3 Ways to Keep Negative Employees from Ruining Your Meetings

Ever conducted a staff meeting where one or two employees ruined the whole thing by their negative comments and whining? Sometimes the solution is to get rid of them.

In many cases, though, these people are an integral part of your team, perhaps even star performers in front of customers. But put them in a room with their peers and you, their supervisor, and they turn into monsters of negativity that suck all the effectiveness out of the meeting.

3 Ways to Combat Negativity

In my case, these employees were very effective in their customer-facing roles. But when they let their hair down when customers weren’t present, they turned from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde. Here’s how I overcame their negativity in staff meetings.

1. Talk to your team. First, I met privately with each of my team members and sought their input on how to improve meetings. (It’s important to note that I wasn’t talking solely about negativity, it was just one factor we discussed.)  I especially cultivated those team members who had been around and were looked up to by the rest.

I asked everyone for suggestions about how to improve the meetings. I also encouraged my more positive members not to stand idly by when they disagreed with the negativity.

2. Update your norms. Based upon input from these discussions, we came up with several new norms:

• The purpose of staff meetings was to share information and solve problems. Therefore discussions were focused solely on what we could directly impact. Discussions about policies we couldn’t change were immediately moved to a flipchart marked “Parking Lot.” I followed up on these later.
• We focused on what we need to do or solve between now and the next meeting. Other discussion was discouraged.
• If a topic needed more discussion than had originally been planned for, the group decided if it needed additional time for discussion. This shifted the focus from finishing all of the topics on the agenda to providing more value to the attendees. It also empowered team members to be more responsible for having a successful meeting.

3. Provide private feedback. In the beginning we found old habits hard to break. When the discussion started to deteriorate, I called a 15-minute break and privately provided feedback to the offender. “

When you start complaining about things we have no control over, it wastes everyone’s time, gets us off-track, and sucks all the positive energy out of the room," I told them. "Your peers do not appreciate it and neither do I.”  I also provided feedback to those who had been positive contributors in the meeting.

Focusing on Solutions

To me, the critical factor here was that we focused on solving the problems we could solve and that we allowed those discussions additional time when needed. The other side of that coin was that we shut down whining since it detracted from problem solving.

How did things turn out for my team? The group began to police itself after a few meetings. After one or two meetings, if someone started to get negative, a team member would say, “Save it for Happy Hour!” 

Occasionally, however, the negative person would have a point. In those cases it was up to me to reframe it in a way that promoted mature, solution-oriented discussions.

Don’t just sit there and suffer through ineffective staff meetings. Do something about it! Your first step should be to talk one on one with each of your team members. Listen to their feedback. My team provided the solutions; so can yours.

Regards,

Glenn

Meet me on Twitter. I’m @txglennross.