Meetings. The word can solicit strong feelings about their value and level of effectiveness. Regardless of how you feel about them, meetings are an essential part of most organizations. Many of us practice the standard guidelines for creating a good meeting: creating a clear agenda/meeting objective, keeping time, recapping action items, inviting the right people, etc.
So how can meetings be more engaging and productive? What’s missing?
Knowing your audience’s personality style is often the missing piece.
A personality assessment like EverythingDiSC® can help bridge the gap between employees and optimal workplace communication. For example:
Consider that D-styles prefer meetings with minimal small talk and an agenda that everyone sticks to.
Allow i-styles to flourish by allowing them to express personal opinions and have open discussions with others.
To ensure S-styles feel comfortable, provide them with your meeting’s outline or agenda in advance so they can prepare.
Remember that C-styles don’t do well with making big decisions when they feel rushed or pressured.
These are some of the elements of how knowing your communication style and that of your other meeting participants can make for more effective meetings.
A wise man once said, communication makes friends; a lack of communication makes enemies. Our words have power! We all know communication is important, and yet effective communication can be a battle for individuals, teams, and organizations. Communication is the gateway to clarity, which ultimately gets the right things done.
As Alan Schaefer, Branding People Together states, “to ensure we have clarity, we must consider how we share and process information. Most of us have experienced a scenario where you have a meeting with one or several people. You have a robust, or at least what appears to be forward-moving, conversation. You break the metaphorical huddle and go running whatever plays you understand to be correct. You come back together and people are so off course that you have a twilight-zone moment of disbelief wondering, Was the other person in the same conversation as the rest of us?”
So how do you prevent your team from falling prey to the telephone game? Below are three ways to prevent miscommunication:
Use the right format –Email? Phone? Face to face? We tend to default to email a lot! Email is best used to spread information, like recapping action items after a meeting or sharing attachments others need, NOT for in-depth communication. This means no debating, convincing or critiquing via email—save that for face-to-face communication.
Know Yourself and Others. The more you know about yourself and those you’re communicating with, the more effective you will be. This is especially helpful with people who are wired differently than you.
Repeat and Recap. At the end of a conversation, repeat what you heard, allowing for feedback on whether you understood the message in the way the speaker intended. You will be amazed by how many times the other person will say, “No, I didn’t mean that. I meant…” This includes recapping next steps if applicable.
The good news is, like anything else, you can build your communication skills and become a skilled communicator that’s productive and clear. You are what you repeatedly do.
“Well, that’s just how we do things here… It’s how we’ve always done it… It’s best that you don’t rock the boat…”
Have you ever heard these dismissive responses when you or your colleagues have suggested changing things in the workplace? Change is always met with some resistance – just ask any visionary.
Anyone Can Challenge the Status Quo
Even when we know something should be different, we don’t always have the courage to take action. And when we do, we risk our ideas falling on deaf ears, or being overruled or ignored. These five approaches can help increase your chances of success when considering challenging to the status quo.
Ask the Right Questions
If you keep asking yourself “why” when you’re following a process or regular course of action, you’ve likely identified something to be improved.
If that’s the case, ask yourself and other people questions, in order to fully understand why things are being done in a particular way. There may be good reasons that you’re unaware of, or maybe it is just because “that’s the way it’s always been done.” Listen carefully – their answers may lead to further questions, problems or solutions that you hadn’t considered.
Prioritize Your Ideas
Perhaps you have a whole list of ideas that you’d like to implement. If so, it’s important to pick your battles. Being passionate about change is admirable, but rattling off new ideas every day will see people start to tune out, and your best ideas may get lost among the lesser ones.
For maximum impact, pick the ones that are most relevant and likely to succeed. Choose wisely; take time for self-reflection and factor in some personal brainstorming.
Gather Allies
If you’re planning to challenge long-standing attitudes or processes, it can help to have people on your side!
Multiple perspectives can help creativity to blossom. You won’t be the only person in the office with ideas, and you might inspire others to speak up with theirs. You’ll gather allies who can support you if you meet resistance, either face-on or behind your back.
Remember, collaboration is the key to success, so it’s important to put your ego aside.
