7 Deadly Sins of Business Meetings

Here, seven deadly sins to watch for in business meetings -- and tips on how to redeem yourself.

1. Meetings that become useless rituals. Companies frequently meet simply because it's time for their weekly, monthly or annual sales meeting. "Meetings that are ritualistic instead of necessary are often boring, and attendees eventually flip an 'off switch' in their brains," says Joe Calloway, business strategy consultant and author of Becoming A Category of One (John Wiley, 2003).

Tip: First, reexamine your routine. "Do not have a meeting unless you can very specifically define why it's necessary and how it will advance the strategy of the organization," he says. Also, create a specific agenda and send it out early enough for people to prepare.

2. Meetings that are a one-way conversation. People often tune out monotone lecturers and mind-numbing PowerPoint presentations. "A one-way speech is generally one of the least effective ways of teaching, informing or motivating people to action," Calloway says.

Tip: Encourage your team to speak up, exchange ideas and comment on what they've heard. If you show PowerPoint slides, make them visually interesting and keep words and numbers to a minimum.

3. Meetings with lax leadership. In today's "virtual" conference rooms, time is often wasted waiting for people to join the call and then getting stragglers up to speed on what they missed. "This punishes the people who joined the meeting on time with the likelihood you'll run over, leaving employees stressed out playing catch-up on the rest of their day," says Gary Bradt, business strategy expert and author of The Ring in the Rubble (McGraw Hill, 2007).

Tip: Choose a leader who is organized and forceful, leaving latecomers to catch up on their own. "Use tact, of course – you don't have to be Attila the Hun – but if you're too nice, it allows too much nonsense to go on," Bradt says.

4. Meetings that harp on setbacks instead of strategies. One of Bradt's clients spent 95 percent of each meeting having plant managers explain why their numbers weren't up to par and only 5 percent planning future strategies. Not surprisingly, Brandt says, everyone came out of the meeting with a long face.

Tip: Use the past as a platform for understanding and planning future actions, not "a battering ram to beat people up," Bradt says. The collective brainpower in the room should be used to avoid mistakes going forward.

5. Meetings that disrupt the most productive hours. Many companies hold meetings in the morning, interrupting employees' most productive hours, says Jackie Freiberg, co-author of Nanovation: How a Little Car Can Teach the World to Think Big and Act Bold (Thomas Nelson, 2011).

Tip: Schedule meetings in the afternoon, when escaping the cubicle can be a welcome relief.

6. Meetings that are held in a bland environment. At the vast majority of meetings, employees gather around a conference table and keep their gaze focused on the leader at the head of the table. Freiberg believes this format does little to stimulate discussion and creative ideas.

Tip: Take your employees on a "walking" meeting in the park or just around the building and parking lot. "When you're not eye to eye, you have the guts to say certain things," Freiberg says. "And when walking, you look at the world differently, which stimulates fresh ideas."

7. Meetings that are too formal and rigid. Few meeting leaders have a sense of humor. The result is a room full of bored, restless employees, says Eric Chester, author of Reviving Work Ethic (Greenleaf Books, 2012).

Tip: Break up the meeting with music, a video, jokes or an engaging story, Chester says. "In the age of YouTube and iTunes, there's simply no reason to not inject a bit of levity in a meeting to gain attention, disarm negativity and generate enthusiasm."

I got this amazing article from Entrepreneur.com by Lisa Girard. I hope you find something useful.

Elvin

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Four Ways to Make Your Team Effective

1. Set quiet hours. Think about the times when you've found it easiest to concentrate. You probably aren't thinking of times when your phone was ringing, or when your neighbors were conversing loudly, or when your boss was visiting your desk bi-hourly with demands for "status updates." Distractions matter. Distractions kill good work. So try this: Set aside a 4-hour block, one day a week, to be "quiet hours." No talking; ringers off; no IMs; no desk visits. Just good old-fashioned silence. 

2. Stand up during meetings. Nobody schedules a "lunch hour" and then eats nonstop for the full hour, dropping his fork at the 60th minute, with no regard whatsoever to the amount of food consumed. Yet this is the way every meeting works. By default, a meeting consumes the time allotted to it. That's crazy. Meetings should last as long as they need to last, and not a moment longer. Yet there is no force pushing for that outcome! So add a force: Make people stand up during your meetings. Now you've given your team a powerful incentive to be efficient. The military and software developers have already embraced this approach. Be next.

3. Bake in bright spots. We know from psychology that people focus instinctively on problems. Meetings are often dominated by problem-solving (or, less charitably, frustration-airing). By indulging that instinct to dwell on problems, we miss a chance to analyze what IS working. (That's a philosophy we call "finding the bright spots.") To correct this bias, some groups are now starting their meetings with a discussion of bright spots. To try it, start your next meeting with this question: "Since the last time we met, what has worked well, and how can we do more of it?" Not only will you harvest lots of great ideas, you'll create a more positive tone for the meeting.

4. Change the way you brainstorm. In most brainstorming session, the "talkers" in the group will share a few ideas, and then others will chime in with refinements of those initial ideas (rather than introducing a radically different point of departure). The effect is that, within 10 minutes, the group has shut down 99% of the potential conversation paths. One easy way to correct for this is to have every member of the team brainstorm privately and record their thoughts prior to the meeting. Then, start the meeting by asking people to share their ideas before the group discussion begins. That way, you can be more confident that you've charted more of the "landscape of ideas," rather than simply building on the (possibly misguided) ideas of the group's loudest members.

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I got these very useful tips from Heath Brothers newsletter. In case you didn't know them, they are the authors behind the books entitled Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die and Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard. 

Out of these four tips, I am excited to try the third one. How about you, what do you want to try first? 

Until my next post,

eLviN

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