Reflective entry by Yuchen

My role as a coachee:

This week’s coaching session was really helpful to me. After talking about my “terrible experience” with a mal-functional team, my coach helped me realize that during team building process, communication and inspection are both important. He demonstrated this with an example of scientists and engineers who collaborate to complete a task. As the scientists need to plan for the project, they also need to communicate with engineers and make sure that the engineers understand the purpose of the process they designed in order for better participation of all members. An important lesson I learnt from this story is that each member, no matter what his role is, must understand the goal of the team so that they won’t feel that they don’t belong to it.

In my team, what happened was that the new member of the team might feel she was “the third wheel of a bicycle”. With the help of my coach, I realized that it’s important for team leader to periodically inspect the commitment of his team members and ask about their opinion. As a result, team members, including the new comers would be encouraged sharing their opinions without being afraid of break the harmony within the team, and therefore they would participate and engage themselves more to the team activities.

In addition, I realized that on the other hand, it was her (new comer’s) responsibility as well to be more proactive. All of us should make extra efforts to “rock the boat” since the problem won’t come out themselves and the team building processes won’t flow without intervention.

My role as a coach:

For another time, I was really inspired by how Awa talked about the skillful leader that she had worked with. She had briefly mentioned this leader in the session of last week. I had a sense that she was really impressed and convinced by the leader. However, to my surprise, she told me that this manager wasn’t a charismatic leader and it’s not the manager’s personality that made him an admirable leader. She explained that the manager was actually a successor of a very popular manager who intended to influence his subordinates by building personal relationship and turning this into his own personal assets. However, the new manager conducted a very different way. Although he has kept suitable distance with his subordinates, he made them feel that he was accessible and he would listen to their opinions. In addition, he used very creative way to organize the meetings. In short, the manager has demonstrated that he had the competency in commutation and management so that his subordinates would follow him.

great team and great leaders by Awa DIALLO

Just like all our coaching sessions, this one has been very educational in our different perceptions of good teams. However, we all worked in different environments, one aspect is always found in our experiences, effective team working goes through effective communication.

David emphasised this aspect at his workplace by explaining how in meetings where technicians, engineers and managers are present, one needs to make sure that technicians knows and understand that their opinion and thoughts about the task are needed. They must contribute to the good outcome of the meetings and the great performance of the teams. Not just by being able to do what engineers ask them to do; but by also being able to analyse a situations suggests better ways to perform a task.

Bob had a bad experience when working in a team that ended splitting up because one of the members left the team. That team member did not speak up for her ideas and she was following the lead of the two other team member. Writing about it now, I think, made Bob realised that they might not have given her the opportunity to express her feelings and thoughts about the subject they were analysing at the time. I learned that in the Chinese culture, you do not oppose to what the majority is saying. That resulted in a team member that did not agree with the team’s choices and could not say it. All the frustration could have been avoided if the team was aware of her difficulties to speak up for her ideas, and if they made her feel and understand that her suggestions were essential for the team’s performance.   

Depending on our experiences, we learned different lessons that I believe will make us great managers. Indeed, as an MBA student and a Future manager, I understand that I have to make every member of the team I am supervising understand and know for sure that their opinion is needed for the wellbeing of the team; considering any restrictions that they may have, either cultural or personal. From my own experience, I know that to get people committed to their workplace, a great manager has the duty to make them understand that they are an essential part of the company; for the company to be at its best, they all need to perform their best.

teamwork reflective posting DDemers

In general, I must state that this coaching exercise (teamwork) was much easier - the opinions and lessons learned seemed to flow out much more easily.  In our "meetings" coaching sessions there were occasional awkward silences, while during the teamwork coaching sessions even our observers could not resist adding their observations into the coaching conversations.

As a coach this session was very "rewarding" as my coachee seemed to have learned a lot from his personal before-coaching blog and also during the coaching session.  His experience was a team that "ended badly", partially due to inequalities among the team members.  At the end of the coaching session he came to realize that team progression through the "forming-norming-storming-performing" stages had dependencies on cultural and even personal backgrounds.  He came to realize that when some team members had already made it to the norming stage (due to previously being on the same team), it is important to make extra efforts to help "new" team members feel like they are part of the team.  However, the new team member also has some responsibility, it is not just up to the existing team members to take the initiative to ensure that the team structure naturally enlarges itself.

