This is a response to Scott McLeod’s call for posts for Leadership Day 2009.
No meeting should ever start without the input of every member of your organization. Computer and communications technologies provide an unprecendented number of options for soliciting, collecting, and aggregating ideas from large numbers of people.
- Ask a question. Make sure the question is related to the goal of the meeting. If you don’t have a goal, ask for suggested goals.
- Collect input from any person willing to throw in their two cents. Open multiple channels of communication to get more diverse input. Email, voicemail messages, web forms, blogs, wikis, or suggestion boxes with slips of paper allow people to engage where they are comfortable.
- Aggregate the input appropriately and review the input before the meeting. Without aggregation, the input of your members is overwhelming. Too much aggregation will scrub the input of any authenticity.
- Conduct the meeting. Set an expectation that each participant in the meeting will audibly refer to some idea in the input at least once during the meeting.
- Tell the story of the meeting and publish it. This seeds interest and ideas for the next call for input for the next meeting.
Certainly, there are cases where this procedure would need to be modified. If the goal of a meeting is related to sensitive information, then the questions and stories that are told must be sufficiently vague. Sensitive subject material is not an excuse for closing off the meeting from input.
Ultimately, this procedure for conducting meetings is not about technology. It’s about valuing and engaging every member of an organization. It’s about generating buy-in for policies and programs rather than mandating compliance from the top down. Technology (when carefully implemented) simply accelerates the process of engaging and conversing with large numbers of people.
And yet … if you have a school with 100 teachers and every meeting needs to have input from all of those members, I can see the entire system buckling under the weight of ideas. And conflicting ideas, too, at times (I am thinking now of several examples during my own staff meetings).
I wonder if what you mean is that a true leader knows when and how to solicit input from the members of the network (ie, the school) and then uses that input to make a meeting worthwhile, engaging and of value.
In my mind, I need my administrator to open up conversations, collect feedback, gather more feedback if warranted and then make a decision that moves us forward in way that most of us feel satisfied with.
Great post and very thoughtful.
Thanks
Kevin
I think the tools of aggregation are sophisticated enough that even in large organizations, mere mortals can collect input and tease out common threads and useful ideas. And honestly, I’m not sure any survey on any topic will evoke responses from 100% of the members of an organization.
If the topic or decision is important enough to require a meeting, isn’t it also important enough to do some research?