How many meetings have you had today?
Meetings are a critical context to consider in relation to inclusion. A whole range of biases (such as in-group and out-group bias and conformity bias) mean that if meetings are not intentionally conducted with inclusion in mind, exclusion will occur.
While there are plenty of things that we can do to make meetings inclusive when we are the chair, if we are not chairing the meeting, it is of course much harder to influence how the meeting is being run.
However, this great Harvard Business Review article from Tijs Besieux and Amy Edmondson provide three interventions that anyone can use in a meeting to help make them more effective:
- The helpful workaround – when psychological safety is low, a question can be used to indirectly address the issue (i.e., ‘I wonder if you could clarify any actions I need to complete following this?’).
- The solution-centric proposal – when there is moderate psychological safety, you can highlight the problem by asking a question which illustrates how finding a solution will be helpful (i.e., ‘I think this is a really important point that requires an in-depth discussion, can we pick-up this up after this meeting?’).
- The constructive confrontation – when there is high psychological safety, you can explicitly name the problem and give feedback to support finding a productive solution (i.e., ‘It feels like we have strayed off topic here, could we park this discussion for now to ensure that we have time to cover everything on today’s agenda?’).
You can access the original article here.
