Interpersonal Issues: Touchy Feely Meetings

Hiring people who fit your company culture and team personality vastly improves overall performance, but there is still hard work to be done to make sure that the interpersonal dynamics are being actively managed so that the good work sees the light of day.

Even when people are friends, as we are, and have a lot in common, which we do, there will always be bullshit (our fancy internal term) that arises.  If left unattended, it will take root and blow up spectacularly.

And those festering issues can manifest themselves in other ways.  Someone will shoot down an idea not on merit, but because of who suggested it.  Or someone gets caught up thinking about how they’ve been ‘wronged’ rather than focusing on the business.

There are only so many minutes in a day.  You can either do your best to clear the mental decks or you can ignore the issue altogether, let things build up and then fire someone.

Unfortunately, most companies select the latter option.

At RoundPegg, we’ve chosen a different approach.  We air our concerns and grievances with eachother in a bi-weekly Touchy Feely Meeting (a bit of a misnomer since it’s actually one of the hardest things to do).

We also have the benefit of knowing how each of us are wired and we pull out our ‘Peggs’ at every meeting to remind others of what we value or what our personality is. That makes things more effective…as do the rules we’ve put in place:

1. 1. Start by stating how a situation makes you feel (When X happened, I felt Y).  Describe the situation and your reaction to it only.  No focusing on what you think the other person intended or their motives
2. 2. Be vulnerable. Letting your guard down is the best way to prevent the meeting from going south and ensuring that everyone has the same goal of improving the situation
3. 3. Think. Don’t react. Being defensive is not helpful.  Instead, try to understand why someone felt that way.  Needless to say, attacking is prohibited.  Nobody is keeping score so it’s pointless
4. 4. Take ownership of making someone feel the way they did/do.  Likely, that wasn’t your intention, but it happened.  Own it
5. 5. Don’t let issues linger.  It’s okay to agree to think through things as ‘homework’ and revisit in the next session but the person who brought up the issue must agree
6. 6. Walk out stronger than you came in.  The air should be more clear and will be if people are owning their actions and agreeing to
7. 7. Work hard. Put real thought into solutions between meetings.  If, like most other meetings, you walk in and wing it then it’s not going to work and you’ll likely violate rule #2.

We’re then posting the output on our internal wiki.  This may be going too far, but we want to have a fully transparent workplace and you can’t get more sensitive than these meetings.  We’ll continue doing so until we’re badly burned.  And then we’ll still probably continue doing so with a tweak or two (like removing names).

As we grow we have every intention of rolling this out for every team.  Frankly, it’s a couple hours a month that are very well spent.  You waste more times doing less productive things, like status meetings.

While I’d like to tell you these are the elixir that cures all workplace ills, it’s too early.  We’ve been at it for a couple of months, but we can definitively say that it doesn’t hurt and that we all believe we’re a stronger team for feeling comfortable bearing our insecurities.

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