An equal opportunity to voice your perspective

Challenges to Solve:

The Moir Group’s purpose, a satisfying job leads to a fulfilling life, imbibes the entire culture. It’s important to the company that it’s team is as diverse as the candidates it recruits and places with clients.

Challenge number 1:

Give all members of the leadership team an equal opportunity to voice their perspective in meetings.

It’s one thing to recruit a team of diverse individuals and an entirely different challenge to create and maintain a psychologically safe space in meetings for those individuals to be confident sharing their diverse perspectives. The value in recruiting diversity is lost if everyone doesn’t have a voice in the discussion.

The leadership team was put in place to discuss and decide strategic initiatives that would have long term and company wide positive impacts on the Moir Group and their clients. Given that the members of the team were diverse in their experience some members were relatively new to taking this longer term company wide perspective. These members were more familiar with managing the short term pressures felt within their immediate team and/or department.

Challenge number 2:

Raise the level of all attendees’ engagement in discussing topics that have long term and company wide impacts on the Moir Group business and their clients.

Solution:

Director and founder, Stephen Moir and Financial Controller, Kelly Patti codesigned with Look Who’s Talking’s founder, Matt Jackson a five meeting program whereby specific desired outcomes were set for each meeting and monitored using the LWT software prototype. The program required no team member to be trained, attend a workshop or change their working schedule; it ran simultaneously as they ran their meetings. This meant that the Moir Group did not have to incur the considerable costs of facilitating workshops and having employees away from the office.

During each leadership meeting LWT collected data related to each attendee’s talk time during the entire duration of the meeting and for each topic on the agenda. Some topics on the agenda were deliberately designed to encourage attendees to share from a long term and company wide perspective. After each meeting LWT produced a report showing the balance of talk time during the meeting and to highlight any topics that attendees were more inclined to share their perspective or not. 

Over the course of five meetings the Moir Group leadership team could see patterns in the data that evidenced whether some individuals were consistently challenged by sharing their voice on specific agenda topics. From there The Moir Group could explore how to assist those attendees to speak up; ideas ranged from focusing on meeting preparation, training, changing the format of the meeting or more intentionally moderating the meeting to elicit more contribution from quieter members and less from the more extroverted members of the team.

Results:

"As a result of the program we are a stronger leadership group and everyone in the group are thinking of the whole business and not just their area."

- Stephen Moir, Director of The Moir Group

At the start of the five meeting program the topics specifically seeking all attendees’ input were not the topics when all attendees were speaking up. By the fifth meeting this dynamic shifted dramatically and all attendees were contributing to the discussion.

Over the span of five meetings the attendee who spoke the most for the entire duration of the meeting reduced their talk time by 23% from a maximum of 45% during the 3rd meeting to 22% during the fifth meeting.

During the first meeting the three attendees with the highest talk time spoke for 62% of the meeting*. In the second meeting this proportion of the discussion increased to 71%. By the fifth meeting meeting it was reduced to 48%.

In the first meeting “Strategy in the face of Uncertainty”, an agenda topic that directly requested attendees to take a long term and company wide perspective, two attendees made up for 80% of the talk time. By the fourth meeting four attendees made up for 80% of the talk time.

This progression toward more attendees speaking up was also observed in other topics that were seeking all attendees to offer a long term and company wide perspective; eg. significantly Annual Plan - Our Brand in meeting 1 compared to Annual Plan - Technology and Automation in meeting 5.

With the help of LWT the Moir Group leadership team were presented with objective evidence of their discussion patterns in leadership meetings. This gave them undeniable proof of the gap between where they were at and where they wanted to be. Over the course of five meetings they were able to experiment with a number of initiatives before and during meetings and track how effective those initiatives were in moving the discussion patterns closer to what they needed them to be. It is a credit to the team that they were able to achieve such a positive shift.

"I would highly recommend the program to any leadership group wanting to hear from all members of their group which will help them make better decisions. In particular I have found that it is a great way to get people thinking about the whole business, not just their particular areas."

-Stephen Moir, Director of The Moir Group

* Research on teams of eight attendees by Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University shows that typically three people will speak for 70% of the entire duration of a meeting. This is an unintentional pattern observed before intervention.