In a recent post, I explored the techniques of toxic disrupters — people who repeatedly disrupt meetings for reasons of their own. Whether by violating norms, demanding attention, messing with the agenda, or sowing distrust, or any other tactic, they manage to halt forward progress, or worse, to generate negative progress.
The temptation to eject them from the meeting can be difficult to resist. A preferable outcome would be to bring them into the fold — to guide them back to a productive role within the group. That's the basis of the approach I sketch in this post, which includes suggestions for a set of tactics that can bring about that result for a specific set of cases.
The cases The temptation to eject disrupters from the meeting
or the group can be difficult to resist. A preferable
outcome would be to bring them into the fold — to
guide them back to a productive role within the group.that respond to this approach include those I regard as well meaning. This class excludes those that might be said to involve saboteurs and coup plotters. The former are people whose objective is purely subversion of the group conducting the meetings. The latter are those who want to seize control of the group, or failing that, to subvert it. Because these cases are complex and rare, I'll address them in future posts.
For the present, my focus is the individual group member who intends to prevent the group from proceeding in the manner it has chosen, making progress towards the objective it has chosen. In what follows, I'll refer to the Disrupter as David (he/him) or Diane (she/her).
Demotivational techniques
The core concept of the approach is to apply techniques that cause David/Diane to experience intense discouragement and frustration, because his/her tactics are utterly unproductive.
- Strengthen alliances
- As noted in that previous post, Diane might try to sow distrust among group members. Strengthening alliances can render this tactic of hers quite useless. Meetings of members of the alliances might be required.
- Revisit your group norms
- A set of norms for respectful discussion is a useful tool for controlling David. If your group hasn't established norms, you'll find it helpful. Examples that are especially useful are bans on interrupting others, deviating from the agenda, raising one's voice, and disparaging the character of others.
- Deploy a Norm Check protocol
- A "norm check" occurs when any member of the group feels that the discussion has led to a violation of one or more norms. That member can then call out "Norm Check" or another agreed-upon signal. At that point the discussion halts and the Chair interviews the person who called the check. After taking appropriate remedial action, the Chair restarts the discussion. This tactic can be an effective means of obtaining compliance with established norms.
- Delegate responsibility
- In meetings of size greater than five or six, it's beneficial to delegate to participants some of the work of running the meeting. Delegation can then also serve as a means of integrating Diane into the group. For example, appointing Diane to the office of Timekeeper can help to change her focus from disruption to process maintenance. Other roles that can also serve in this way are Facilitator, Designated Digression Detector, Scribe, and Parking Lot Valet.
Last words
Using these tactics is one approach to ending the disruptions David/Diane is creating. More important, this approach preserves the possibility of saving the relationship between the disrupter and the group. If at any point either the group or the disrupter determines that achieving that goal is so unlikely as to make investing in further efforts difficult to justify, terminating the effort is the best option. Until then, it's certainly worth a try. Top Next Issue
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Related articles
More articles on Effective Meetings:
- Take Any Seat: I
- When you attend a meeting, how do you choose your seat? Whether you chair or not, where you sit helps
to determine your effectiveness and your stature during the meeting. Here are some tips for choosing
your seat strategically.
- Naming Ideas
- Participants in group discussions sometimes reference each other's contributions using the contributor's
name. This risks offending the contributor or others who believe the idea is theirs. Naming ideas is
less risky.
- Start the Meeting with a Check-In
- Check-ins give meeting attendees a chance to express satisfaction or surface concerns about how things
are going. They're a valuable aid to groups that want to stay on course, or get back on course when needed.
- Polychronic Meetings
- In very dynamic contexts, with multiple issues to address, we probably cannot rely on the usual format
of single-threaded meeting with a list of agenda items to be addressed each in their turn. A more flexible,
issue-driven format might work better.
- Antipatterns for Time-Constrained Communication: II
- Recognizing just a few patterns that can lead to miscommunication can reduce the incidence of miscommunications.
Here's Part II of a collection of antipatterns that arise in communication under time pressure, emphasizing
those that depend on content.
See also Effective Meetings and Effective Meetings for more related articles.
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