DO YOU USE THE 5% RULE IN YOUR MEETINGS?

I am sure you do! Don’t you?

Have you even heard of the 5% rule? No?

Read on!

The first five percent of any meeting, like any other experience, is like a palate cleanser. You’re preparing people mentally, physically, and psychologically for whatever is coming next, according to Priya Parker, author of The Art of Gathering, which takes the form of an online course. Jenna Abdou interviewed her for a recent article (The first 5% rule, and other meeting strategies that will transform your leadership, in Fastcompany, 20 Nov 23), in which Parker explained strategies you might consider adopting to invigorate your team’s shared purpose as they engage in the weekly round of meetings, informal at-work gatherings and other events.

So, what is this 5% rule? Parker attests that the first five percent of any meeting you hold or share online should be helping people orientate themselves to What is this meeting for? What is my role in it? How can I be successful here??

Do you ever pause to reflect on the meetings you initiate or attend with your senior team and your other staff? Do you even enjoy meetings? Do your meetings achieve what you want them to achieve? Do your meetings achieve anything? In the life of schools, there are always so many competing and conflicting demands on our time as leaders, let alone on the time of our staff members. Some people hate meetings for this reason. They just interrupt the flow of the working day.

Yet Parker asserts that the most sacred thing we have in our personal lives as well as our working lives is our collective and shared time together. How should we spend it? ?she asks.

According to Aboud, Parker believes that gathering well, in person and online, is the 21st-century leadership skill. In her interview with Aboud, Parker offered tools, toasts, and templates to transform your meetings— with ideas to turn meetings ranging from a team retreat through a leadership meeting to an honorary celebration — into memorable gatherings.?

In The Art of Gathering, Aboud explains, Parker shares as an example the story of a company anniversary party, that took the form of a surprise rock concert. As their team grew upwards of 500, Parker tells us how the leaders aspired to reinvigorate the spirit of the early days. She continues: The event was to begin at 11 a.m., though the doors were locked when everyone arrived. Once they opened, people were greeted by strobe lights, a band made up of their team members, and the senior partners dancing. In that moment, they were surprised and moved,” Parker explains in the course, which the team invited me to experience. They realised that their hosts really get them and that: ‘We are still us. There is a way to grow but at the same time, stay who we are.’

Parker indicates that the partners achieved this by creating a temporary alternative world, and goes on to suggest that doing so is an opportunity available to us every time we plan a gathering.

Aboud offered Parker this scenario: Let’s say we’re designing a dinner with the purpose of helping a team build authentic friendships and learn each other’s stories outside of work. Through the lens of your course,?Aboud asks Parker, What mechanism might you create to give guests the social permission to engage with each other in a way that is relevant to the gathering’s purpose and context?

You might like Parker’s response:

One approach is to use a model I created with my friend, Tim Leberecht, called 15 Toasts: It’s a meal model for groups to have one shared conversation around a theme with a little bit of risk. The rules are to choose and share a theme that is relevant to the group. At some point in the evening, you ding your glass, stand up old-school style, if it’s available to you, and share a story that taught you about that theme and that no one in the room has heard. The other rule is that the last person has to sing their toast, which speeds the night along.?

What do you think? Might this work with your Executive Staff team?

Parker continues:

I received a note from the CEO of an edtech company who did 15 Toasts at their team retreat. The theme was mentorship. Over the course of the night, 15 to 20 team members shared beautiful stories about mentors who had had an impact on them, which at some level was answering what had influenced them and why they worked there. As an edtech company, it was also helping them deeply understand what mentorship is. Do our interactions embody the qualities and relationships in these stories? It’s not gratuitous. Part of the art of finding the connective tissue within a team is asking the right questions to help elucidate and illuminate.

And how would you actually open that experience??Aboud asks.

Parker again: A gathering doesn’t begin at the moment people enter the room or Zoom. It opens at the moment of invitation. Tim Leberecht sent out the 15 Toasts ahead of time:?‘You’re invited to an evening of 15 Toasts. The theme is mentorship. Here are the rules’.?You could make it a surprise, depending on the group, though, in my experience, people have different learning styles and preparation times. Issuing an informative invitation helps people prepare and be ready to have a shared experience.?

Aboud then asks Parker to expand on her statement that the first five percent of any gathering is where guests are trying to discern, What is the way to ' here?”?

The first five percent of any experience prepares people mentally, physically, and psychologically for whatever is coming next, Parker replied, continuing,This is even more important in remote work because we’re toggling between different meetings and roles. You can pop off a work Zoom, enter a parent-teacher conference, then have a consultation with your doctor, all before going into your next meeting. So, the first five percent is helping people to work out What is this meeting for? What is my role in it? How can I be successful here??