As a coachee I came to understand that communications, in particular effective communications, are critical to effective teamwork for team reports.  The team that I had given as an example (MRK class) used Facebook as a means of coordinating.  At certain points in our teamwork communications, there were so many new postings that the important messages were sometimes falling through the cracks.  The fact that we virtually never had face-to-face meetings meant that it was difficult to communicate messages to all members of the team and have "deeper more philosophical" discussions of what are the important points to be included within our marketing team assignments.  The only way to assert one's ideas within the group dynamics is to put text within the report that is being revised and updated from time to time.  I have low self-confidence in the "writing about marketing" skills, and low self-confidence in my writing in French skills, so I find it difficult to assert my ideas in this particular framework.  This fundamental comprehension of my weaknesses (inability to assert in such cases) is part of the reason behind me changing my MBA program from Global Business to Supply Chain Management (SCM).  The coursework in SCM will be in French, but it is a more "quantitative" subject area and I will fell much more comfortable being assertive in teamwork situations.

The characteristics of a team by Yuchen

It’s not easy to accept failure, especially when it’s the failure of a whole team. In one of my other courses, we had a group of three people, two guys and one girl, and we were supposed to deliver two team projects. The first project is a group presentation of an analysis of Sport brand commercial, the other one is a 30 pages paper. Everything was on track until the first Tuesday after the reading week and one week before our presentation, when one of our teammates left the class. The rest of us were shocked, angered then confused. We managed to deliver the presentation but that was also the end of our group. We had to split up and look for other groups that would accept us for the last team project.

Now since I finally have some time to review what went sour in the team building process that lead to the unfortunate split. To be honest, I blamed her for weeks and never had a single thought of if it was me to be blamed and it actually is. Before she left, I thought our team was creative and effective because each time we met (once per two weeks but the other guy and I contacted often), we had solid progresses on the subject. The team also looked diversified in terms of different background, gender and capability, though we are all from China. One potential problem was none of us tent to lead the team, but at the moment we thought it was OK.

However, the real reason is underneath the peaceful surface. First, we didn't manage to create a friendly and trustful atmosphere for all of us. When the team was formed, the other teammate and I knew each other which made the girl a new comer to the team. However, either he or I bothered to establish the sense of security for the new comer; we just went directly to the business and thought that would be sufficient. As a result, we lost our magnetism and therefore, people no longer wanted to affiliate with this team. In addition, when one person in the team talked too much (it’d be me in our situation), the other members might feel unappreciated since they couldn't share their opinions equally. In the end, since nobody was in the middle to communicate with each member, we couldn't know what people's true feelings were, and finished our team with the split.

There are several things I think we could improve. First, create a trustful environment for the new comer as it’s the foundation of any teamwork. Second, have one person to lead the group. Last but not least, encourage all members to share opinion in order to facilitate the coherence and avoid from letting someone feel undervalued.

reflective posting from meetings - late, I forgot :-(

I found this coaching session the most difficult so far.  As a coachee I had difficulty coming up with good and poor meeting experiences.  However, after reading other blog posts and hearing other coach-coachees as observer, I came up with other examples.  I found that meetings of about one hour for passing messages throughout an organization are very effective.  I mentioned the framework of an upper management COmité des OPérations (COOP) meeting on Monday morning, followed by a meeting of section head, admin assistant and group leaders was very effective for passing messages and ensuring that communications channels were open.  While I was a group leader for a scientific group, we also found that having group meetings (when all members could be present) was very effective in helping to coordinate and ensure collaboration among the various R&D initiatives within the group.  When I was group leader for informatics personnel we had group meetings only occasionally since the informatics support function is mostly made up of individual interventions.  For the most part, ad hoc coordination was all that was needed.  Meetings were held mostly for periodic budgeting (determining how much money would be needed for software purchases, training, determining priorities etc.) and developping annual business plans.

