When you call a meeting, do your employees groan and complain about it being a waste of their time?
Replacing stale, monotonous meetings with ones that generate engagement, buy-in, alignment, and accountability will lead you to achieve greater results.
Here are a few tips on how to update your meetings:
1. Eliminate mundane and unnecessary meetings. Most managers are regularly in front of their teams, conducting meeting after meeting. Regardless of the topic, the typical method of managers is to lead the meeting with their own agenda. Make sure your meetings are necessary, useful and engage others.
2. Get off your soapbox. When a manager gets in front of their team during a meeting and does most of the talking, they’re engaging in soapbox management. In order to produce breakthrough results during every meeting, the manager cannot simply preach to their people. When managers point fingers and tell people what to do, how to do it or what they’re doing wrong, most employees put up their defenses. Consequently, they stop listening—and their level of engagement diminishes. The solution? Get off your soapbox and start leading with questions in order to focus on other people’s opinions and what’s important to them.
3. Reset expectations. If you’re unhappy with how past meetings have gone, reset your team’s expectations. Call everyone together and let them know that you want to make your meetings more productive, engaging and collaborative. Then, show your team members you mean what you say, and ask for their feedback and insights.
By making minor changes to the way you conduct meetings, you can encourage and motivate your team to work harder and do better. Good luck!