Contradict With Style
By: John Davidson
Tags: Teamwork, Meetings, Leadership, Management, Productivity

3 simple hacks to avoid you being undermined in meetings

Meetings don’t have to be bad! Westminster, London © 2019 John Davidson

A colleague was describing to me recently how she was becoming frustrated when in meetings with stakeholders. She explained to me what was a simple problem on the face of it, but it has taken me some time to understand how to best coach teams to prevent this problem.

Imagine, you’re presenting something to stakeholder — a plan, for example.

Everything’s going well and people are asking questions, feeding back suggestions and you’re feeling great.

Then disaster strikes.

One of your team members contradicts you. They brazenly have the nerve to say you’re wrong, or they disagree with what you’ve just said! All of a sudden, your authority just disappears out of the nearest window and what was a great meeting becomes a disaster.

It doesn’t take many of these meetings to undermine confidence in you, your team or your product. So, how do you stop this happening?

There are some obvious answers.

If you have a trivial problem, project or product, just attend the meeting on your own. It’s hard to contradict yourself. But, once you’re past ‘small’ then it’s unlikely you’ll have all the answers to all the inevitable question, which means you either have ineffective meetings as you have to ‘come back’ with an answer (and the decision making opportunity is lost) or you lose your audience because you can’t answer their questions. They start to doubt you.

You could also tell your team to not contradict you, under any circumstances. This sounds obvious, but of course if they don’t do that they could let you walk into a trap, and you could end up losing your team and your stakeholders. Again, this isn’t a particularly effective tool.

Here are three simple hacks you can discuss with your team that allows you to join meetings with confidence:

‘Let me build on that’

The first hack is simple. If you (or anyone else you care about) misspeaks, doesn’t answer a question well or leaves out a detail, then offer to build on what they’ve said.

For example, you may discuss a milestone on a project but leave out the key risks to meeting it. Try this:

“I just want to build on John’s point about this milestone. We think there’s a risk to meeting it, which is……”

Simple, effective and respectful, building is a powerful way to help your teammates.

‘Could you clarify?’

If your teammate says something plain wrong, it might be inadvisable to ‘build on it’. For example “The June milestone will be met” can’t be built upon if it’ll actually be missed.

So, the second hack is to brief your team to ask a clarifying question:

“Could you clarify the circumstances that need to happen for it to be met” acts as code for “you’re wrong!”. Asking the question in a leading way helps to guide the conversation back on track without your stakeholders being aware of your error. Thank you!

Riffs on this would be to chip in with the risks to meeting the date, or adding that to meet the date, these things need to happen (impossible or not).

‘Ping’

Now that many of us are meeting virtually, consider using 2 screens and dedicating one to a team chat. If you only have one screen, use WhatsApp. Brief the team to use that if one of you starts to say something you shouldn’t.

Well structured, it allows you to pilot a meeting in real-time. If you’re on video split your screen, if you’re (shock) face to face, then agree on a code. Move a pencil, loudly turn a notebook page, anything really. As long as you agree the code, ping the speaker.

Summary

No matter how professional you and your team are, you’re never going to get it right 100% of the time — particularly when dealing with customers or other stakeholders who are trying to catch you out, or who simply want more information than you have at your fingertips.

As soon as you’re off script, then no matter how well you rehearse you will find that you need real time piloting.

What’s critical for you, your team and your stakeholders is ‘controlled confidence’. If you’re trying to manage your team as well as your stakeholders, then control and confidence can quickly fade.

So, the next time you meet, try these things, keep in control and exude confidence.