As a coach I found it somewhat surprising how well the coachee was able to coordinate and brainstorm a group presentation with only limited interactions beforehand.  He said that the group felt energized (by the looming deadline :-) and really got their creative juices flowing.  As a group they were so pleased with the advancing of their work package that they did not realize that another meeting to polish up their group presentation was needed.  That is one thing that is very important to realize when doing group presentations.  Some people are very good at doing impromptu presentations and at understanding how to transition from one presenter to another, but it is not natural for all presenters.  Practicing beforehand is important to help ensure all are "on the same page".

I learnt from this exercise that there are many surprising twists and turns and detours on the road to running effective meetings.  Preparing beforehand and ensuring that all members are given the opportunity to "do their homework" in advance is critical to creating a smooth-running meeting.  Of course, not all meetings are meant to be smooth-running, an example being budgeting meetings where it is difficult to come to win-win solutions (there is only so much money to go around).  In cases such as these, and also where participants may not have the same understanding regarding the planned outcomes, it is critical for the meeting organizer to create a common understanding before the meeting starts.  With a common understanding of the desired outcomes from the meeting there is a much better chance for the discussions to stay "on topic" and ensure that all efforts reach toward the desired meeting goals.

Reflective entry by Yuchen

As coach, this week’s coaching session was conducted with three steps. First, we discussed the two scenes that she posted in the blog, more in details. Second, we evaluated the pros and cons of these meetings. Finally, we summarized the coaching with two questions: “what are the conditions of a successful meeting?” and “what are the competencies a manager should have to organize an effective meeting?” My expectation with these steps was that to help my coachee to crystallize the supportive factors of an effective meeting and the reason why participants were not engaged, and then I would conclude with the two questions to see if the coaching session has exceeded my expectations.

After the small talks to warm up a bit, we continued with my questions on the first meeting my coachee introduced in her blog. As she was saying, there were actually two types of meeting in her company, one was conducted on a weekly basis concerning employees’ performance, their KPI etc, and the other one was a 30-minute daily informative meeting concerning the sales data of each person. The organizer of the latter one was the manager on his shift at that day. According to my coachee, neither of them was constructive and effective until the intervention of top management due to the planning and preparation of the management team. As for the second meeting experience, my coachee expressed her learning on the situation where she was surrounded by senior employees who were mean to her at first.

In the next step, I planned to evaluate the pros and cons with two aspects, the aspect of manager and the aspect of meeting process. As we discussed, we found that the managerial skills, especially the communication skills of a manager are important since he will need to convince participants with authority as well as respect. The way he communicates in the meeting may influence the result whether it’s a decision-making or brainstorming meeting. On the other hand, we found that sometimes the participants are not fully engage with the meeting due to the clarity of the meeting purpose, the process and the planning. As my coachee’s first meeting experience shows, one way to improve the participants’ moral and commitment in an informative meeting is to recognize their work before discussing the statistics. My coachee connected this with motivation theory as the recognition of their works improved their job satisfaction and therefore motivated them. In this regards, they were more committed to the meeting.

Finally we concluded our coaching session with the two questions mentioned above, and I think my expectations were mainly exceeded. Personally I think this coaching session was really helpful as it actually gave me clear methods to organize my coaching process and I'm grateful for having Awa and David sharing their priceless experience on organizational meetings.

effective team leader by Awa Diallo

The assignment about meetings and interviews got me thinking about this manager that I had in my last workplace. To get workers interest about the meetings, he always tries to include activities that will involve all attenders’ participation. As I explained in a previous post, he included a sort of award ceremony in the weekly meetings in order to get employees involved and interested about the company’s key performance indicators, and all in a fun a way.

Therefore, during the whole week, employees always do their best in order to improve the company’s status; he was also able to implement a good competition spirit within the same team. That means we will still compete to get the best results, be we were all aware that all our efforts were to make the team perform well.

I think he was able to perform this well regarding those meetings because he was genuinely interested about the workers, and he had strong managerial and people skills. Even though he was a senior manager leading a group of employees half his age, he was able to find out what would get them more interested and increase their implication at the workplace.

Before taking actions, he observed and studied the whole group spirit and he was able to make everyone understand his opinion and feelings about the company, and he was able to make everyone feel the same way: we are all on the same boat and we need, each in our part, work our best, but still with each other, in order to make our boat move forward. 

coaching call conclusions by Awa Diallo

During this coaching call, I realised that we all had positive and negative meeting experiences but it was very constructive for all of us. David and I did not conduct a “5P” analysis of our meeting experiences, but during the coaching call, it was very interesting to see how our experiences happened differently but were kind of linked in the conclusions and lessons we learned from them.

