How To Handle Meeting Killers - The Naysayer

Naysayers at community meetings

The podcast did a great M-T job of focusing on actionable steps for managers.  What recommendations do you have when the Naysayers are important and invited members to committee meetings, but aren't superior, peer, or subordinate in the organizational hierarchy?  Role power is far less recognized.

Thanks.

Nasser v naysayer

Hi Manager tools,

Just a funny comment about this podcast. I am french and I listen to your podcast while cylcing the roads around my town called Nantes in the West of France. 

I never read the titles of the show, I just listen to them. And this one, for the biggest part, I was thinking "What has this got to do with the president of Egypt, Nasser?". 

Being french, the Suez canal crisis is part of our history courses. 

Anyway, I did not know the expression "Naysayers". At one point, Mark pronouced it really detached as "Nay------sayers" and then I got it. 

But it made me smile and I thought I'd drop you a line about this confusion. Your show is listened around the world and sometimes, expressions like this one is unknow. 

Anyway thanks for the show. 

I share your vision on Consensus and Leadership. In fact, I submit you this quote from Lady Thatcher who one said:

""Ah consensus … the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies in search of something in which no one believes, but to which no one objects; the process of avoiding the very issues that have to be solved, merely because you cannot get agreement on the way ahead. What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner 'I stand for consensus'?"  Margaret Thatcher

I hope you'll like it. 

Best regards from France

Damien Fournier

Confessed Naysayer

Mike and Mark,

I have a confession. I'm a Naysayer. My DiSC profile is high C/high D and my role is Project Management. Being in this role, I find myself being the one who brings up risks and challenges when ideas are brought up. My intent is not to kill ideas but to make sure people have a balanced view of an idea before pursuing it. How do I break the habit of being a Naysayer in meetings and come across as more supportive of ideas? Would one method be to self impose the "and not but" rule during meetings? Should I wait until after the meetings and provide my input face to face with the key stakeholders? Any advise would be helpful.

Thank you, Kent Allen

Re: Confessed Naysayer

 Kent, 

I believe in the podcast they say it is ok to bring up the risks as long as it is in the correct timing.  I don´t think it is a good idea to bring them face to face after the meeting because then the timing is wrong.  The person is not going to held another meeting, so you bringing the risks then is no good, because they are not going to be able to change the decision any more.  

What you can do is perhaps bring the risks up front prior to the meeting. 

Something else you can do is when you bring a problem, bring the recommended mitigation action as well.  It may not be the definite solution, but it shows that you are in favour of the idea you want to contribute to the idea.  Just identifying the risks is useless if a mitigation action is not proposed, because things got to get done anyway.

One think we do run in our company internally and with clients is a risk analysis workshop.  This workshop is specific to bring up risks.  So everyone is in the mindset for brining up risks.  We first evaluate the risks like in a brainstorming format and put them on a table.  We then quantify whether they are high, medium or low risks (depending on the probability of happening and magnitude of impact) and then we evaluate mitigation actions to bring all the high risks down to medium or low.  This process has made a big difference in the development of our projects, as when we do face the risks we have anticipated we are prepared to cope with them.  Also we get the whole project team on the same base, everybody agrees by the end that there are risks but we have taken all possible actions we could within the constraints to mitigate them.

Another think we do is run "Lessons Learned" workshop after projects.  This is again to point out everything that went wrong and decide how to do it differently next time.  This way next time we run a similar project usually somebody brings up the problem that happened before but already with the solution, with the decision made to counteract that potential problem.

If it is within your line of influence you could schedule a risk analysis workshop.  If not, just do that on your own to exercise bringing up the risk plus the solution.  And bring that early into the discussion, so the solution is incorporated in the plan.  You don´t need to have the perfect solution because the high I´s in the group will probably think of something else on the spot.

Nara