Open Minds — A Requirement for Meeting Attendance
By: Debi Peverill
Tags: Governance, Productivity, Meetings, Attendance, Goals

Having an open mind is a highly desirable characteristic of a meeting attendee or anyone else for that matter. Your committee or workplace meeting is convened for the purpose of moving a project forward to achieving a goal. To do this everyone who is attending needs to be able to listen to the other attendees with an open mind and make the best choice, not always the choice that they came to the meeting ready to approve.

Given that a board member will be attending many meetings and by definition has to work with others being open to other ideas is crucial.

If your board members will listen to each other then there is more chance that decisions will be made with all of the expertise on the board. What you do not want is a board member who is dug in on their own opinion and nothing that anyone can say will ever change their minds.

A board member reviews the board package and considers the decisions that need to be made at an upcoming board meeting. They consider whether they will have further questions that need to be answered before they are ready to make a decision. When they arrive at the board meeting they will likely hear from other board members who perhaps have a different take on issues being decided. This is the critical part, if another board member raises an issue that the first board member did not consider then he or she must be able to change their mind. Every organization needs to be able to make the best decisions with every board member considering all of the facts not just the facts that confirm the opinion that they have already reached.

We have seen lots of examples where politicians disagree with each other just because they are in different parties. Looking at the American political system from here in Canada, it appears that democrats and republicans would have trouble agreeing what day it is. This is the opposite of an open mind. We ask board members to talk about the issues not the personalities.

I have dealt with boards where board members have formed cliques. If one person is not in the clique then it is possible that no one who is in the clique is going to agree with them about anything. In my example if Steve decided to make a motion about an issue then Gordon was going to disagree, and he did not need to know what the issue was. This type of a board does not do the best job of helping an organization achieve their goals.

The board chair can help with this in a couple of ways, one way is to discourage any conversation where the discussion strays from the issues into personalities. Rhetoric about how we are all on the same team trying to do what is best for the organization can be really helpful in getting board members to understand that it is not about who is right or wrong, it is about their duty of loyalty to the organization, to set aside any thoughts of personal advantage to do what is the right thing for the group.

When you are putting together the participants for any meeting, consider whether the people being invited will play well with others. Inviting someone to come to your meeting who is opinionated and is unlikely to change their mind, even in the face of evidence that they are wrong, is a truly bad idea. Sometimes you have not choice, because that opinionated person is the boss. When you do have a choice, look for people who understand that collaboration is the plan for the group not conflict.

Taking care to choose the participants carefully will lead to better meetings.