Meetings

We are pleased to share a new article, recently accepted for posting on eZineArticles.com.

The title: The Cure for Bad Meetings: Pay Attention and Contribute

This topic started life as a blog topic, but nothing beats repetition for driving a point home; changing mindsets and improving behavior!

The Key Point to Remember and Internalize:

You control your own behavior in meetings, and that behavior is infectious.

Examine your own actions to see if you are part of the problem:

• Arriving with a bad attitude about any particular meeting, tuning out the speaker, “enduring it”

Or the solution:

• Arriving with energy and engagement, setting a standard for participation that others can emulate

Positive and negative attitudes are equally contagious! What sort of behavior are you promoting through your own actions? Make sure you err on the side of “positive” as often as possible. You will find meetings easier to take, and even find value in them nine times out of ten!

Think about how much more productive all your meetings will be if you relentlessly approach each with a positive mindset focused on the following personal objectives:

• Support the organizer to achieve the meeting objective
• Keep the momentum moving forward (volunteer to “keep the clock” and keep people focused on the task at hand)
• Ask forward thinking, action-oriented questions that are germane to the topic
• Never use the meeting to advance a tangential agenda, score points or make a fellow employee look bad.

For more, click through to the article.

If you find meetings boring and “a waste of time,” there is a simple remedy that solves that problem constructively, rather than destructively:

Banish boredom by paying attention and participating!!!

This advice pops into our mind because our marketing guru received this diatribe from the market research publisher Quirks. It captured very nicely the horrifying impact smartphones and iPad-like devices have had on workplace meetings. The experience the writer described is way too common in business today, and must be eradicated if we are to maintain productivity.

You can banish boredom all by yourself and it is easier than you think. Simply engage fully in the content being presented. Don’t distract yourself with e-mail management or other off-task activities. Choose to pay close attention, and actively participate in discussions.

• Assume you will hear something new and useful every time, even if you have heard the presentation before. Volunteer to take notes, if that keeps you fully engaged.
• Turn off your electronic equipment every time. If you are “on deadline” or “on call,” don’t come to the meeting. Being physically present is useless without being mentally present. It is OK to ask beforehand if you really need to be there.
• Challenge yourself to keep an open mind, and “check your assumptions and preconceived notions at the door.”
• Make constructive comments. Never snipe, or use the poor presenter to score points in front of your boss.
• Challenge assumptions in a substantial way. Never disparage any well-intentioned contributions to the conversation.
• Never hijack a meeting from the presenter. Let that person retain control while offering your input.
• Give ground when reasonable arguments are presented in opposition to your view. This is not a sign of weakness, it is a sign of character and an ability to adapt and grow.

Any meeting can be turned into a useful event if a constructive conversation breaks out that is forward-thinking (what should we do from here?) and action-oriented (how best to do those things?). You can instigate these constructive conversations!

Solve your boredom by engaging fully in the content. Be the person on your team that magically turns meetings from dead zones to constructive events! Our twenty-five years of experience tells us that if you do take this “high road” others will see the results and start to adopt your behavior.

Comic source credit: We found the comic above at http://blog.somepixels.net/2012/03/meetings/

We were pleased to serve as a platinum sponsor for the recent HR Star Conference in South San Francisco. Over 700 HR Professionals attended, and we had the chance to converse with about 200 of them during the day.

Brooke and Dave with Kern and Lisa at the Bovo-Tighe booth

Dave Tighe had the great priviledge to present a short seminar titled “How HR Professionals can play a lead role in raising employee productivity.” We are happy to report that the room was packed, with folks standing in the back, and the presentation was well received. About 70 people asked for a copy of the presentation, which was a great compliment! We look forward to deepening relationships with a number of people with whom we had great conversations, and returning again next year!

The Army has hit a real chord on leadership with their “Army of One” advertising campaign:

• Accept personal responsibility
• Keep the needs of the team paramount
• Adopt a psychology of achievement in your personal approach to your responsibilities.
• Take initiative. Make the most of your energy reserves.
• Stay action-oriented and forward-focused. You have no time for dwelling on failure, except to learn from it and move on.
• Adopt a positive attitude, and model it, which is as infectious as the bad attitude of others, and much more energizing.

This is why so many businesses seek out veterans of the Armed Services as employees. It is not (or not just) because they admire hierarchy and take orders well. Respect for authority can be a positive foundation for success, but it is passive rather than active, and not sufficient for being a creative, contributory employee.

Veterans are attractive because they have been trained to take initiative, find solutions to problems, waste no time dwelling on failure, keep moving forward. These are the traits that lots of companies seek in the 21^st Century.

Good news: You can create the same mindset in your organization.  continue

This article on how senior executives can better manage the collaborative decision-making processes that hold sway in most corporate executive suites points to how the Foundation of Excellence approach applies up, down and sideways in any organization. Simply switch the labels in this article to “unshakable trust,” “pursuit of truth” and “communication that counts” and you have the Bovo-Tighe approach. We love it when we are right!

This article can provide excellent guidance on better using professional interpersonal skills at any level of management.

