Facilitation and meetings
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7 min read
Key findings
A disagreement in a leadership meeting concerns facts, options or decision rights, and each is settled differently.
Conflict intensity runs on five levels, and a meeting can handle differences, misunderstandings and disagreements but not discord or polarization.
The response runs in order of force: structure, neutral naming, a break, and removal from the agenda with an owner.
Dissent recorded with the decision gives an objection a route other than the corridor.
Personal conflict is not resolved in the meeting, and trying to resolve it in front of an audience makes it permanent.
Managing conflict in a leadership meeting starts with naming which disagreement the group is having, whether about facts, options or who decides.
Each needs a different response.
The facilitator then responds in order of force, using structure first, neutral naming second and a break third.
A matter that cannot be settled goes off the agenda with a named time, named participants and an owner.
The dissent is recorded, so that the decision is not reopened in corridors.
Three Disagreements In One Meeting
Two directors arguing are usually arguing about one of three things, and the group often does not know which.
Facts. The two hold different data, or read the same data differently
Options. They agree on the facts and prefer different courses of action
Decision rights. Neither knows who decides, or one believes the decision is already theirs
A useful test is to ask what would settle the argument.
A fact is settled by someone looking it up.
An option is settled by agreeing the criteria first and then comparing the options against them.
A dispute about decision rights is settled by the person who owns the decision saying so, and no amount of further discussion by the group resolves it.
Facilitators who treat all three as a temperature problem spend the meeting cooling people down while the actual question stays open.
How Hot The Disagreement Is
Craig Runde and Tim Flanagan describe five levels of conflict intensity, and the level shapes the response.
Differences. People see the situation differently, understand each other and feel no discomfort
Misunderstandings. What one person understood differs from what another understood
Disagreements. People see it differently and feel discomfort about that
Discord. The conflict damages the relationship, even when the people are discussing something else
Polarization. Severe negative emotion, recruiting of supporters and unwillingness to take the other's view
At the first level they recommend embracing and exploring the difference, and at the second, checking for understanding and summarising.
Disagreement, the midpoint, is the delicate one.
They advise taking care of the relationship or emotions first, and then stating one's own thoughts and feelings clearly.
Their remedy for discord is persistent listening, acknowledgement and summarising between the individuals concerned, which a meeting has no time for.
A meeting can therefore work on the first three levels, and discord and polarization belong in a conversation outside it.
Escalation Of Conflict
Runde and Flanagan describe a chain that runs before anyone speaks.
People form conclusions from incomplete data, and when they feel their interests are threatened they attribute the other person's actions to flaws or sinister motives.
They then conclude that the other person is a threat and needs to be punished, and the emotions that follow feed further negative thinking.
All of this happens very quickly, and their advice for an individual is to cool down, slow down and engage constructively, in that order.
For the person running a meeting, the practical consequence is that the interpretation does the damage, and it forms in the seconds after the first sharp exchange.
Preparing Before The Meeting
Preparation for a contested meeting is done in two steps.
The first is to settle which decision the meeting has to reach, who holds it and by which rule, as set out in workshops that end in decisions.
The second concerns the facilitator's own reactions.
Runde and Flanagan list nine behaviours in other people that trigger conflict, called hot buttons, among them abrasive, aloof, hostile, overly analytical and unappreciative.
Before a contested meeting, ask two questions.
Which behaviour in this meeting will irritate me personally
What will I do in the ten seconds after it happens
A facilitator who has not answered the second question reacts instead of intervening.
Naming The Disagreement
The intervention that changes a contested meeting is short.
Roger Schwarz and colleagues describe a sequence of describing what was said, testing whether the speaker agrees, sharing what you infer from it and testing that as well.
They advise against skipping steps when a conflict is high or the participants have a history of misunderstanding one another.
For example, a finance director wants to freeze hiring and an operations director wants to hire eight technicians before the summer.
"Rania, you said the cash position rules out any hire this quarter. Tom, you said the summer schedule cannot be met without eight technicians. Is that right?"
Both say yes, and the facilitator continues.
"It sounds as if you are both describing the same decision, and each is using a different measure. Is that fair?"
Then the facilitator stops talking and waits.
Most people running a meeting speak again within three seconds, and the intervention is lost.
Interventions In Order Of Force
A contested discussion needs a graduated response.
Structure. A round, or a switch to written input
Naming. A neutral description of what is happening, as above
A break. Taken before it is obviously needed
Removal from the agenda. The last resort
Structure comes first because it costs nothing and often changes the dynamic.
A break interrupts the rumination Runde and Flanagan describe, and they list taking a time-out to cool down as one of seven constructive behaviours.
Removing a matter from the agenda needs a commitment, which is a named time, a named participant list and an owner.
A person whose objection is never recorded has no route except the corridor.
A Dominant Sponsor
An internal facilitator often runs a meeting in which the loudest voice is the chief executive or the facilitator's own sponsor.
Sam Kaner and colleagues note that groups tend to defer to the person in charge and offer several counters.
Have people write before they speak
Take a round with the person in charge speaking last
Break into small groups for part of the discussion
Hold part of the discussion without the person in charge
The arrangement is agreed with the sponsor before the meeting, in a private conversation, and is presented as protection for the sponsor's decision.
The conversation follows the method in challenging a leader you advise.
A decision reached with false agreement is fragile, and Kaner observes that group members often give the boss the advice they think the boss wants.