The first one that I think is very important is the need of preparation beforehand. Indeed, if you and the team participant are not aware of the meeting purpose and are not prepared well, the meeting will be a waste of time.

Secondly, it is very important to be able to listen and get yourself listened, and all that goes through respect and effective communication. For example, speak loud enough for you to be heard, but do not scream at people. Define a purpose for your meeting and do not get away from it to avoid getting out of subject.

Also, not as easy and evident as it appears, but get everyone interested in what you are saying, be clear and concise on you intervention.

Most of the meetings we discussed were informative meetings, where the team leader had information to give to the meeting attenders; or where the leader needed to be debriefed in the current situation in the different sections of his company. However, David also talked about his brainstorming meeting experience that happened at his workplace. For those to be successful, it was necessary for everyone to be able to listen and build up on ideas that were previously suggested.

This coaching call really helped me understand what we needed to do for this week’s assignment. In fact, it was interesting to see how we can all learn from each other’s experiences and different perceptions of our experiences. When I thought that my meeting experience was bad, Yuchen thought it was a positive experience as I was able to get myself respected from older people.

Finally, we all understood that in our future meetings as managers, we need to respects some fundamentals (cited before) in order to conduct really successful meetings.

Positive meeting experience by Yuchen

I've had a very impressive and positive meeting last semester when the three of us met together in order to prepare our book presentation. Before the meeting, we had completed our slides and speech for the presentation individually, but we haven’t integrated our parts yet. So the goal of the meeting was very clear: we need to combine our parts and see if the book presentation can take shape. To explain in details the positive sides as well as some drawbacks of the meeting , I would like to conduct the 5Ps of Effective Meetings.

Purpose: I believe that we've done a good job with the first P. The meeting was called because we needed to share information. Since we prepared our parts separately and each one of us must had some information that others wouldn't know, it was important to meet together and see if we could combine the fragmented parts into a complete presentation. Much to our surprises, through the brainstorming process, we achieved our original goals successfully, and apart from that we also managed to change our platform for the presentation as well (from Powerpoint to Prezi).

Participants: In regard of Task–Process dimension of meeting composition, our meeting was balanced well between task and process. Indeed, it would be easier as our previous meetings normally started with some irrelevant small talks in order to create a comfort environment, but this time we decided to push ourselves to the task instead. However, changing our default styles brought us some confusion at the beginning because we didn't know to what degree we can accept the conflicts during the meeting. We all felt a little bit embarrassed when we had to “criticize” people, but by avoiding giving evaluative feedback, we had a good ambiance after all. Another lesson I learnt from this meeting is that we gave each other constructive advises and most importantly we recognized each other's work. Having experienced an unpleasant team, I realize that when you have to correct someone's wrong, it's better to start with the recognition of  his work otherwise he would probably be very defensive on your opinion. It'll only fuel the conflict.

Planning: The third P was the one we didn't put too many efforts into. We didn't have a concrete agenda for the meeting. Perhaps it was more time-consuming (it took us nearly 3 hours) but on the other hand, since we didn't have a fixed agenda, we were able to be more creative on our task which I think is more important than just focusing on the agenda.

Participation: There was no doubt that we expected all of us to participate as much as possible, and as explained above, we were very tolerate to propositions that seemed to be off-topic as long as it would be constructive to the presentation. Our meeting was largely succeeded although there was a vital mistake due to our decision making process that we made the decision with everyone’s agreement. One teammate gave up her idea on which chapter was more important simply because the rest of us disagreed with her and therefore we didn't go deeper in this topic, so it’s not hard to imagine that we felt regret when it turned out that we missed some important aspects in the book. To make it worse, we didn't summarize our meeting at the end because we were too optimistic with our “master piece”.

Perceptive: Since the meeting was so fruitful, we didn't stop and think what was potentially missing in our meeting, leaving the bomb unsolved in the following meetings until it exploded in the presentation.

