Employing Differences, Episode 134: Do we need to postpone?

Paul: 0:08

Welcome to Employing Differences, the conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals.

Karen: 0:14

I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul: 0:16

And I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: 0:18

Each episode, we start with a question and see where it takes us. This week's question is, "Do we need to postpone?"

Paul: 0:26

There are any number of reasons why we might choose or want to or feel that we need to postpone a meeting, or an event, or something like that. There's one in particular that we want to focus on here today, which is the absence of a particular individual. I, any number of times, have been in a situation where I'm working with a group, and we've got something scheduled, and we're going to get together and work on a particular thing or talk about something. And then I get a,"Oh, well, this person is out of the office today, so we shouldn't meet." What we want to explore a little bit here today is when that is actually the correct decision and when it's not. When are times where we might choose to postpone because someone can't attend? And when might we and how might we proceed, even though some member of the group that we originally wanted to have present is absent? That's where we want to explore today.

Karen: 1:26

So I think we want to be careful not to jump to assumptions in either direction. Yeah, I think it's easy to have a culture where we just say,"Well, you know, just because one person is absent, we're not going to stop everything. We're just always going to have the meeting and go ahead." And it's also possible to have a culture that says, "Well, if somebody can't be there, we can't proceed without everybody. So if somebody's not going to be there, we just won't meet this time." And I think both of those are probably not great. I think it's wise to be more.. If it's very rare for anybody to be absent, and you don't have particular deadlines or urgency, maybe one of those makes sense. But what I think is more likely is that it makes sense to look at what's on the agenda – so to speak – what are we planning to accomplish? And how does that work with either anyone missing or a particular person missing? And it can be either way, depending on what it is you're trying to do.

Paul: 2:29

Yeah. The canonical thing that I've run into a ton is we're getting together to make a decision about a thing – and this is in an organization where there's some centralized decision making authority – and the person who actually has the power to make the decision isn't going to be able to be there. The manager is stuck in another meeting. And so we find out three minutes after the meeting is supposed to start that this person is not going to be able to be there. But even then, I think you have the opportunity to say things like, "Okay, well, given that this person's not going to be here and given that we can't accomplish our original purpose, which was to actually make a decision about this, what could we do, so that when this person becomes available, we could get to that decision faster?" What can we as a group do even though we can't make that decision? How could we move closer to having what we need so that we could? Rather than just saying, "Eh, we just want to go and we're just going to cancel." Now, sometimes it's perfectly legitimate to say, "Actually, there's another pressing issue that we would all be attending to if we weren't in this meeting." So in some ways, it's not just about what are we intending to do? What is our original agenda for the meeting? What else is happening may also influence our decision of whether or not we want to postpone.

Karen: 3:52

Yeah, I think all of that makes sense. And as is often the case with you and I, Paul, I'm going straight to the non-hierarchical situation, which is you're trying to make a decision and you don't have everybody there. Can you make a consensus decision in the absence of everybody? And, and I'm going to say usually you can. This is especially true if somebody knows they're going to be absent. I really trust and expect that if someone's going to be absent from meeting, and it's known that we're going to make a decision at that meeting, that it's really important and it's their responsibility – largely – to say, "I can't be at the meeting. I'm going to get together with somebody else and say, 'This is what's really important to me, this is my concern. Can you make sure that this gets talked about at the meeting?'" And if we're doing a good job of consensus generally, we're going to be taking that person's concern into account. We're not gonna say, "Well, they're not here, so we don't have to worry about that. Yep, everybody here agrees so we just go ahead." You're gonna be in all kinds of trouble if that's your approach. I'm gonna guess your consensus process is not working well. But on the flip side, if you're moving along towards a decision that's not super urgent, and somebody isn't there and you know they care a lot, and we don't have all of their viewpoints or we got their viewpoint on the proposal as it was going into the meeting but we've made pretty significant changes to it. And we don't really know how this is going to land or whether our idea to solve this problem has actually solved it. They're the one that brought their concern, are they going to be happy with the solution? You might say, "You know what? We really shouldn't." So that's, again, this sort of nuanced, do you stop everything because somebody can't be there? No. And if I can't be there, do I expect everything to stop? No. But on the other hand, if it's pretty clear that I'm not going to get my needs met when I'm not in the room, I'm going to hope that that group that I'm absent from is going to hold that. And again, based on urgency and other factors, so it's not 100% just can't, but that if it's reasonable to wait until I can participate, that the group will probably do that. And so I just think, like so many things here, it's a discernment thing. There's a lot of nuance in it. And the thing is to be thoughtful and intentional about is this a decision we should be making? So that's the flip side, I think, of that decision case that you mentioned.

