Do you suffer from bad meetings at work? Is your team dysfunctional?

Chris Jenson joins Jared Siegel on this week's episode to discuss the importance of organizational health, effective meeting strategy, and trust. Chris is a principal consultant at The Table Group, a management consulting firm that strives to make organizations healthier, teams more cohesive, and employees more engaged and fulfilled in their work.

Tune in here, at delapcpa.com/podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts:

Here are the highlights from Jared's conversation with Chris Jenson:

• Chris shares that The Table Group, started by Patrick Lencioni, was founded to provide assistance to companies for cultivating and maintaining good organizational health.
• Jared asks Chris to make a distinction between the two types of trust. The average team’s foundation of trust comes from being able to predict one another’s moves, because they spend a lot of time around each other. This is predictive trust. “Great teams have a foundation of vulnerability-based trust,” he says. This type of trust is present when team members are willing to lay down their guard, admit mistakes, and not be defensive.
• Organizational clarity involves how leaders communicate and reinforce their goals, vision, and disciplines, ensuring that everyone is aligned with what they are trying to accomplish.
• Chris often encourages his clients to get rid of their agendas for meetings. “This is very counterintuitive, it’s not what anybody learned [to do], but we want to see teams get around the table… and spend the first 15 minutes asking themselves how well they are executing their strategy,” he shares. Additionally, he recommends that electronic devices should not be used in order to keep everyone’s attention.
• Jared asks Chris about observable indicators of organizational health. One such indicator is the way team members interact with one another before a meeting starts. There is a buzz in the air among great teams, and their camaraderie and interest in one another is clear. According to Chris, starting the meeting with this buzz is the ideal beginning for something of such importance.
• The Six Types of Working Geniuses, which is a model developed by The Table Group, identifies six requirements for production. Everyone has two geniuses, which are the two that they are naturally inclined toward, and two working frustrations, which are the two geniuses that they struggle the most with. Chris gives a brief description of the model and how to apply it to the workplace.

Resources

The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni

Death by Meeting by Patrick Lencioni

More books from The Table Group