by Patrick J. McKenna

It can be very challenging to manage a group of professionals with different substantive skills, diverse experiences, a variety of work styles, and sometimes conflicting priorities. Nowhere is this more visible than in the fundamental workings of practice group meetings.

Casey Stengel, the renowned former New York Yankees coach, once said, getting good players is one thing. The harder part is getting them to play together. Imagine a professional ball team on which every player could debate the signals and challenge game strategy. This is but one of the challenges in conducting a practice group meeting.

We are no longer surprised to observe the lack of ongoing meetings or formal communication efforts among various practice groups in many firms. The group? surprise may come when its clients learn that the expected group collaboration through shared experience and is all but absent and that those clients are therefore being short-changed.

In these same firms, we observe distraught managing partners (or Executive Committee members) throwing their hands in the air in defeat, exasperated in their efforts to get their groups to meet, finally retreating into a perplexing belief that professionals despise meetings.

The most common frustration within meetings of practice groups being those professionals who are always late. (Late to the meeting, late to the plane, late to work, late to your own funeral.) Showing up late means that this particular professional made a pretend commitment about starting on time.

The drama, the wasted energy, the wondering begin immediately: Where is Paul? Is this meeting on his calendar? Maybe we should check with his assistant. He told me yesterday that he would be here. How are we going to restructure the agenda? Why is he always late? Doesn't he know that we're busy, too? Does someone have to be somewhere else after this meeting or can we extend it? Doesn't anybody give a damn around here?!

In our own travels across a number of counties visiting managing partners, we are often told about one particular practice group in the firm whose performance casts a large shadow over the others, because of their enthusiasm, drive, morale, recognition in the marketplace and overall profitability. We find it striking how often a leader who cites one particular group that stands head-and-shoulders above the others, will then tells us, and of course they meet weekly!

We have come to believe that professionals do despise meetings where minutes are taken, but hours wasted; where protracted discussions are absolutely unproductive and result in nothing meaningful ever being accomplished.

We have been in attendance at numerous of these practice group meetings where the members of the group are attempting to wrestle with some important issues. What is most memorable about those discussions is how disorganized they were. Group members rarely seem to speak to the topic at hand, no one sticks to the point, they waste time with trivial items not on the agenda, and a specific course of action is never determined. As a partner in one of these groups observed, Our meetings are like television soap-operas, you can leave the group for three months and return to pick up exactly where you left off with no new progress having been made.

We have noted several clues that can tell you something is not right in your practice group meeting structure and procedures. Among them are these warning signs:

• practice group meetings start and/or finish late;
• practice group members don't come to meetings or arrive later and later each time;
• no agenda exists, or the agenda, materials and reports are not distributed in advance;
• the agenda lists more items than can reasonably be dealt with or acted upon;
• the practice leader is not prepared;
• some partner is allowed to monopolize discussions;
• only a few members speak; others withdraw nonverbally;
• members interrupt each other or cross-talk, (excluding others);
• the meeting evidences long drawn out discussions, but conclusions are rarely reached;
• at the conclusion of the meeting, there is no clarity upon who has agreed to accomplish what, by when;
• specific projects are not completed on time;
• there are no consequences for non performance or challenging behaviour.

Recently, we even calculated the billable time cost of one firm's monthly practice group meeting comprised of eight partners and five associates to be over three thousand dollars. Our obvious question to this group at the end of their meeting was: Do you feel you got three thousand dollars worth of benefit from this meeting or could you each have better spent this time elsewhere?

It becomes painfully evident that we need to improve the productivity of meetings. Your firm cannot afford to continuously invest time in having numerous professionals gather together only to have them conclude that their time could have been better spent in other activities and that the meeting effort is not significantly progressing their group goals, or their individual client work.

In attempting to tackle this situation, we have often asked partners to explore together as a group their answers to the question: what benefits should we expect to get out of meeting together as a practice group?

The benefits that partners identify most frequently include:

• we could learn a bit more about what client assignments the other professionals in our group are working on and what specific issues they are facing;
• we could have members of the group take turns making a substantive presentation to the group on some area in which they are developing expertise or have acquired some new knowledge, especially where they may recently have attended outside courses or seminars;
• we could use the meeting as a forum to orient our juniors, review work assignments, give them feedback, instill some pride, and help them feel like they are part of an important practice team;
• we could invite clients, the practice leaders of other related groups, or even outside experts to come and inform us as to what issues and projects they are working on;
• we could work together on some joint projects especially where it might help make our practice group become more attractive to clients or assist each of us to be more proficient at developing business.