Paul: 6:32

Well, and what it points to something that we've talked about before is this idea of how we always need to be mindful of the impact of of decisions on people who aren't in the room when we're making them – particularly if those are people who normally would be part of that decision making process. To what degree can we and do we feel that we actually are able to represent their perspectives, to bring them into the room effectively even when they're not here. I think that's a really valuable thing to be able to do. And I that's a thing that I think groups need to do generally. Part of the discernment thing that you're talking about there is also just about assessing risk. What's the risk of making a decision without this person being present? Or meeting without this person being present? Because sometimes it's not necessarily a decision thing. We're trying to move forward, we're trying to design something, we're trying to carry this process forward. Maybe this person has particular knowledge about the area that we're working in. If we proceed without that knowledge as part of the process, there may be some risks to where we go. The risk may be we're just gonna need to come back and redo all this work later. The risk may be that we go down a path that actually gets us further from where we want to be. In the decision-making case, it may be the risk is that we decide on something that then turns out to be untenable. That this person's objections to it are problematic. And so I think when we talk about being intentional and using discernment for me, part of the lens of that is risk. What's the risk of if we do meet without this person? And what's the risk of not moving forward, of not meeting, of not doing something? One of the things that decreases risk there is if you meet more often. If we get together every day and we're going to skip today, because the person is going to be back tomorrow, that's generally not a problem. But if this is something that happens infrequently, or – I run into this a lot – where we're getting together, a lot of people have flown in from all over the world, and one person, as it turns out, can't be there. And we only get together once a quarter. Do we do we just not do anything? And so being clear about what risks are we willing to take on and which ones are we not, I think can be a useful way of working through the nuance around this.

Karen: 9:03

Yeah. Another factor we should be looking at here is,"What difference does it make that they're not in the room?" So we've talked about decision-making spaces where their input is needed, and their buy in-to the decision at some level is needed. Whether it's the manager and they're the only buy-in that counts in some ways, or whether it's just as a group we need buy in from everybody. But there's also the, "What information do they bring?" I was in a meeting recently where we knew that the person who had the information that we were looking for wasn't in the room. And so people started saying,"Well, if it went this way, we could do this. And if it went that way we could do this." And I said, "How about we don't take our time for this conversation?" Because I don't want to spend 20 minutes speculating and talking about lots of things that in the end won't actually happen. I'd rather just wait – and frankly not have the emotional damage of, "But what if? But what if? But yikes!" it when it's not actually real – and just wait until we have the actual data. And that, by the way, could be that the person isn't there or it could be that the data isn't there, either way. But just being thoughtful about "When that person is missing, what is it that's missing?" Data, perspective, information of some sort, or the ability to commit. The "I'm willing to take this part," if they're not there to say, "Yes, I can do that part," or "I have that capacity." Those things could be actually so important that we shouldn't progress without them, or at least shouldn't progress on that topic without them. Which then brings us back to what you were mentioning about, "Okay, we don't talk about that topic. We talk about other topics." And that could be totally appropriate. So yeah, "So what's missing when they're missing?" I think is a reasonable question.

Paul: 11:05

The last piece for me around this is if we decide that we don't postpone, if we do decide that we are going to move forward in some particular way, we're willing to take on these various risks and we're willing to do the best that we can, what do we need to do because that person was not there? What do they need to know about what we decided? Or what we experienced? How can we include them, even though they weren't there? What needs to happen around that? Because I see groups all the time where they just decide,"Well, we're just going to move ahead with this." And then they don't do anything to help that person catch up or understand what occurred. And so it's a question that I often like to ask when I'm working with groups, and there's someone who's missing is near the end,"So what needs to happen regarding this person to help them understand what happened here? What do we need to do? They normally would have been part of this process – whatever that was – they would have been part of this meeting. They weren't. What do we need to do differently?" To maybe mitigate some of that risk or to close whatever loop. "Hey, we need to go ask them about this thing that we would have asked them about in the in the meeting there?" What do we need to do differently to loop back in? To either repair whatever damage was done, to fix whatever needs to happen, to make sure that we can actually move forward with this? How do we need to include them even though they weren't included?

