If you’ve ever walked out of a meeting thinking, “That went great,” only to discover later that people were upset, this post is for you.
Let me use a contrived example.
Let’s say you plan to tell your team you’re going to have lunch together today.
Seems simple and completely non-controversial.
You walk into the team meeting and announce: “We’re going to a team lunch today at 12:00.”
Breakfast, lunch, dinner. Three meals a day. People have been doing it for years. You don’t think twice about making the announcement.
But afterward, you start hearing through the grapevine that Sally is upset and Dale is kind of annoyed.
What happened? Are they anti-lunch?
No. They want lunch.
So what’s the problem?
You didn’t ask if they were free. They don’t know where you’re going. John is a vegetarian, so it depends on the restaurant whether he wants to go. Samantha has a meeting at 12:00 and is wondering if it could be pushed back to 12:30.
In the end, everyone was fine with the idea of lunch. The issue wasn’t the lunch itself. The issue was that they didn’t feel included in the decision.
That’s where the Japanese concept of Nemawashi comes in, which is more or less about socializing your ideas and getting alignment before the meeting.
In this contrived example, if you had gone around individually before the meeting and said: “Hey, I’m thinking about a team lunch today. What do you think?” …and gathered everyone’s input, then by the time the meeting rolled around and you announced it, everyone would already be bought in. And you wouldn’t spend the next four hours hearing that Sally is upset, Dale thinks you don’t listen to him, and Bob thinks you don’t care about his opinion.
That’s Nemawashi. Every time I have forgotten or failed to do this, it has bitten me. A little upfront investment to save you time and heartburn afterwards.