Time Management

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/

Brooke introduces audience to E+R=O

Bovo-Tighe was pleased and honored to present a series of educational sessions at the National Property Management Association’s annual conference last week. The NPMA is putting a strong emphasis on teaching “people asset management” in addition to management of physical assets. We delved into a range of topics:

How to Work with Difficult People 

This session (Bovo-Tighe Motivating-Leading Session NPMA 2011,) led by Marilee Robertson, taught how to use an understanding of basic behavior styles to better work with different personalities, a foundational step to great team building and stronger interpersonal relationships.

Changing Personal Mindsets (Keynote address: Rise Above the Rest)

Brooke led the full assembly in a mindset-changing exercise (Bovo-Tighe Keynote NPMA 2011) to get them to adopt forward-thinking, action-oriented behaviors as a habit. She used E+R=O (Event plus Response equals Outcome) as the mnemonic to encourage this change in mindset. And a tip of the cap to the property managers: Audience participation was fantastic!

Leading Change in 90 Days

Dave took his group through a compact version of our leadership development model (Bovo-Tighe Leadership Seminar NPMA 7-2011) based on our Foundations of Excellence approach of Unshakable Trust, Communication That Counts and the Pursuit of Truth. Participants learned everyday behaviors that can change the way they manage their professional relationships to significantly enhance their productivity, and that of their peers and teammembers.

We had a great time, made some great new friends, and look forward to returning in 2012 to check on the progress NPMA members make in embedding forward-focused, action-oriented habits into their day-to-day business interactions!

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!