Perfect Your Pitch
There’s a fine line between firm reasoning and antagonism, and change is a scary and therefore touchy subject for some people. If you’re too forceful, you risk people shutting off, and perhaps shutting down your idea before you even had the chance to sell it to them. Be sensitive to other people’s points of view. Listen to what they have to say and be clear about what’s at risk and what will be improved by your idea.
Keep your pitch short and snappy, and leave plenty of time for discussion and questions. Be sure to choose the right moment too.
Keep Calm and Persevere
If you don’t succeed straight away, don’t let exhaustion, anger or stress get the better of you. It’s important not to let failures get you down. Learn from the experience and focus on turning negative emotions around. Some ideas can take a while to come to fruition.
Have you ever challenged the status quo? How did you approach it? What was the outcome? Would you do anything differently next time?
“No matter how much success you’re having, you cannot continue working together if you can’t communicate” –James Cameron
Managers play a critical role in developing the people on their teams. Without strong leaders and a strategic management plan, people often become complacent or feel unfulfilled and “stuck” in their jobs. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. recently shared A Winning Approach to Employee Development, making it personalized to the individual by noting the following for each direct report:
Individualized assessments of the employee’s potential
Employee’s career and development goals
Identifying employee’s motivators. Such as do they appreciate acts of service (helping them)? Gifts (coffee cards, lunch certificates)? Quality time (regular meetings, going out to lunch together)? Words of affirmation? Etc.
Identifying the employee’s preferred work personality style (DiSC)
Curious about how to tailor your development approach to the employee’s preferred work styles using DiSC? Here are some simple ways to get started:
For D-style employees, consider development opportunities that have the potential for impressive results, as success is typically their bottom line. Review the big picture with them and encourage them to come up with appropriate long-term goals.
When working with i-styles, allow them to lead small groups, as they thrive in a collaborative environment. Help them stay focused by pointing out the negative consequences of not taking enough time to develop skills with deliberate effort.
For developing S-style team members, be mindful to push them gently to grow and develop—slow and steady tends to win with them. Show them that they have what it takes to work autonomously, and don’t be afraid to offer constructive feedback when necessary.
With C-styles, try putting development opportunities into clear, well-organized framework. Make sure that these independent and logic-driven employees see the drawbacks of always playing it safe, and remind them to fill you in on their progress.
By communicating with our employees in the way they are wired/prefer, shows them we see and hear them – making them feel valued.And that is a critical component to developing people.
Aha! Leadership is an authorized partner for Everything DiSC® and its tools and assessments. If you would like to learn more about how we can help you or your employees, please email aha@ahaledership.com
Let’s be honest. How many times do you read the same email message over and over again? Guess what? The information hasn’t changed. You’re just procrastinating.
I have a personal rule: I will only read each message once, then take the appropriate action. The goal is “Inbox: 0” every day. Now, honestly, I don’t do it every day.
I do it almost every day, and I always keep my emails under a hundred. But I have met people who have thousands of emails in their inbox—with hundreds, sometimes even more than a thousand, unread. This is not helpful. Not only is it potentially bad for your personal brand, it also makes email far more time-consuming than it needs to be.
The key is not to get bogged down, to keep moving, to deal with each email message once and only once. The way you do this is to start by asking, is this email actionable? Does somebody expect me to do something with this email, or is it asking me to do something?
If no, there are three possibilities;
If yes, there are three different possibilities.
These are taken from David Allen’s book, Getting Things Done. And this summary will help you deal specifically with your email.
TIP 1: HOW TO PROCESS NON-ACTIONABLE EMAIL
If the answer to the question ‘Is this email actionable?’ is NO, then you have three options.
Delete it. Yes, there really is a delete key when it comes to email. My own philosophy is if it’s really important, somebody else somewhere in the world has a copy.
Add it to you Someday/Maybe list. If I don’t want to lose the idea but there’s nothing to do with it just yet, I can drag it into Evernote or a saved folder and return to it another time.
