What happens when people in a meeting are different stratum, knowing each other well enough to have some experience of each other’s capacity? Who leads? If certain people talk, does the conversation die? Does the meeting have to be facillitated by the highest stratum person? Will it be regardless, at least effectively?
This got started by my recently reading an old article by Peter Block (1998, “As Goes the Followerd; So Goes the Leader” and the response by Trudy Cooper) about an experiment regarding what he called “patriarchy”. I wonder what the resuls would have been had he considered stratum.
Imagine a meeting with ten people around a table. It’s a mix, but a higher stratum mix and almost everyone is in a five year age-range. The breakdown looks thus:
- StrIII: 2
- StrIV: 4
- StrV: 2
- StrVII: 1
Make the discussion about something personal, say a community issue rather than work. Each person is here by choice rather than appointment so eliminate non-desire as an issue.
Further, the meeting is facillitated by a StrIV.
What happens? What dynamics play out? What if we simplify it thus:
- StrIII: 4
- StrIV: 1
- StrV: 3
- StrVII:
Now what happens? If the meeting is run at StrIV, one would think that this would get the StrIII engaged. Or do they wait for the StrVII or a StrV to set further context?
What happens if one of the StrV+ speaks out on an issue? Will the StrIIIs clam up because the conversation has taken a weird turn or will they engage more because that person has set an broader context?
I know that in this case personality would play a part, especially the control and dominance scores (as measured by Human Patterns personality test). If the facillitator has strong control and dominance scores, will she or he even let the higher stratum members speak for long?
These meeting happen rather regularly at work, of course, except it normally looks like Str2/3/4. At least within IT they are quite normal. One would expect control mechanisms to support whomever had the managerials authority (normally a Str3) in order to maintain the illusion of the hierarchy.
I really don’t have any good ideas on this one except that trying to lead a meeting with a higher-stratum person in the room probably means always fighting for control.
In a way, this is related to the problem of having the boss in the room during a discussion of direction. Inevitably, people will look to him or her for signs of approval or disapproval. George Washington pulled off the “argue your case with each other” with his executive team during the war. He would get them together and have them passionately argue with each other, almost to blows. He would then make up his own mind about the issue. I suppose that they felt comfortable arguing because he felt comfortable being responsible for making the decision.
