Fostering the Right Climate

In advocacy situations, people tend to offer only the information that supports their case and omit details that might weaken it.

To help your group generate creative solutions to problems and evaluate them critically, choose diverse settings for your meetings. Such settings might include conference rooms that you don’t typically work in, off-site locations, or a familiar location with the furniture rearranged to facilitate face-to-face discussion. When people are removed from traditional settings they tend to speak more freely because they feel less constrained by office hierarchies.

Consider the following scenario: A manager at a software development company has been charged with assigning limited resources to the firm’s current projects. The manager calls a meeting with all of the project leaders to discuss how the resources will be allocated. The discussion quickly turns into an argument. Each project leader advocates for his or her project. The debate gets heated as the conversation goes around in circles, and each project manager decides to assign the limited resources to three projects. The project managers leave the meeting exhausted and frustrated.

What went wrong? The manager did not manage the decision making process effectively, and the meeting deteriorated into an advocacy mode. The project leaders viewed the meeting as a competition. They advocated for their positions without considering the needs of other departments or the company as a whole. In advocacy situations, people tend to offer only the information that supports their case and omit details that might weaken it. As a result, the discussion can quickly deteriorate into personal attacks, giving rise to negative emotions.

ACTION POINT: Create an open atmosphere of ideas for effective meetings.