File it. When in doubt, file. Why? Because you can always get back to it if need be, and it really doesn’t take up a lot of space. Here is what’s important: I use one and only one folder for my filing. It’s called “Processed Email.” The reason I do this is because it keeps me from getting distracted and wasting time. The moment I have to start answering questions like, “Where am I going to file this? This is about Project X from Client Y, so do I file it in Project X? Or do I file it under Client Y?What if it’s about two projects?Do I make a copy and put a copy in each folder?” It can become very complex very quickly. And that means time down the drain. Instead, I just put it all in one folder and let the software do the searching when I need to find that message. I can get back to almost any message in a matter of seconds. It takes less time than me having to remember what folder I filed it in. But what if the email is actionable?
TIP 2: HOW TO PROCESS ACTIONABLE EMAIL
Just do it. Here is where I use David Allen’s two-minute rule. If you can take care of the action in two minutes or less, why even take the time to put it in your task list? You run the risk of losing it, not getting back to it, or not being as responsive as you’d like to be. So just go ahead and do it.
Defer it. It may need to get done, but it doesn’t need to get done now. So go ahead and put it on your calendar, create a reminder, but defer the action until a later time. You can drag the email to Processed and set a reminder in a task manager like Basecamp. You can also drag the email into Evernote or Notes and add a reminder. Email apps like Dropbox’s Mailbox let you defer emails with a swipe or place it on a todo list. However you manage it, the thing is to get it out of your email inbox.
Delegate it. I am preaching to myself here, by the way. I’m kind of a control freak, and I have this unspoken assumption that nobody can do it as well as I can do it. But the simple truth is that we’re not always the best person to handle every task. You probably have other people on your team more competent than you at one task or another. They may be colleagues. They could be contractors.
Recommended Resource: Robyn Marcotte’s note: One of our favorite Podcasts is Michael Hyatt’s Lead to Win
Great 1:1 meetings drive accountability by continuously keeping top priorities, top priorities.
If you feel that your one-on-ones aren’t especially useful, then it’s time to improve your process. I truly find that 1:1’s are the single most important meetings of my week. It helps me set expectations, communicate priorities, and listen to the struggles/challenges that each person on my team is having. When done well, 1:1’s drive engagement and accountability.
Trap: Don’t get caught by the misconception that 1:1’s are just another meeting or that the “open door” policy is better. I truly believe by focusing 30 min of time each week on each of your direct reports, you will free up hours of meetings by delegating decision making power, and eliminate last-minute fire drills by getting ahead of problems before they blow up while results by motive each person to stay focused on your team’s top priorities. When done well you will also reduce email and phone calls because both of you have a predetermined weekly time to talk through or share key information.
How to create more effective 1:1 meetings
1-Recurring, scheduled meetings: Weekly, bi-weekly depending on your role/business.
2-Brief – 30 minutes. It may look like this:
15-20 min: Progress on goals and priorities
Progress should be reviewed for each goal; share with your leader any issues or blockers they may need to help with to ensure that the target will be achieved.
5 min: Share recent accomplishments – ask for feedback
Ask for feedback from your leader. Any good work or praiseworthy behavior should be recognized and encouraged. Be open to it. It is a gift!
5-10 min: Development and open-ended Communication
Leave this open in the agenda – where does your leader need help? It may be an opportunity!!
What are you working to further your career development? Discuss ideas.
3-Location: Consider having your one on one meeting outside or out of the office – the change of venue can contribute to a more relaxed session.
4-Timing: Consider the timing for the recurring meeting. 4pm on Friday is not ideal for a focused conversation about your career development.
5-Commit to your 1 to 1 meeting – make it a priority: The first thing you need to do is make your one on one meeting a priority. It’s easy to skip meetings, so schedule a recurring calendar event each week to ensure the appropriate time is set aside.
6-Establish the 1:1 Meeting Agenda Format: Setting a mutually agreeable agenda allows the both participants to show up prepared and with aligned expectations.
7-Prepare so you can look forward, not backward: Thoughtful preparation. If you submit your template to your leader the day before your one on one meeting, each will arrive at the meeting knowing what will be discussed and allow you to spend the bulk of your time looking to the future, brainstorming, creating action items, and connecting personally.
8-Focus on you and your projects and development: Avoid discussing other employees’ work during your time together, unless it’s specifically applicable to the conversation.
Let’s be honest. How many times do you read the same email message over and over again? Guess what? The information hasn’t changed. You’re just procrastinating.