Now this list is not intended to be comprehensive and we invite you to try this with the members of your practice team, but what you will notice is that there are essentially two different types of meetings being suggested here. One meeting involves spending some time sharing information and acquiring knowledge; while the other involves working together on some mutually important projects to determine what we can collectively accomplish together as a team.

To progress this even further, we have learned that to get the best results, the members of a practice group need to invest some time together to identify and agree upon some basic procedural parameters for how their group's meetings are to function. It makes good sense for you and your team members to determine:

• do we want to meet on a regular basis: what specific benefits would each of us have to realize to make such meetings a worthwhile investment of our personal time? and/or how could we better serve our clients from getting together as a practice group on a regular basis to share our knowledge, enhance our collective efforts, and engage in some joint action planning activities? The members of a practice group should identify (in writing) the specific benefits that each member expects to achieve as a result of their meetings. They should then review periodically whether everyone is satisfied that they are getting those benefits; and if not, what remedial action should be taken to modify the meeting format or content in order to make meetings more valuable;
• how much time are we prepared to commit to meeting: what is a realistic minimum time that we would be prepared to start with, to see what we might accomplish? A realistic minimum, to start, might be an hour. We have found that this time issue is often driven by the size of the group. Larger groups may have difficulty with an hour, but if you are dealing with a situation where people are not used to meeting at all, an hour is at least a reasonable start;
• how much time are we prepared to commit to taking action on joint projects: how much non-billable time are we each prepared to commit to working on any projects that result from our action planning efforts in meetings? While we are very comfortable with focusing on billable production, the real value that results from working together as a group comes from our commitment to spend a modest amount of non-billable time, between meetings, working on some specific project that will advance the goals of the practice group;
• what are people's preferred schedules for meeting: when should our meetings occur: which day of the week and when; early morning, during lunch, at the end of the day, on the weekend? There are and will always be client fires that irrupt. The degree to which we can al least attempt to work around our client priorities can be enhanced if we can agree on a set pattern for when we will schedule our practice group meetings. We have observed that the best seem to schedule their meetings well ahead of time on a consistent day and time (the second Tuesday of the month at 12 noon?) such that everyone is able to block that time into their calendars.

As part of these deliberations, your practice group members should also establish some agreements governing whether everyone is committed to being at the meeting; whether they can agree to start the meeting on time with everyone in attendance; whether people will submit their action reports to everyone in writing a few days in advance of the meeting so as to save time; and whether commitments made to implement a specific task are to be commitments kept. In this way, any practice group can determine their own acceptable guidelines. The best groups then circulate to everyone the group's guidelines in writing, periodically reminding members of their mutual agreements, and take a moment every so often, at the conclusion of some meeting, to assess whether the meeting functioned to everyone's satisfaction and consistent with the agreed guidelines.

Now let's say your practice group is prepared to meet monthly for one hour. The key issue then becomes how do we use that hour as effectively as possible.

PRACTICE GROUP MEETING FORMATS

One of the best ways to satisfy the diverse interests of your group is to devote one meeting to knowledge sharing and skill building, while reserving the agenda of the next meeting for one action-planning issue of importance to determine the group's future direction and/or incremental improvement.

1. The knowledge-sharing and skill-building meeting

While it is important to find the means to effectively share substantive and technical information: what different members of our team are currently working on, we would offer a small caution. Some professionals behave as though they believe that the true purpose of every practice group meeting is to provide a forum for their long-winded discussions on what they have been up to lately.

We do need to keep in mind that information can be shared with group members in countless ways, such as: memos, electronic bulletin boards, intranets, e-mail, written progress reports, and even informal word-of-mouth communications during social or office corridor gatherings. Valuable meeting time should be spent tapping into the collective genius of all the minds present but only as it contributes to moving the group forward.

We submit that the highest priority for this type of practice group meeting is to have an agenda that encourages substantive learning and skill development. The very best use of the group's time is to review specific learnings and new developments acquired while serving clients, dealing with client problems, or gleaned by researching new and emerging issues that may impact the group's practice. There is a vast difference in the value of hearing one of our partners talk (in general terms) about a matter that they have been working on, versus hearing about what that partner specifically learned, that might be of use to others in the group, from the way in which a particular situation or transaction was handled.

Therefore, rather than the question: tell us what you are working on? the question might be phrased: what have you learned during these past few month that may be of value to the other members of our group? Productive time is then spent going around the table, hearing from each individual in turn, on new knowledge they have acquired.

Practice groups find it valuable to devote some time on agendas to hearing from a client directly, perhaps having invited a client to address the entire group on the issues facing their particular industry. Many groups make it a habit to have each of their members take turns preparing a brief presentation designed to enhance the skills of everyone involved. To that end, we have witnessed partners demonstrating to their group the effective use of a new technology (that everyone could benefit from being more familiar with), a partner briefing colleagues on a development that will have impact on the problems facing clients, and perhaps a couple of the more accomplished rainmakers role-playing for the group how they actually handled a particularly difficult client interaction.

