Managers and Their Meetings: A revealing look at Leadership Skills
You don’t have to look far to get the skinny on the role of meetings in our business lives. Twenty-five million meetings occur every day in corporate America. The average employee spends 25% of their time in meetings, and the middle manager spends up to two days every week. Unquestionably, it is the most common communication situation that business people face, and the most frequent speaking situation for most managers. And yet, it seems to be the situation they care about the least. In all of my years as a coach, I can think of only a few times when a senior manager or executive has told me that his priority is to work on his effectiveness in meetings. I do talk about meetings and evaluate meetings over the course of a coaching engagement because I know that a manager’s meeting is a testing ground to becoming an effective leader.
Consider the perspective of those who attend the meetings. Employees gripe more about meetings than any other communication situation. A recent survey said that 71% of those who attend work meetings consider them unproductive. Meetings are consistently ranked low on employee surveys and 360 evaluations. They see more role-modeling in this communication setting than in any other. Employees take cues from managers on the significance of meetings and their own meeting skills are often a reflection of how meetings were run by the managers who mentored them.
To really raise the bar on meetings, we coach managers to focus on three things:
1. Clear Objective: Just like a presentation, a meeting should have a clear objective. While there may be lots of items on an agenda, there is usually one leading discussion point that pushed this from a memo to a meeting. The objective should be clear to all who plan to participate and it should be framed up in such a way that an employee understands what the group is trying to solve.
2. Common Ground: The common ground is the foundation for the discussion. It’s our term for coaching managers to be sure there is context around an issue that represents the agreed upon strengths and challenges. Most employees don’t disagree on the issues surrounding a topic. They just have different opinions based on how they interpret the issues.
3. Group Facilitation: Managers forget that discussion is meant to be facilitated, not lead. So, they have to keep in mind that they don’t offer an opinion but they have to solicit opinions and perspectives from everyone else in the room. The hardest task is learning to be a meeting facilitator and driving a group toward a solution that has generated input and buy-in from all participants.
Future leaders may spend time delivering keynote messages and capturing prospective customers, but they will still spend most of their time in meetings. And, the managers who learn to differentiate themselves in this day to day communication situation will soon find that meetings can be a real game-changer.
