Mining Group Gold the Five

Mining Group Gold

The five basic steps in the mining group gold process for meeting management are to determine the purpose of the meeting, set objectives for the meeting, assign the roles of facilitator, scribe and timekeeper, set the agenda and establish time allocation for each item on the agenda. What these five steps accomplish is to ensure that each meeting has a specific target, and that these targets are achieved within a reasonable time frame. The process keeps the meetings on point, and discourages time-wasting, sidetracks, and digressions. The first three steps are all pretty basic for any meeting management process, and it is the timekeeping aspect that differentiates this methodology.

Timekeeping is not just done by the person with the clock, but is also partially the work of the primary and secondary facilitators, who are trusted with keeping the meeting moving, and focused on the objectives (Hightower, 2014). This forces the team to keep going back to the solution, and discourages emotional issues in particular. However, emotions are a part of this process, because it is collaborative and open. All meeting members need to agree before the meeting can move on to the next topic.

Emotions therefore will play a role. In particular, things like anger and defensiveness are going to be a part of the meeting because people are being asked to make important decisions, reject or accept ideas, in a short period of time. In particular, people may be asked to move on an important position, and others may be asked to state a complex case quickly, causing frustration with the artificial constraints inherent in this process. The methodology prescribed by Kayser is for the group to take a moment of silence to relax, and have everybody write down their feelings to express them later. The primary facilitator then asks everyone in the group to read what they group. This gets the issues on the table without the emotion, so that the issues can be addressed more effectively. It is also believed that more information comes from this process, something that reflects the positive aspects of conflict. The process therefore accepts conflict and emotion are natural parts of the management process, but tries to leverage this conflict and emotion towards the achievement of the overall objective.

The mining group process does have some interesting elements in terms of effectiveness. Everybody has seen the rambling meetings where issues simply are not resolved, making it difficult to move the process forward. In such situations, there is little doubt as to the benefits of establishing internal discipline, which is something that the mining group gold process does, in particular with the timekeeping. Over time, this process will also change the culture of the organization with respect to meetings. Whereas there will probably be a lot of initial resistance, one of the things this technique does is that it forces people in the meetings to come prepared, so that a lot of the fact-finding components that can get people sidetracked have already been dealt with.

In that, the technique improves the way people in the organization handle meetings. They start to come to meetings expecting to see positive results, and that also helps drive them forward. This technique will be especially useful in organizations where meetings are places for emotional conflict to be resolved. The culture becomes much more oriented on issues over time, so that the emotional element of the meetings becomes minimized.