Best Performance at a Staff Meeting Goes to . . .

Ever wonder why staff meetings can resemble an amateur stage play, an open meadow at hunting season, a dysfunctional family dinner conversation or just a place to sleep?

Office meetings tend to make many workers feel vulnerable, experts say, and that’s why many will reach for defense mechanisms or roles they learned at a much earlier age, say 10. And that can be dangerous.

“I think people underestimate how strong the workplace, especially a meeting, evokes old family dynamics,” said Connie Gersick, associate professor of management at UCLA’s Anderson School. “People can regress. Then they’re not at their best, and they’re not at ease.”

Still, every worker needs to take meetings seriously. Studies show that performances in meetings can translate directly into salary rewards--or lack thereof.

According to “How to Sharpen Your Performance on the Business Stage,” a recent article by Michael Hattersley in the newsletter of Harvard Business School, employees need to look inside themselves to figure out what roles they may play in office meetings.

Each should then decide if he wants the role he has assigned himself. He should also learn how to effectively deal with other character types who create the drama in meetings.

“In meetings, people are always performing for someone,” Hattersley said. “Usually they are trying to impress the leader--there’s a lot at stake.”

Here are 11 of the typical meeting roles that Hattersley, an author and expert on management, identified:

The Joker: Tries to break the ice or insert disguised barbs. This can be a useful meeting role. Humor is a great icebreaker and bonder of workers, but it can be dangerous if it descends into sarcasm. If you are in a meeting with a joker, be prepared to point out when jokes are going too far.

The Gatekeeper: This person (not always the leader) tries to keep the agenda. Try to play this role if you are leading a meeting. Identify an emerging consensus. If someone else is the gatekeeper, don’t let her shut down discussion before your views are heard.

The Devil’s Advocate: Regularly challenges an emerging consensus. Can be useful when a self-satisfied meeting consensus should be challenged. To deal with an overzealous devil’s advocate, try to limit him by praising how good he is at identifying pitfalls, but say it’s time to move on.

The Critic: Sees problems with others’ ideas but has none better to offer. These people can argue with an idea just because they don’t want to see someone else succeed. When dealing with a critic, accommodate the strong points in her argument but be prepared to challenge them.

The Agenda Setter: Regularly puts new ideas and issues on the table. No good meeting survives without one. If you are the leader, try to play this role.

The Consensus Builder: Draws others’ ideas together into a course of action. Everyone should be prepared to play this role; it’s a sign of leadership. But if a consensus builder is on the wrong track, acknowledge his talent and then play devil’s advocate.

The Cheerleader: Encourages any sign of progress. Everyone should try this role at some point. Just don’t overdo it.

The Mimic: Always echoes others’ comments. Avoid becoming a parrot. To deal with a mimic, quickly point out that someone else has already made that point and move on.

The Monomaniac: Rides the same hobbyhorse every meeting. This guy can be a real time waster. Try to challenge him early.

The Outsider: Conveys detachment or contempt through body language and comments. If you find yourself playing this role, it may be because you are shy or because you typically disagree with what is going on. (In that case, you might want to look for another job.)

The Leader: This person (not always the one running the meeting) has the final say. A leader usually earns that title through experience and responsibility, but a wise leader recognizes when another leader is emerging in a meeting and examines why that is happening.

To be more effective in meetings, Hattersley said, workers should make sure they make their points quickly, avoid being predictable and above all, don’t play any single role all the time.

The most destructive of these characters to a meeting, Hattersley said, is the Critic, who shoots down every idea without offering anything new.

“People shut up if their ideas are always being torn down and then the good spirit of the meeting gets destroyed,” Hattersley said.

One of the most important benefits of a meeting is brainstorming, in which good ideas can come out of bad ones. So if people are afraid to throw their ideas out, the meeting can be useless.

“Unless there is a certain amount of risk-taking in meetings, they get rigid,” he said. “Then you don’t have to go to the meeting, you could just write the script of what everyone is going to say beforehand.”

The other dangerous character is the Monomaniac, who wastes everyone’s time talking about the same idea.

Workers who find these characters dominating their meetings can adopt three strategies: Lay groundwork before a meeting; establish yourself as a person of principles and a consensus builder (that means praising a rival’s idea if it’s a good one or disagreeing with a friend); and follow up on the information gathered in a meeting.

Bosses trying to head off role-playing at meetings should remember that meeting size can have a direct effect on this type of exaggerated behavior, Gersick of UCLA said.

Studies have shown that meetings of more than 12 people start to have an “audience effect.” That means the meeting becomes more of a performance by a handful of people, with the rest playing the part of a silent audience, sometimes responding by laughter to the performance.

For better discussion, more meetings of smaller sizes should be offered, experts said.

“People who would talk in smaller groups just become silent when the size is above 12,” Gersick said.

Another key point about meetings is that they can become an arena to act out conflict that is going on among other workplace groups that aren’t even at the meeting. Some meeting participants become representatives of certain factions in the workplace.

“You can draw a line around certain people in a meeting and a lot of invisible people are standing right behind them,” Gersick said.

That’s when some of the role-playing by the Agenda Setter or Consensus Builder can be helpful.