You can make the people around you smarter

“Can I just mention one thing before you go?”

The workshop had finished and people were putting their laptops away. One of the engineers had waited for the room to empty before he came over.

I had put a lot of effort into preparing that session. Engineers, sales reps, the CEO, all in one room to work through our customer’s problems that I had found during site visits. The discussion had been great.

And yet, that one idea the engineer shared with me by the door was so much better than most ideas in the workshop. It meant a completely different solution approach - and potentially trashing all the thinking we did in the workshop.

If you run workshops, project meetings or design reviews, you have probably had a version of this. The really great ideas arrive afterwards, one to one, when it is almost too late and it disrupts the next steps.

So how do you set up a meeting where people actually say what they know, in the meeting itself, and they bring their best ideas to the table?

You can influence the quality of other people’s ideas

For a long time, I assumed that how well someone thinks is fixed. As in, some people are smart, some people are not - and that influences the quality of ideas they bring to the table.

That is wrong! How well someone thinks in a meeting depends enormously on how the people around them are behaving: Interrupt them or rush them and they think worse. Let them feel their view counts for less than the senior person’s, and they stop sharing it at all.

Which means the opposite is also true. You can change how well the people around you think, by changing a few small things about how the meeting runs.

Last week, a very experienced female manufacturing leader joined us as a Keys To Impact community guest and shared a framework called ‘The Thinking Environment’ - to deal with exactly this challenge, of how to get the best ideas from a team meeting.

This framework was developed by leadership coach Nancy Kline. She and her colleagues helped run a school in the United States, where the whole point was to get teenagers thinking for themselves. Over years of watching what worked, she noticed something she had not expected. How clever a student was, how old they were, where they came from, how much experience they had, none of it explained the moments when they thought really well. Instead, what explained it was how they were being listened to.

Kline went on to identify ten behaviours or principles that help other people think well. I have picked the three that changed my meetings the most. (I linked all ten below)

You might wonder, helping other people think well sounds like extra work. Is it worth it?

Helping people think is a critical leadership skill
 

Up to a certain point in your career, you get rewarded for what you produce - your analysis, design, reports etc.

Senior roles work differently: you get rewarded for what happens around you, because you are present. For example, whether the room reaches a good decision, not whether you personally had the best idea in it.

If you become the person who reliably gets the best thinking out of a room, people will notice you as someone with Senior leadership potential - even before you are in a Senior role. It will help you get promoted.

So, how do you help people think?

1. Equality: everyone gets their turn

Many of us assume: the more senior someone is, the better their thinking.

That’s not true.

Think about the customer service representative who spent three hours on the phone with an unhappy customer yesterday. Then think about the senior leader who spent yesterday writing a board report. Who is more likely to know what is actually going wrong?

So we need to create a way for everyone to get a turn, to get the best ideas.

Our community guest shared what she does at the start of every meeting. She sends out one question beforehand. Then, in the meeting, every person gets two uninterrupted minutes to answer it - no one is allowed to interrupt, comment or ask a question.

She found that it brings people into the room and flattens the hierarchy. And it definitely increases the quality of contributions.

Here is why: When someone knows their turn is guaranteed, and not only for senior leaders, they stop rehearsing their opening line in their head and start actually listening. That means the thing that was taking up most of their attention is now removed, they can build on previous points, and they come up with better ideas.

Here is what you can say:

“I want to hear from everyone before we start debating. Two minutes per person, and the rule is we don’t interrupt. This is how we make sure we don’t miss any important points.”

This tells everyone what is about to happen, and it tells them why.

2. Ease: mention deadlines but remove the panic
 

When something really matters, we tend to say so. “This has to be solved today.” “The client is waiting.” “We can’t leave this room without an answer.”

We say it to show we are serious. But what it actually does is put everyone into a mild state of threat - and people in that state do not think well. The amygdala is activated, the brain cannot think calmly. They give you the safe answer, the one that will not get them into trouble.

Nancy Kline puts it simply: ease creates and urgency destroys.

There is more research behind this. Teresa Amabile and her colleagues at Harvard collected more than 9,000 diary entries from 177 people in 7 US companies in chemical, high tech, and consumer products, working on projects that needed real creative thinking. On high-pressure days without focus, people described feeling stuck on a treadmill, constantly switching between things, and their thinking suffered for it. (I have linked the HBR article with the research below).

Most people believe they do their best thinking under pressure, but they are usually wrong about that.

What you can do about that at work: You often cannot move the deadline. Don’t pretend to, so make it clear - but separate the thinking from the delivering.

Here is what you can say:

“The date is Friday. But for the next twenty minutes let’s not worry about this - we are not solving it. We are working out the exact nature of the problem.”

The deadline is still there, but less of a panic. And that will change the quality of what you hear from your team.

3. Incisive questions: remove assumptions

People stop themselves from thinking properly because of assumptions they do not even notice they are making.

Someone on your team has an idea but does not raise it, because they assume it is not their place. Someone else does not suggest the ambitious option, because they assume it will fail and they will be blamed for it.

Nobody says these assumptions out loud. So you have to build a question that steps around them.

Kline’s structure is: If you knew that [the assumption is not true], what would you do?

Two you can try with your team:

• “If you knew your idea would be taken as seriously as the CEO’s, what would you say right now?” This removes the assumption that only senior voices count.

• “If we knew this could not fail, what would we build first?” This removes the fear of being wrong.
  
  

You will get answers you would never have got from “any thoughts?”

Your next step

Start with a meeting you already run where not much is at stake, e.g. your weekly team meeting. Use one of the three principles and see what happens.

When you nail these techniques, you will be the person who others want in the room when something important needs to be worked out. That person gets invited into more of those rooms - including the leadership rooms.

The ten principles of The Thinking Environment are linked here. And the HBR article on creativity under pressure you can find here.