Task Conflict And Personal Conflict
Two kinds of disagreement look alike in a meeting and need different handling.
Task conflict concerns what to do, and a group that never has it is not examining anything.
Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg summarise a study of task and relationship conflict in top management teams by Simons and Peterson.
Task conflict was highly correlated with relationship conflict, which leads to poorer decisions and lower morale.
The study's conclusion was that trust should come first, since trusting teams still disagree but with less emotional rancour.
Hamilton and Kroll draw a similar line.
Their ground rules for productive conflict are that ideas are separate from the person and that feedback is descriptive, not evaluative.
A practical test is whether the disagreement survives a change of subject.
Where two people disagree about the plan and agree about the budget, the conflict concerns the task.
Where they disagree about everything, including matters they previously agreed on, it concerns the relationship.
Personal conflict is not resolved in the meeting, and trying to resolve it in front of an audience makes it permanent.
Recording The Disagreement
The record is what lets a disagreement end in a decision.
It has four lines for each decision.
The decision, in one sentence
The owner, named
The first action and its date
Any dissent, attributed
Kaner's Gradients of Agreement scale gives the group a vocabulary for degrees of support, and the poll result becomes the record of where each person stood.
A person whose objection is never recorded has no route except the corridor.
The fuller method for closing a session is in workshops that end in decisions.
The Corridor Version
A frequent failure comes after the meeting.
The chair smooths the conflict, the meeting moves on, and the disagreement continues in corridors with different accounts of what was decided.
It comes back weeks later, attached to an unrelated item.
Three signs show that it is happening.
The same topic returns under a different agenda item
Two people give different accounts of the same decision
The action agreed has no owner
Runde and Flanagan describe cultures of yielding, often in organisations that call themselves nice, where people quietly go along with the person who holds a strong view.
The cost they name is lower innovation and poorer decision quality, because the person who yielded may have had the better idea.
The Facilitator As A Party
An internal facilitator is sometimes one of the two parties, and running the process as if neutral in that situation loses the group.
Three honest moves exist.
Say that you are a party and hand the process to someone else
Separate the roles in time, running the session first and contributing as a participant at the end
Withdraw from the decision and put your position in writing
Whichever is chosen, say it aloud before the meeting instead of after the accusation.
Agreements Set In Advance
Leadership teams that handle disagreement well usually agreed how before they needed to.
Four agreements cover most of it and take twenty minutes to set.
Disagreement is raised in the meeting, not after it
Anyone may call for a pause
Decisions are recorded with dissent attributed
Nobody reopens a decision in private
The fourth fails without the third, because an objection that was never recorded has no other outlet.
Runde and Flanagan ask leaders to consider what conflict costs, including whether people keep quiet, avoid rigorous discussion and settle for mediocre compromises.
Three costs can be named to a leadership team.
Decisions taken twice, because the first version was never agreed
Work that slows where two functions' leaders avoid each other
People leaving a team for reasons described as career moves
Where The Tools Sit
Trusted Talent Advisor covers the meeting interventions in its facilitation component and the two-person conversation in its stakeholder conversation component.
Its template pack includes the session agreements and the decision record.
Related reading: leadership offsite agenda, virtual workshop facilitation.
Sources
1. Runde, C. E. and Flanagan, T. A. Developing Your Conflict Competence: A Hands-On Guide for Leaders, Managers, Facilitators, and Teams. Jossey-Bass and the Center for Creative Leadership.
2. Schwarz, R., Davidson, A., Carlson, P. and McKinney, S. The Skilled Facilitator Fieldbook. Jossey-Bass.
3. Kaner, S., Lind, L., Toldi, C., Fisk, S. and Berger, D. Facilitator's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making. Jossey-Bass.
4. Schmidt, E., Rosenberg, J. and Eagle, A. Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell. Harper Business.
5. Hamilton, C. and Kroll, T. L. Communicating for Results: A Guide for Business and the Professions. Cengage.
From the system
Trusted Talent Advisor sets out the full method: seven components, 51 tools, The Talent Template Pack and The Prompt Library.
See the system
Questions this answers
How do you handle conflict in a meeting?
Name whether the disagreement concerns facts, options or decision rights, then respond in order of force: a round or written input, a neutral description of what is happening, a break, and removal from the agenda with a named owner.
How does a facilitator manage disagreement between senior leaders?
Describe what each person said, check that you have it right, share your inference about the difference, and then stop talking. Agree with the sponsor beforehand how to handle a senior voice, and record dissent alongside the decision.
What do you do when two executives argue in a meeting?
Take a break before it is obviously needed, or move to written input. If the argument is personal and survives a change of subject, take it out of the meeting to a private conversation with a named time and owner.
How do you encourage healthy disagreement in meetings?
Agree four rules beforehand: disagreement is raised in the meeting, anyone may call a pause, decisions are recorded with dissent attributed, and nobody reopens a decision in private. Separate ideas from people when giving feedback.
Should you stop a meeting when conflict escalates?
Pause it before anyone says something they will defend later. A break interrupts the rumination that follows a sharp exchange. Stop the item, not the meeting, and return with a named time and owner if it is unresolved.
How do you get to a decision when the team disagrees?
Establish who owns the decision and by which rule before the meeting. Write a proposal, poll the group on it, and let the owner decide with the dissent recorded. A dispute about decision rights is settled only by that owner saying so.
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