The Productive Student

Group assignments are something we all have to go through during our academic lifetime. It’s not only a real challenge to get good marks from such assignments, but they teach you vital lessons for life, in my opinion. But alas, getting a good grade while having to deal with morons can bog you down. Here are a few pointers that helped me get the most of my teamwork sessions. It is vital to not only get the actual work done, but to create an efficient context in which everyone knows their role. These tips help you take the lead on your assignment and provide great value to your peers. Your grades (and peers) will thank you for it.

1. Know everyone: Dale Carnegie once said, the sweetest sound to anyone in any language is his or her name. Likewise, know your teammates, and know them well. Something as simple as addressing them by their name can take you a long way. Find out about their lives, and connect with them by asking them questions next time you meet about some tiny bit of information you picked up.

2. Visualize: Learn to visualize. My mentor showed me the power of a flipchart. Just by visually collecting all the results from a team session, you can take the lead and move your team towards productive results. Keep it simple, use connecting lines and structure anything you write down well. My trick: Use a premise-problem-solution technique to hold together information. What’s the premise? What exactly is the problem? What steps can help solve the problem? I strongly recommend Dan Roam’s The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures.

My way of doing this actually evolved over time, and the key is to rake in lots of feedback from more experienced people. Take their feedback seriously but also try to just implement what you think works for you and your audience. I’ve received some loads of crappy advice in my time.

A good basic structure consists of a nice, big headline followed by 2-3 factoids your audience needs to know. Keep it short. Follow it up with some points about the problem you’re trying to solve, and use the bottom half for outlining a couple of hands-on actions to solve the problem.

Learn to do this in advance first, then you’ll get good at doing it live during a team session. Be a leader by collecting and caching information while your team does the grinding.

1. Summarize: You don’t even have to have the best ideas to lead your team. Simply helping them rephrase their ideas, summarising and bringing everyone to a common level can establish you as the alpha-(fe)male. Ask questions like “Do we agree that /[insert what someone else said/]?” and you’ll often prevent conflict and keep control of the meeting from an elevated level.

2. Criticize well: My favorte trick in order to criticize someone else’s idea is the Sandwich Technique. It basically follows the rule of mentioning a criticism by beginning and ending with a praise or positive remark. This way, the criticism will get passed to the person without hurting his or her feelings. Just be frank, or your criticism will lose it’s impact among the praise.

A further idea for dealing with ideas you don’t like is by asking the bright mind who came up with the idea to think the consequences through himself. Instead of asking

“John, that won’t work!”

ask

“John, what do you think will happen with X if we choose Y?” or something along those lines.

In any case, guide team members to good ideas: your ideas.

Structure of Fruitful Meetings

The techniques described above are good for the low-level, “runway”-work, as David Allen would put it. Now, besides being a charismatic chief of meetings, it’s important how you structurally organize and lead through a team session. Let me break it down into phases:

1. Arrive early: If you can be at your meeting point earlier than the others, do so. Be sure to prepare for waiting a while, because it can often consume 15-25 minutes (according to my experience) for everyone to collect and be in a place you can finally start working. Be early and make sure everything needed for work is in place: Flipcharts, tables, quietness and some water is a good checklist.

2. Small Talk: When people arrive, small talk is not only the obcious thing that many people will engage in, but is vital. Use this phase to create an understanding of each other and establish a common culture over time. I like to call this relationship design.Get a healthy social relationship going with all of you, and don’t overdo it as you’ll run out of time.

3. Clarify Expectations: Here’s the leader part. Before beginning work, ask a vital question: What is the goal of the following fifteen minutes/half hour/afternoon? Declare the goals, objectives and topics clearly before diving in. What should be done by the end of this meeting? Often, we need to write a group paper. One goal a meeting will usually have is that we should clarify who will write what by the end of the meeting. That’s a good goal, because it requires us to structure our work and decide what goes in before we can distribute work.

4. Work it: Working on the actual assignment usually works the way you’d expect it to, and obviously differs depending on your subject and scope. Nothing unusual. But you can get out the extra edge of each meeting by moderating the meeting well. Here’s what I do: 1. Keep summarizing along the way, 2. Ask questions to clarify things for everyone, 3. Be a source of balanced praise and criticism.

5. Define next actions: Here’s the deal-breaker. At the point you feel you’ve done your work for the day, dig in and ask what the next steps are for everyone. This is something I learned in Business School as well as David Allen (who probably picked it up from someone who picked it up from business school in the first place). Without this step, your whole meeting might have been pointless. Re-asess whether you met your objectives for the meeting, set a new meeting, clearly define the next steps of action and distribute them among each other. First make fair chunks of work, then ask for preferences. You can’t always get the most fun job, but you can make sure the work load is fair.

6. Small Talk Part II: Once the meeting is done, don’t just get up and walk your lvies. This not only keeps your groups relationships very platonic, but also hinders the whole team from working together more efficiently. By developing a common culture and trust, work between people will get done with less talking, more doing, and with more independence of each member. Hence, more efficiently. Take the initiative and go for a coffee with the team. Or lunch. Or just goof around for 5 minutes after the meeting.

How to Keep Meetings Short Yet Extremely Fruitful

Conducting meetings is a pain, in the end. Almost 90% of all meetings could be saved through a bit of smart preperation and leadership. Here’s three dead-simple tricks you can use to make the time together as useful as possible.

1. Require an agenda: Unless you’re the initiator of a meeting, ask for an agenda via E-Mail in advance. Before a meeting takes place, the issues and questions that need resolving should be defined. This lets you prepare mentally for the meeting, and gauge the time required. It also allows for some issues to be answered instantly via E-Mail.

2. Set an end time: Regardless of results, try capping the meeting time. This creates a sense of urgency, which magnifies the amount of work done immensly.