Karen: 12:37

And that points to another piece that I think it's important to think about, which is the relationship element. How much of what you're doing in this meeting is about forming relationships? You may have a book club, for example, that maybe it's about you all want to actually learn what's in the book, but probably it's about you want to spend time together and engage with each other and form a group together. And on the one hand, if every time somebody can't be there you cancel and that means you're almost never meeting, that's not serving your purposes very well. But on the flip side, there is a piece about if we can cancel every time – if we meet without people – then we're not getting that whole group bonding, particularly if it's a fairly small group. That's a real thing. And I think there's also a an added element of, well, if the answer is we just won't meet or that we'll just meet without someone – either of those – if that becomes a norm in the group, think about what that does in terms of people's commitment to the group. That if“Well, you just meet without me” becomes an easy excuse, and then somebody's just showing up once every six months, then maybe that's okay. Maybe what we really wanted was to have a conversation about a book and there were enough people there and it all worked, and everybody had a good time. But if what we're really wanting is to forge deeper relationships in that space, there may need to be a conversation about commitment and being there and how it does make a difference. Maybe not for that one meeting. But if the goal is I want a safe space where we really know each other well, and we're getting this deeper connection than we need to think about that. So I do think that there is a relationship element apart from the business piece, and you are pointing to that in terms of how do we track it when we meet without someone. But I think there's a lot of nuance about do we have the meeting or not based on how much of connection, relationship building, team building, trust building that we're hoping to accomplish in that meeting. And what's the impact both if we do meet and if we don't. What happens there? So just being able to think through that. And I'll add one little tag on that you a little bit alluded to, but there's also the piece about what's going on that's causing the person to be absent? Yeah, we know that they happen to have a doctor's appointment, they were out today, we could shift it by three hours and get them. That makes sense to do. Or “Yeah, they just went in for emergency surgery yesterday, and we hope they'll be back in six weeks but it might be longer…” you probably need to go ahead with the meeting then, and make some sort of contingency plan. So I do think there's all these sort of outside elements of like the risk factor there, but really, when do we expect them to be back? And what's realistic about

Paul: 15:31

To track where we've been on this, it's not a simple that? decision of do we need to postpone when someone's not going to be able to attend or not. And in fact, what we're saying is it shouldn't be. It shouldn't be that we have a policy where we always cancel if someone can't make it or we never postpone when someone can't make it. But what we've tried to point to are things that you should factor into your decision, your consideration of whether or not you need to postpone. So things like “What is the impact of not having that person present, whether it be on the work that we're trying to do, or on the relationships that we're trying to build? What is the impact of their absence?” And then if we think about what's the impact of not meeting– of postponing –what risks might we be incurring along the way by doing either of those? Going down the wrong path for for too long, or delaying for longer than we really should? Taking a lot of those sort of things into account. And really recognizing that the more that we are able to include people who are not present during the process by thinking about what are their perspectives? What would they be concerned about? What do we need to be thinking about, given that they can't speak to it? But also, then how can we include them, even though they weren't here? What are the things that we can do so that they at least, are part of the group in some way? That they feel attended to, that they get the information that they need, that they are included, even though they weren't present? The degree to which we can do those is the degree to which we can be more skillful about working with absences when they occur. And then just noticing in the larger pattern that there is there are contextual factors that figure in around this. If we are thinking that, “Oh, this person's out for one day, and we're going to meet again tomorrow, because we meet every day,” that's very different than a situation where this person is going to be absent for quite some time or this is a an important decision that has to be made now and has timeliness to it. Or are there other things going on in the organization that we're going to go attend to, and so as a result, we're going to cancel this meeting and figure out how we'll get back to it because this isn't a priority right now. Those are a lot of different things that you need to consider when you're trying to decide when you discover that someone can't attend. Do we need to postpone?

Karen: 18:11

That's gonna do it for us today. Until next time, I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul: 18:15

And I'm Paul Tevis. And this has been Employing Differences.