Meeting experiences by Awa Diallo

As a student we are always subjects to meetings and group work, school assignment are generally performed in teams and the team efficiency usually reflect on the grade the team gets. in the retail industry, where I used to work, we would have a meeting every morning to talk about the previous day performances, the budget and expectations for the day. At the end beginning of each week, there would also be a meeting that outlines the previous week performances, and point the expected revenues and general numbers for the coming week. Usually, those meetings always last for around ten minutes, and are only informative about the numbers we need to be aware of.

At some point, people were not really interested in those meetings anymore, as we could see the numbers in the staff canteen, and there was not really news every week. So people would just sit and listen and not participate, or they would come in late because they feel like the meeting could be missed and that it was not really important. One day, the top manager realised that he needed to put the importance of those meetings back at the point they were. Therefore, he decided to include short award ceremony to the team meetings, for example the team member that would have performed the best the day before would get a free drink from him at lunch, and depending the amount, he would get a free whole lunch.  The excitement that came out of that new strategy was not really from the reward side of it, but more from the acknowledgment of your performances in front of everyone. From then, weekly and daily team meetings meant something else, not just a listing of the important numbers for the store, but also the way personal performances are recognized and rewarded.

I think the way this meeting has been managed was very well done. Indeed, the management team knew how to involve workers by using incentives instead of punishment. As a motivational factor, it was very effective for them to use a reward strategy in order to increase workers commitment to their duties. In fact, an increase in sales has been observed couple of weeks later.

I also had a not so bad experience during an internship in Senegal. I was responsible for implementing new disciplinary rules for the workers, and culturally the Senegalese is not a much disciplined person. Therefore it was a challenge for me, a young girl, who had the age of their daughter to tell them that they had to perform one way and not the other. I was leading a meeting where I had to present my program to the unit’s chiefs, around 10 men. When I started the presentation, they were asking questions to make me uncomfortable, there was particularly one that everyone followed, and he was not the meanest but was not especially welcoming as well. During the meeting I called all the strength in my body and reprimanded him in front of everyone else, I was not really proud of that action, but then it allowed me to gain others respect. Indeed, the understood that I was not afraid of them, that I was there to do my job and I had the intention to do it properly.

 ing : How to offer, give and receive help

Positive meeting experiences, DDemers

The meetings that I have seen that go the best are those where the meeting leader (and other participants) do a lot of preparatory work.  I find that informal meetings with fewer attendees that already know each other do not need extensive preparation.  However, once the number of attendees gets to be ten or more, then it is very easy for the meeting to get “derailed”.  Most of the meetings that I have seen go well are more information sharing than decision making.  It is very difficult to have a decision making meeting with a large number of participants.  There are frequently divergent views and only participants that feel comfortable “laying it on the line” speak up.  In my experience, for decision-making meetings, with more than about five or six people, either “group-think” will set in or the conversation tends to degenerate into “side-bars” where a common understanding of the issues is lacking due to several parallel conversations.

Some of the best meeting experiences for me were during brain-storming sessions.  Ground rules must be set (no criticizing, building on other’s ideas is encouraged), and it works well to have attendees first do some “alone” work in preparation.  After the initial burst of ideas, it is important that the leader keep the momentum going.  The initial burst of ideas can be quite draining for some participants, and stopping for a break allows some people to think up new ideas or build on existing ones, information that is shared when the meeting resumes.

For information-sharing meetings, it is important that attendees receive advance copies of presentations.  That permits the attendees to be better prepared during the presentations, and having the copy means that the attendees do not need to waste time writing out slide contents.  Also, the participants may have to concentrate on taking notes and miss other important points that the presenter was making.  One of the best run information sharing meetings that I experienced was our annual R&D program reviews.  Each project to be presented had to use a standard format (quad-chart) plus one or two more informational slides, five to ten minutes per project.  This was a very economical means (time wise) for the management team to become aware of what research was being done throughout the organization (about 400 staff).  For the upper management, there were fewer “surprises”, finding out about R&D at their home centre from military clients.  For middle management, it gave an overview of what was happening throughout the centre.  The shared knowledge of what R&D axes were being investigated facilitated focusing R&D on operational challenges and also aided in the creation of intra and inter research centre R&D collaborations.