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So, you’re in a team meeting, and you have lots on your plate. What should you do? A lot of people set an agenda so that individuals can share information and present their point of view. Unfortunately, this is a highly problematic assumption.
Research has shown that there are a number of issues with pre-polling (which is what you’re doing by creating a meeting without a clear agenda of issues). Whomever speaks first has the ‘upper hand’ and the one who speaks somewhere in the middle of the meeting will be at a significant disadvantage where memory principles are concerned. The primacy and recency effect dictates that this information will be the most heavily discussed simply because we remember them better.
In addition, information that is commonly held by different individuals tend to be more frequently discussed. Contrary to popular belief, teams tend to share information based on what they have in common. The bias toward communicating information that they already share is quite great. The irony is that you form a team for the diversity and breadth of information it has, not to lapse into a trap of discussing what you already know. But common sense does not bear out the research. Teams that do not have the right communication strategies will lapse into something known as the common knowledge problem – you will discuss things you all tend to have in common, and tend to ignore or gloss over important information that should be discussed is unique to only one member of the team.
Generally, you can deal with this if you are aware of the processes that help to overcome such biases.
- Log information. You will need someone who is a good information tracker to keep information discussed as topics that had been discussed.
- Time information sharing. It will be important to keep track of information that is shared, and tag the amount of time
- Use visual information. Research shows that visually shared information tends to help teams to build their mental models of problems more effectively (Rentsch, Delise, Salas & Letsky, 2010).
- Redirect to unique information as part of the whole. You don’t want to get into the trap of discussing only unique information. You still want such information to get sufficient airtime and connect it with the available knowledge.
- Ensure that your team is designed to separate creative brainstorming and convergent outcome achievement. On the one hand, individuals work better when brainstorming. On the other hand, teams perform much better than individuals when it comes to making decisions. Remember to keep these two functions separate in the overall work flow.
Ironically, just knowing this information does not help teams. It requires an integrated approach to designing a team, working with the different individuals in the team while creating opportunities for team learning amidst the unique team culture that exists within the organization. There’s definitely no one-size-fits-all solution, but there’s evidence to show that a decent training can get teams involved in their own design and setup so that they are geared toward performance.
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