Do some members of your team make agreements during meetings but fail to support them afterwards?

If this behavior is happening, I suspect your team is using an obscure process to make decisions.

I'm a big fan of Sam Kaner's Guide to Participatory Decision-Making, ISBN 0-86571-347-2. I highly recommend it to anyone who leads meetings.

In my post on Decide as a Team, I wrote about using a method called Roman Evaluation to reach a decision. Kaner talks about a more formal concept he calls Gradient of Agreement in his book.

I am less enthusiastic about the Gradient of Agreement today than when I was first introduced to it.

Why? 

I have had the good fortune to be a member of many successful teams during my career: But my career hasn't been all bliss -- I have also been a member of unsuccessful teams. In my experience, the recipe for the most successful and satisfying team experiences contained ingredients that were ignored by the unsuccessful teams. What ingredients fostered both teamwork and success?

Twenty percent of the participants arrive late to the weekly meeting you lead.

What do I recommend you do?

The social awkwardness of an extreme introvert -- a loner-- confounds most extroverts. Extroverts prefer using social interaction as a big part of the problem solving process while a loner prefers solving problems without social interaction.

Can a loner be a contributing member on a collaborative team?

There are different types of meetings. Each type requires a different structures and supports a different number of participants. For instance, a status (feedforward) meeting has no limit to the number of participants while a decision-making meeting produces results faster with a small number of participants.

If you want to help your teams have more effective meetings, set the participants expectations about the meeting by stating in the agenda --

• the purpose of the meeting.
• the type of meeting

What does it say abut the participants of a weekly meeting when the meeting consistently starts 5-10 minutes behind schedule?

Answer, the participants are cooperating with each other to start late.