We had an extended discussion on “asking the right questions” during our first-ever afternoon meeting of Bizbookclub. We focused most of our discussion on confronting people when a leader needs to.

Mr. Maxwell recommends that a leader should try to substitute “confront” with “clarify” if it is threatening to others. However, we agreed that some people and situations actually yield better results if confrontation is used tactically.

We then moved to an interesting sub-section on confrontation called “10 commandments of confrontation”. We had some very exciting segues into vital behaviors, core characteristics and other psychological aspects of humans. We generated a very exciting idea about vital behaviors during this side-conversation and I will dwell on that in future posts. As it is becoming a trend with our meetings, we could hardly get past 1 section of 1 chapter, albeit for a good reason. We concluded the meeting at the 8th of the 10 commandments.

For more details about this chapter, please review the mindmap at: Chapter 7: People

Yes, there was a long gap between the two meetings, but that actually served us well. I had a lot of time to mull over the diverse and frank opinions expressed during that night’s conversations.

For a change, there was a humongous opinion difference in every topic we discussed that night. Right from providing encouragement to understanding what motivates people. We extensively studied some of the characteristics of our colleagues in an attempt to understand what works and what does not. The conversation, by no means, came to a conclusion. Case in point: we covered only a fifth of the chapter that night!

Some take-away points from that night:

• We will soon be switching to afternoon meetings (same weekdays) because majority of the regular attendees are from Fiserv-Hillsboro anyway and there has been a growing demand to cater to the family folks
• We are going to focus more on actionable items while debating the pros and cons of the countless ideas that seem to spring during the conversations
• I will add a new section on the blog to collect these actionable items

Anyway, I loved the energy and opinion differences that night and hope to continue on that path for a long time to come.

Here’s a link to the MindMap for our all important chapter: Chapter 7: People