Meetings in The New Reality need to be functional, customer focused, and extremely efficient (meaning short!). The world is moving too fast, the competition is too fierce, and customers are too impatient to put up with ineffective, dull, dysfunctional, or internally focused meetings.
In The New Reality, effective meetings are a key to unlocking and leveraging employees’ intellect and creativity to ensure better outcomes for customers.
We need meetings. Although we need far fewer meetings than occur today, getting people together to communicate, educate, and solve problems is a necessity. Meetings are the circulatory system of how things get done in an organization . . . or should be. And like any good circulatory system, it needs to be healthy and working well to support the functioning of the entire enterprise. Meetings can be the lifeblood of a healthy company, bringing oxygen and nourishment to every nook and cranny—feeding solutions and innovation every time in every meeting.
Click here to read more about Karl’s method for effective meetings: Meet, Decide, Act.
Success today is all about employee engagement. Indeed, that’s the only sustainable competitive advantage. The most effective way to capitalize on employees’ intellect is to democratize the problem-solving process. Everyone is involved. Everyone has a say. Everyone has a vote. More ideas are better than fewer ideas and more dialog is better than less dialog. Meetings need to be where dialog and intellect get shared to solve problems for the customer.
Effective meetings today maximize the expertise in the room. It doesn’t matter who’s missing—an influential colleague, the subject matter expert, or the boss; what matters is who’s present. There will always be someone missing. There will always be some reason we can’t decide or solve right here, right now. The more input people have into the solution the more likely they are to actually implement the solution. When you maximize the expertise in the room, you maximize the likelihood of implementation.
Effective meetings have a methodology in place for problem solving. Everyone understands the process, and uses it… each time they meet. A common methodology creates a shared compass so that all in the room know where they are and where they are going. In fact, anyone in the meeting can get a derailed discussion back on track by asking that simple realigning question: “Where are we and where are we going?”
Here’s how to make meetings more effective in The New Reality:
Click here to learn more about how Karl can help your organization transform unproductive, repetitive meetings into a key driver for improved customer outcomes.