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Managing Research Projects

Managing Research Projects

Chairing Brilliant Meetings

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If you want people to say of your meetings that ‘they just don’t get better than this’, chair them as a Thinking Environment.1 As team leader, manager or chair of a meeting, consider following these nine simple guidelines:

At the beginning:

1. Give everyone a turn to speak.
2. Ask everyone to say what is going well in their work, or in the group’s work.

Throughout:

3. Give attention without interruption during open and even fiery discussion.
4. Ask Incisive Questions2 to reveal and remove assumptions that are limiting ideas.
5. Divide into Thinking Partnership3 when thinking stalls and give each person five minutes to thing out loud without interruption.
6. Go around intermittently to give everyone a turn to say what they think.
7. Permit also the sharing of truth and information.
8. Permit the expression of feelings.

At the end:

9. Ask everyone what they thought went well in the meeting and what they respect in each other.

 

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