Aboud’s next question focuses on Parker’s suggestion that every gathering has scripts and that scripts don’t lead to transformation. If you and I are on a team, how can we dismantle the scripts in our interactions and replace them with new ways of being? she asks.

Parker’s answer will be of interest to you. Think about your own meetings. Do you have a 'script'? Are your meetings boringly predictable? How do you grab everyone’s attention in a new a different way so they cannot help themselves becoming engaged and interested?

Or are your own meetings so poorly-scripted that no one knows what they are really for?

Parker recalls that A few years ago, Brené Brown invited me to examine her team’s weekly leadership meeting and practised vulnerability by recording our call. She polled her team about it and realised that no one knew its purpose. One of the blockages was the name of the meeting — Campfire.

When I asked why they called it that, she laughed and said something like: ‘It sounded like a cozy name.’?Then, I asked:?‘Well, is it like a campfire? Do you want people doing the equivalent of singing songs and roasting marshmallows?’?She said: ‘Of course not, we need to get stuff done.’

Scripts aren’t problematic if they are, at some level, the right scripts, Parker acknowledges, but we tend to under-name our meetings and gatherings. A simple element to increase their likelihood of success and have the right people there is to give them a name. Names have social contracts within them. By shifting the name of the meeting, they began to get off their own scripts and into the right ones.

Moving along, I was excited to learn that you are a student of improv theatre, Aboud continues, which is where you learned the language of being?altered?by an event. You shared that when we are not altered, there’s nothing to learn or grow from.

Parker outlines how she learned the term altered from one of the fathers of improv, Keith Johnstone. She takes up the story: A simple example happened to my stepmother at my father’s retirement party. Often, in particular in workplaces, we over-rely on symbols to convey meaning and appreciation: the cake, plaque, and the gift. It’s not that they don’t contribute context, they do. But, who and what we mark in our workplaces, and how we mark them, is a reflection of our values.?

My father was a civil servant for many decades, Parker recounts. His colleagues found out he was retiring and very sweetly organised a lunch. Everyone was chatting. Ten minutes go by. Then, 15 and 20. My stepmother started to worry that his retirement lunch is going to be a normal lunch. So, she dinged her glass, stands up, takes a huge risk, and says:?‘Hi, I’m Renee, Ron’s wife. I am so happy to be here. I know home-Ron, but I’m wondering if you can tell me some stories about work-Ron.’

Silence followed, Parker said, and then, a few seconds later, an intern dings his glass, stands up, and says:?‘Ron is the kind of person, who whenever I have a question, I walk to his desk because I know he’ll put down what he’s doing, stand up, and answer my question.’ Then, someone else: ‘Ron is the fun master. His personal coup was naming an acronym after his daughter, the Pesticide Reduction Information Act: The PRIA.’

All of a sudden, Parker enthuses, the room shifted. My stepmother helped the group find just enough structure, and no more, to achieve its stated purpose. She helped them figure out: 'What do we do when we honour and celebrate people’s impact here?' It altered my father, she goes on, because it changed the story of his impact for the rest of his life. Those 90 minutes did a lot of labour to achieve an answer:?Did I matter??It also altered everybody else. The experience temporarily shifted the dynamics of the culture for people to ask questions like:?Do I put my stuff down when someone asks me a question??

Aboud concludes her piece with: I love this example because being 'altered' isn’t fireworks and rocket science. It’s asking: How do we create connection and meaning around our personal purpose? At a deep level, particularly in the workplace, everybody wants to know that they matter.?

The way we lead in our workplaces subtly shapes the ways our team members respond to us, and sometimes we need to remember that as leaders in schools, it is our fostering and nurturing of those relationships that is our primary responsibility. From our senior colleagues, as well as with our students, we cannot draw their best and help them be the best teachers and students they can be without nurturing the relationships with them that lie at the heart of educating, of teaching and of learning.

As Priya Parker reminds you, the most sacred thing we have in our personal lives as well as our working lives is our collective and shared time together. Ask yourself Aboud’s closing question: How do we create connection and meaning around our personal purpose here in our school? Remember, at a deep level, in every workplace, everybody wants to know that they matter.?

We should do our utmost to ensure – by whatever means we have at our disposal – that we make sure everybody knows they matter – everybody on your staff, and every student they teach – by nurturing the relationships we enjoy with everyone within our school community. By doing so, we ensure that they know they matter; that they are known and valued, and go home from school each day encouraged to be the best that they can be.

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