(Let's suppose for a moment that you remove the boardroom table from your conference room. Now let's suppose you replace the seats with comfortable armchairs. Suppose even further that you converted your conference area into a living room. How much might this affect the outcome of your meetings? That's how much your meetings are about power and not effective communications.)

2. The action-planning meeting

This is perhaps the more difficult meeting to handle effectively. As one managing partner astutely observed, The problem is, for professionals, words are action. Professionals make their living uttering or writing words; that's their stock in trade. But in management, action is action, and you have to overcome the tendency, reinforced by years of education and training, of most professionals to substitute words for action. My challenge, therefore, is to get the practice groups to do something.

Since practice group meetings remain the principle vehicle for effective group action and the most visible aspect of the group's progress, in our experience they require that a practice leader adhere to eight interrelated principles that together will help energize these meetings and make them far more effective.

a. Set a singular focus

This type of monthly meeting should be devoted to only one action-planning issue of importance to your practice group. Consider the following topics and you can well imagine the numerous ideas that might be generated amongst your team:

• what is our practice group's strategy for being more profitable over the next year?
• in what ways can we improve our overall efficiency in handling our kinds of matters and get our client assignments accomplished at a lower cost to us?
• what kind and what amount of training may be necessary to have us each individually performing at a higher level of efficiency?
• what actions can we take to improve our individual billable rates?
• which of our most recent client engagements would we consider to have been our most profitable and what do we need to do to get more of those?
• what could we be doing to ensure a higher degree of morale, motivation and enthusiasm, so that we might better retain our talented professionals?
• what do we need to do to better understand our existing clients, understand what is keeping them awake at nights, and actually be perceived to be more valuable to them?
• what kinds of services might existing or prospective clients like that no one else has offered them?
• what would we need to do to get the very best new clients to use our group's services?

b. Brainstorm ideas

Whomever it is in your group that has the responsibility for facilitating discussions at your meeting (most often the practice leader), should proceed (without entertaining any discussion on the topic, which would only serve to take up the better part of the meeting time) to engage the group in a constructive brainstorming exercise. The purpose of the brainstorming is to elicit individual action ideas, that if implemented, could serve to advance the group toward achieving progress on their singular objective.

We suggest a brainstorming process to tap the imagination and creativity of the group. Those who are concerned that a creative process will lack substance can be assured that the process merely creates a more imaginative menu and that the subsequent ordering from that menu will be executed with wisdom and discernment.

If we can all agreed to be highly disciplined about getting to potential action ideas and refraining from engaging in lengthy discussions and debates, we can devote about forty minutes to this process. Of course, our natural tendency as professionals, is to enjoy engaging in lengthy discussions, so we have discovered that it is helpful to have your group agree upon some basic rules before they begin.

The accepted rules for this brainstorming activity are as follows:

• say everything that comes to mind;
• no discussion;
• make no value judgment comments ?positive or negative;
• record all comments so that they can be seen and get down lots of ideas;
• encourage participation and build on each other's ideas.

Not to belabor this, but you may notice from viewing these rules, that as professionals this is not our normal pattern of behavior. Say everything that comes to mind? You may remember that we have been taught to think before we open our mouths. In the process of brainstorming, we want the members of our team to offer their raw, unfettered ideas so that any idea (however crazy sounding) can stimulate a further thought that might offer a real breakthrough. Make no value judgments? Here again the normal pattern is to observe someone in the group pose a thought and then one need wait only a nano-second before hearing others respond with the six reasons why that won't work. That may be the way our partners' meetings operate, but in this session your intent is to stimulate a little creativity, so professionals need to be protected from everyone overanalyzing and critiquing their ideas.

Once having agreed to these rules, we can begin the exercise. One technique that helps is to methodically, go around the table asking each member in turn to contribute one idea. Another method is to have everyone write down one idea (anonymously) and hand it up to the facilitator who then records it on a flip chart for all to see. The advantage to using a paper flipchart is that you can mount the charts for everyone to see and retain them for transcribing a permanent record of the group's contributions.

The role of the facilitator is to get everyone's ideas out and recorded. The critical task here is to ensure that everyone's contribution is indeed recorded. Sometimes in the verbal flurry of ideas, it is easy to either miss hearing someone's idea or record it in terms that do not adequately capture the intent. It always helps to ask members of the group to assist you to ensure that all ideas are captured and recorded accurately. Try to capture a few of the words actually used rather than summarizing or paraphrasing.

[End of Part I. To see remainder of article, go to Energizing Practice Group Meetings Part II.]