Enjoy the article. (Note: Free registration with the S+B business blog is required to view it.)

Great employee engagement is built many ways, but the best include smaller initiatives that help form the rock-solid foundation trust that is so critical to achieving full engagement.  

I get a little reminder of that every month from a local ice cream vendor called Arctic Express. I don’t do business with them, and cannot recommend their service either way. Somehow I got on their e-mail list, though, and get entertaining e-mails which constantly remind me that engagement doesn’t grow solely on grand initiatives like 360° Peer Reviews or leadership seminars. It grows from constant attention to work environment details that give regular confirmation that senior management does care. 

Little gestures count. If you provide a meaningful break to hard-working employees by making ice cream (or baby carrots for that matter) available to them, they notice. If you stick with it, they notice and appreciate it. If you build on a steady series of such signs of appreciation, they will start to believe you are serious about building trust and start to engage more energetically.

Consider the humble ice cream freezer sitting in the break room full of cheap but quality ice cream. Energized employees can act on their own desire to bond by throwing spontaneous ice cream socials. Think back to the AT&T Super Bowl ad that featured a group of employees throwing an impromptu Taco Party. If you can facilitate that kind of bonding exercise, you can add strength to the environment of full engagement you are trying to build. 

Ice cream in particular is one of the world’s great guilty pleasures, and you can make it affordable and available 24/7. If you worry about encouraging bad dietary habits, play that up too. Put a sign up right over the freezer with a tongue-in-cheek message like:  

“Easy there, Captain! How many of these have you had this week? Remember your New Year’s resolution! Always eat responsibly!”

-Management

Small gestures add up, as long as they happen consistently, and it is clear the ‘gesturers’ really mean it.

Guest blogger Binthar Dunthat is back with another rant about meetings and trainings:

Been to millions of corporate trainings? Or does it just seem like that?

Seems like more, you say? Not surprising…

Here’s what I see and hate in typical employee trainings. See if this sounds like one of your events:

• Put ‘em in a hotel for three 14-hour-a-day training sessions
• Buy ‘em dinner at the hotel (twice, even)
• Stuff their brains until they overflow faster than a beer pitcher at a frat party
• Once they are as overloaded as said frat kids, send them back to their jobs … inspired, confused, overwhelmed, and now three days behind with no clear marching orders to sustain the gains.
• Then sit and ponder why it didn’t have a life-changing effect on productivity.

There’s a better way. And it’s not a secret.

Here are the 4 key things required in an effective productivity-boosting training program.

1. Smart upfront planning
2. Startingly great interventions
3. Ongoing support
4. And here’s the key: ABSOLUTELY TOP-QUALITY OUTSIDE PROFESSIONAL HELP

I’ve been lots of places where the top executives received professional help (and no I don’t mean that kind of professional help…although some of them surely needed it.)

I mean professional advice, counsel and guidance from a high-performance, objective consultant. Someone who’s not tied into the mish-mash of corporate politics, confusion and malarky that makes up any top executive’s daily work life.

This works for top executives. So well, in fact, that they get inspired and roll out something similar for the rank and file. But to save a few bucks they have an internal person do the training. Mistake.

Face it folks, having an internal person do this is like going to marriage counseling and having your spouse be the counselor. It ain’t going to work.

Instead, follow the four steps listed above and you’ll have a corporate training program that top executives and key influencers throughout your company will embrace and model.

And that’s the key to effective, productivity enhanced training.

(Full disclosure: Bovo-Tighe is that TOP-QUALITY OUTSIDE PROFESSIONAL HELP you need to hire. And they have the results to prove it. And a guarantee that leaves you absolutely no excuse not to try them! And, no, they didn’t pay me to say that!)

It has been an article of faith that the famous Left Brain/Right Brain split explains why some people are creative and others not. So much for that easy crutch. New studies are uncovering evidence that turning off or turning on either side of the brain (or even being a “right-or-left-brained” person at all) simply does not happen.

So all that brainstorming that has been going on in corporate America for thirty years? A waste of time, or at least, a less productive use of it. Turns out you can’t turn on or off your brain’s left side when you need to think creatively. And brainstorming goes on at every desk in every company everyday. We just do a poor job of capturing it.

What follows cribs from this article.

A short history lesson
The two-sided brain theory showed up in 1981, and it “spread quickly throughout the business world, because it seemed to explain why some people came up with creative ideas while others struggled.”

On to 1998, with the publication of a work that proposed to replace the “left/right” model with one that has the entire brain working on “learning and recall.”

Put simply: The brain collects experiences, and uses new experiences to combine old ones in logical patterns. This process of storing old memories in an orderly fashion is called “analysis”; the combining of old memories with new experiences to create new thoughts is labeled “intuition.” So, a brainstormed idea actually comes not from turning off the storage and analysis functions of the brain, but keeping them all fired up, and interacting with new information (this may be why brainstorming sessions can work, as participants acquire a big set of new experiences in a confined period.)

