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Contradict With Style
3 simple hacks to avoid you being undermined in meetings
A colleague was describing to me recently how she was becoming frustrated when in meetings with stakeholders. She explained to me what was a simple problem on the face of it, but it has taken me some time to understand how to best coach teams to prevent this problem.
Imagine, you’re presenting something to stakeholder — a plan, for example.
Everything’s going well and people are asking questions, feeding back suggestions and you’re feeling great.
Then disaster strikes.
One of your team members contradicts you. They brazenly have the nerve to say you’re wrong, or they disagree with what you’ve just said! All of a sudden, your authority just disappears out of the nearest window and what was a great meeting becomes a disaster.
It doesn’t take many of these meetings to undermine confidence in you, your team or your product. So, how do you stop this happening?
There are some obvious answers.
If you have a trivial problem, project or product, just attend the meeting on your own. It’s hard to contradict yourself. But, once you’re past ‘small’ then it’s unlikely you’ll have all the answers to all the inevitable question, which means you either have ineffective meetings as you have…
