Meetings are part of life for many people, and some people hate them.
When you walk away not knowing what you were supposed to get out of it, or you were given a 40 page slideshow that lost your attention at slide 15, it feels like a waste of your time. Few people come prepared to participate and they aren’t as effective.
I came across some great statistics from an infographic by SalesCrunch.com, Don’t Suck at Meetings.
A few statistics stuck out:
The headline of an article on Open Forum caught my attention: How to Hold Meetings that Nobody Hates. It provides simple advice that is easy to follow.
Communicate the point of the meeting and the topic to be discussed prior to the meeting. Instead of providing a memo for everyone to read, provide an agenda so you don’t lose focus and stay on course. This gives your team a heads up so they can make notes and contribute to the discussion.
Set a time limit to ensure you are getting through all the points of the agenda. Meetings should last about 30 minutes so set a start and finish time and stick to it.
Build questions and discussion points into the agenda if you want engagement. Even though you’re running the meeting, your voice is not the only voice that should be heard. Meetings are also a good place to recognize your team for a job well done. Recognizing them motivates them to keep meeting their goals and getting their tasks complete.
If the topics of your meeting don’t apply to your entire team, then don’t hold a mandatory meeting for everyone. Keep meetings productive with smaller groups of only the people affected.
Meetings should be useful for your team so take the time to plan and prepare. Use them to make decisions, generate discussion and feedback, get new ideas rolling, and set a course of action.
What tips would you provide to keep your meeting from being boring?
Meetings are a part of life for many leaders. Some hate them, some view them as a waste of time, and others simply walk away unsure of what that last 40 minutes was even about.
There are numerous ways to improve meetings, from communicating what will be discussed to setting a time limit, but in the end, they should always be useful for your team.
Mary Jo Asmus, contributor to SmartBlog on Leadership, poses an interesting take on meetings. She suggests you use them to build relationships that make your workplace thrive.
Meetings don’t have to be boring. They can be for making a decision or setting a course of action, but they are also excellent exercises in collaboration, discussion, and feedback. Like Asmus says, they are a great place to build relationships among your team members. Employees who forge good relationships and work well together are more productive and have a better attitude.
“What we really need is to have meetings that allow relationships to deepen, where participants help each other to grow and succeed together,” says Asmus. “In addition to actionable items, a good meeting could increase trust among the participants, thereby promoting deeper relationships and more post-meeting connections and engagement.”
She offers some ideas to consider for better meetings.
Let the participants know the purpose of the meeting, whether it’s to build relationships, brainstorm, or cultivate participation. It will help them prepare and having everyone on the same page increases efficiency.
If you can choose where you’ll meet, pick a casual area. “Somewhere where participants can relax and ‘let their hair down,’” says Asmus. Round tables and comfortable chairs make a space informal, which is a great way to start conversations and build relationships.
Asmus suggests you set some ground rules such as:
Start with a personal question each person in the room can answer briefly. It loosens everyone up, and gets them all to engage in the conversation. It also provides information for post-meeting chats among the participants, and they may even find they have something in common. Examples of questions include:
Tell the participants you will act as the facilitator of the conversation, not the presenter. To do this, try assigning agenda items to others so they can contribute to the conversation, and only ask questions to stimulate dialog if you notice a lag in the meeting. Asmus says to aim to listen 80 percent of the time and talk the other 20 percent.
If no one wants to speak up or the conversation is stifled, break people up into smaller groups, and pose a question for them to discuss. “This is often a more comfortable way for people to speak up,” says Asmus.
Use meetings to strengthen internal networks. This will ultimately lead to improved collaboration, problem solving, and higher morale.
Do you use meetings to build connections between employees?
Sometimes a small business has to be careful what it wishes for. Say you’ve finally snagged a big customer with a huge contract. Great news, right? Not necessarily.
According to Les McKeown, president and CEO of Predictable Success, “Most small companies that land mega-contracts with massive companies end up badly damaged and have their growth stunted over the long term as a result.”
In this article, McKeown describes how this happens:
One client generates more than 20 percent of revenue. In McKeown’s view, “unhealthy things” begin to take place when one client reaches 20 percent or more of total revenues. No one client or customer should be allowed to “dominate the top line.”
Meetings are all about one customer. A red flag is raised when you realize nearly every meeting you hold focuses on the needs of that one client. These meetings turn into “little more than a punch-list of their outstanding production or delivery issues.”
Your employees are getting burned out. A single big customer can easily come to dominate the small business that’s serving it. When this occurs, the atmosphere grows tense because this is the one client you can’t afford to lose.
As McKeown notes, “Your employees lose the ability to work at their own pace, and are increasingly yanked from pillar to post.”
Deadlines go haywire, internal priorities are constantly shifted and superseded and workers are stretched to the limit. “Net result? You have an exhausted, unhappy, and increasingly disengaged workforce.”
Creative employees go unfulfilled. Sometime after the initial honeymoon period is over, a big client begins “turning up the volume when they think they’re not getting what they want.”
This tends to frustrate the most creative employees in your business, because their ideas and suggestions get drowned out in the frantic rush to meet the client’s constant demands. Without creative input, you run the risk of further failing to satisfy the client’s needs.
You lose focus on your target market. With all your efforts geared toward the one big client, you lack time and energy to stay on top of your target audience’s needs and challenges. When this happens, your competitors are only too eager to rush into the vacuum.
New client acquisition gets low priority. Along with a lack of focus on the target market, your small business simply lacks the resources to do what’s most important to long-term success. As McKeown says, “It dawns on you you’ve developed an in-built dependence on the contract that can’t easily be given up.”
The effort it takes to meet your big customer's needs become so “all-consuming” that new client acquisition efforts get placed on the back-burner.
No small business can afford to put all its eggs in one basket. Watch for these warning signs and keep working to expand your client base.
What do you do to avoid the big customer trap?
