Go Broad Before You Go Deep
Does your leadership team meet to make decisions, but the team is hearing only one or two people’s views? By the end of the meeting, the team doesn’t have all the information it needs to solve the problem and members have disengaged. The meeting ends without a solution or with one that many team members can’t support. Frustration builds.
When team meetings focus on only a few members’ views, they fail to build the shared pool of information needed to make high-quality decisions that all team members can commit to implementing.
Teams create this problem when they go deep before going broad. When a team raises a topic or moves to another topic, going deep means following up on what one or two team members say, to learn more about what they are thinking, before hearing from everyone. Sometimes the team leader goes so deep, they ask a team member what the causes of the problem are and what solution they recommend before checking if everyone agrees on the problem the team needs to solve.
Let’s say you lead a team that is starting to discuss whether the organization’s culture change effort has enough support to move to the next phase. You ask the team members what they think and Pari responds first saying, “I think we don’t have the support yet that we need. I’m not seeing a consistent shift in behaviors and certainly not a shift in mindset at the first level of management.” Going deep is asking Pari follow-up questions such as, “What do is think is causing the lack of change?” or even deeper, “How do we solve this problem?”
Go broad before you go deep means hearing each team member’s brief view on the topic before hearing from any member in detail. After Pari responds to your initial question, rather than following up with her, you ask, “What initial thoughts do the rest of you have about whether there is enough support to move to the next phase?”
When you go broad, explain your reasoning for doing it and check to see if everyone is onboard. You can say something like, “I want to make sure we hear everyone’s initial thoughts on this issue before we dive deep into any part of it. This will help us stay focused on what we need to discuss next as a team. Any concerns using this approach?”
If you start by going broad, the entire team will quickly understand what all team members’ initial views are, and the team will have more information to decide exactly where and when to dive deeper. The team will also be more engaged.
Effective teams cycle through going broad, then deep, then broad and then deep again as they move through the standard steps of a problem-solving process: identifying the problem, agreeing on root causes, agreeing on the interests that need to be met for any solution, generating solutions, and agreeing on solutions. This ensures that as the team gets deeper into exploring the causes of a problem and the potential solutions, the entire team moves forward as a team.
Updated 2024
