Hi. I'm Matt. This has been a place of regurgitation and frivolity (don't fret, it will continue to be) but, with any luck and a titch of effort, it will also become a place where I think, document and be more me than it has been previously. Run on sentence much?
The rule is for everyone in the room: if their attention is elsewhere, they aren’t listening. Frank, the guy who plays Plants vs. Zombies during staff and swears he’s listening? He’s not. He’s getting 50% of what’s being said, and worse, he’s giving everyone else in the room permission to slack.
However, the problem here isn’t with Frank, it’s the referee. Frank is not sensing progress, so Frank has left. The referee has forgotten…
If steam isn’t coming from their ears, they might stop listening. It is the responsibility of the referee to constantly be visually surfing the room to determine who is and isn’t engaged. This is hard.
Referee. Solid agenda. Seven people. At any given point in the meeting, three of these people are verbally sparring about the topic. In addition to making sure the three active participants don’t kill each other, the referee — in real time — needs to figure out whether the other four are mentally present, and, if not, what to do about it. This is really hard.
This is really hard because refereeing these meetings is incredibly situational. You’ve got seven people, each with their own personalities and agendas. You’ve got whatever mood they happen to be in at that precise moment.And you’ve got whatever topic merits this meeting in the first place. Given all of these fuzzy variables, what possible relevant advice can I give you to keep everyone engaged? Here are a few small tips:
Pull them back. If they don’t look engaged, steer the conversation toward them and ask them a question relevant to the current state of the topic: “Stan, no code reviews? Really?”
Reset the meeting with silence. If several folks have checked out, one of my favorite moves is referee silence. When all eyes are on you, count backwards for 10 and watch what happens — Frank is going to look up from Plants vs. Zombies and wonder, “Why’s it so quiet? What’d I miss?”
Change the scenery. Are you sitting down? Ok, stand up. Have you been writing stuff on the whiteboard? No? Try it. Small tweaks to the scenery might change nothing or they might give someone a nudge out of their mental haze.
A meeting’s progress is measured by the flow, and the referee’s job is keep it moving along at a good clip, which is why the referee sometimes needs to…
