Paul Mengert has long served as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Association Management Inc., where he has been afforded opportunities to address groupings of his peers, either in the business world generally or in the association management industry specifically. Last year, he was lucky enough to be able to address a gathering of worldwide association management leaders. Paul Mengert spoke to the assembled executives and leaders at the 2013 Annual Conference & Exposition of the Community Association Institute. This was a brilliant opportunity for Paul Mengert—it gave him the ability to discuss a body of research his firm did on small group decisions. His firm has put a great deal of research into small group decisions and how they are best made, as well as how they affect overall business success. Small group decisions turned out to be even more important than Paul Mengert and his team assumed. They are incredibly influential in the business world and tend to guide some of the biggest decisions made on the world stage. Paul Mengert seeks to enhance the management and development of his company, so naturally he has taken an interest in small group decisions and how to improve them.
Paul Mengert was more than happy to be able to share the research that his team conducted and the findings that resulted from their research. They learned some pretty simple lessons from which he learned a lot and from which he hoped the assembled experts and specialists could benefit as well. Paul Mengert was happy to be able to contribute to the future success of the industry as a whole. Chief amongst the things Paul Mengert and his group found were that different people will tend to see things through a different lens or perspective and that once the group learned to accept this as a fact and genuinely listen to one another, the results will improve dramatically. This process eliminates defensiveness, overly-competitive attitudes, knee-jerk reactions, and any preconceived notions the group might usually resort to. It also brings all individual's opinions to the table, preventing one person from dominating the others. This contributes to ideas being paramount, rather than people.