Task Skills and Maintenance Skills

Task and maintenance skills - orb showing road warning signs and representing task and maintenance skills

Kurt Lewins’ model provides a really helpful insight into keeping your team on track.

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A meeting is essentially a series of interactions. At a surface level, it is easy to believe that these are all about the content of the meeting. However, if you look deeper at what is going on, you can see other interactions. Significantly, some of these other interactions seem to help the meeting to flow better, and others don’t.
Kurt Lewin refered to these interactions which help the meeting to progress as Task Skills and Maintenance Skills.
Task Skills are those interactions which enable people to contribute and process content. While Maintenance Skills are those interactions which help to build and maintain relationships within the group.
In many cases, task and maintenance happen naturally. However, we often find that some people do them better than others. As a result, the absence of such people can have a negative effect on the flow of the meeting.
Is this knowledge useful? In most situations, not really.
However, there are situations where the concepts can be invaluable. For example, they can provide real insight into the dynamics of the group, and who is using which skills. This can help the leader to understand the influence different attendees have on the mood of the meeting. In particular, they can identify those who seem to have a particularly positive and uplifting effect on the group. At the same time, it can also help them to understand what might be required if the meeting becomes more stilted or less ‘flowing’ and enjoyable.
The skills are as follows:

Task Skills

  • Initiating: Setting discussions in motion and introducing new trains of thought
  • Information Seeking: Asking questions and drawing out input from others
  • Clarifying and Elaborating: Ensuring that ambiguous or confusing input is properly understood
  • Summarising: Condensing a stream (or a tangle) of input into the essential messages
  • Consensus Testing: Checking agreement and acceptance of input and conclusions

Maintenance Skills

  • Encouraging: Making people feel good about their (intended) contribution
  • Harmonising: Bringing alignment, and reconciling potential tensions between group members
  • Gatekeeping: Ensuring a balanced and manageable flow of input – preventing domination of input
  • Compromising: Finding mutually beneficial outcomes for people
  • Expressing group feeling: Making feeling that are common to the group explicit
Observing the flow of your meeting in this way can provide helpful insight. For example, you may find that certain skills are rarely (or insufficiently) exhibited. Consequently, you are able to consider what positive impact an increase in these skills may have. You can then compensate for this either within the process or within your facilitation of the meeting.

Helpful Links:

Track your progress to ensure the efficacy of this strategy.