These authors posit, however, that the best new ideas seem to pop up “in the shower, or driving, or when falling asleep at night – When your brain is relaxed and wandering…”

Brainstorming? The best sort happens all the time.

The lesson? Brainstorming needs to be moved out of the meeting room and back into journals, diaries, regular meetings and phone conversations that occur every day in corporate America. Employees who are energized and engaged in their jobs will naturally let their brains creatively wander and make connections between stored and new information, allowing insight to flourish on a daily basis! All you need to do is put a culture in place that allows those steadily bubbling ideas to be captured, and acted on.

And you need to let your workers figure out how to get that done, by engaging them in the process!

No One Was Ever Motivated by a Meeting
By Steve Eddy

Thinking about getting some of the folks with whom you work together for a meeting? Think twice about that if your justification for conducting this meeting includes ANY of the following:
- Obtaining ‘STATUS’ updates from everyone. In the 21st Century, status updates can go out electronically, and be logged easily in one central place (Lotus Notes, Google Docs…) where everyone involved promises to go post updates. Your job as a BOSS (however defined), is to follow-up to cement good update behavior. Only meet when your team reports a lack of progress, and individual meetings do not resolve the problems. That is, have meetings to agree on useful changes in group behavior, not just to discuss the behavior itself.
- Launching an ‘initiative’ (Just say “No!” to initiatives…). Unless the participants are being asked to contribute thoughts and feedback to the initiative, why waste their time gathering to hear announcements that can be delivered electronically? Feedback can also be gathered quite productively via survey in this 21st Century without forcing people to air their ideas in public! Just as with marketing focus groups, in meetings the smartest input is often overwhelmed by the loudest input.
- Meeting without a specific, documented AGENDA, and an ironclad time limit. Meetings cost money (employee hourly rate x number of participants x time of meeting). The meeting therefore must have an outcome that earns the company at least that much in return. Put another way: This meeting will make a decision that has a $$ value of XXX, so we should do this in ½ hour or 1 hour. Lots of meetings are wasted talk. People thinking out loud or posturing. Strict agendas and time limits cut out that meeting “fat”.
- Doing anything that will NOT require minutes to be written down, and distributed to all attendees, WITH ACTION ITEMS AND DEADLINES. If people leave the meeting without assignments, tasks, responsibilities or items for follow-up, why meet? No progress has been made.
- Delivering a ‘one way’ message to your troops or peers, aka: Passing-on the meeting-equivalent of a big, fat ‘FYI’ email. The term “Meeting” should always imply that a conversation or dialogue will occur, NOT a lecture or monologue.
- Inviting people who will not instantly know ‘why?’ they should attend.
- Setting an open-ended, non-specified, meeting duration. People feigning their death or going into convulsions during a meeting may be indications that you are doing this (I am not completely joking either)
- Showing-off your skills in utilizing PowerPoint. Black text on plain white slides is all that is required 95% of the time. Fancy formatting and animation get in the way of the content, and extend the meeting needlessly.
- Allowing people to “multi-task”, texting, answering e-mails… When decisions must be made (have I mentioned that is the main purpose of meeting?) full attention is required.
- Exhorting your people to higher levels of performance without simultaneously providing them with the tools or resources needed to do so.
- Using a meeting to express displeasure with just one of the attendees; Why wastes a whole team’s time to compensate for your unwillingness to confront the particular person in a one-on-one fashion?

What to do, then, if I can’t fill my time with meetings?
Celebrate! And you can still run meetings. Simply omit the errors I have listed here. Keep this mantra with you:
Your meetings must support Unshakable Trust, Pursuit of Truth, and Communication That Counts.
Measure your meeting plans against these three goals, and you will find yourself running fewer, shorter, more powerful meetings. If you are unsure about how to make meetings useful rather than roadblocks, get professional help! That small investment could reap a huge return in happier, more productive people around you. I know it works, having facilitated such transitions hundreds of times in the last 25 years.

Steve Eddy is a senior consultant with Bovo-Tighe and has worked for years to eradicate the useless meeting from corporate life.

Meetings That Rock!
By Brooke Bovo

Do you need to get some of the folks with whom you work together for a meeting? My colleague Steve Eddy did a nice post on what NOT to do, but there is also a lot that you SHOULD do. Ready?

Great! Let’s make it ROCK: Run a meeting where everyone leaves chanting…”That was great – when’s our next one?”

People do need to meet in person every now and again to accomplish great results (which is the only reason for a meeting!)

How do you run a rocking meeting that gets great result? Glad you asked!

• Be clear who is running the meeting and what the purpose of the meeting is. Clarity and focus at the start eliminates lost time from confusion and inaction.
• Ask the right people to attend. Check your invitee list and if someone’s attendance isn’t essential or if there is just a low level need for them to attend, erase their name and let them get genuine work done. (Note: Have a constructive response ready for those who feel “left out” when not invited.)
• Use a list instead of an agenda and keep the list short: It should cover what items need to be addressed and must be sent to each attendee well before the meeting. A short list covering only a few key things lets people leave the meeting feeling engaged instead of inundated and tired. And stick to the list!