cannot guarantee you will have the same results as we had. I encourage you to try this approach and continue iterating on it, to better fit your specific culture. If you’re interested in learning more about driving new ideas in organizations of all sizes, from whatever position you hold, I honestly recommend you pick up a copy of Braus’ Leading Change at Work, and it will teach you a lot more than what I’ve covered here.

Go forth and innovate!