CHAPTER 14

Presenting at a Business Meeting

• What’s wrong with meetings today?
• How to re-create the employee meeting.
• Questions to ask when preparing a meeting.
• Tips to increase participants’ interest and attention.

How many times have you sat in a meeting and said to yourself, “What am I doing here? I have a thousand things to do, and this meeting is a waste of time.” Meetings can consume our business lives and kill productivity. Yet meetings don’t have to be that way. We should treat meetings as if they were presentations and speak to the self-interest of those attending.

Figure 14.1 People are only human!

Cartoon: Chris Wildt/Cartoon Stock

Those who conduct or present in a meeting should use the same techniques that apply to a presentation. We should treat meetings as if they were presentations and speak to the self-interest of those attending. What do they expect from the meeting? Why should they listen?

Most meetings are not well planned and tend to become routine and predictable. They create a template that everyone knows, and no one wants to change. Many times, they begin with the specifics of a topic rather than beginning with the conclusion and then showing the details. It’s like watching a bad movie repeatedly. You know what’s coming and you know it’s going to be bad.

How to revive meetings before they become predictable? In my experience in coaching meetings, the structures should be blown up every six months. That seems to be the time limit before participants get bored.

Re-Creating the Employee Meeting

When I was coaching an architectural firm on how to conduct their monthly employee meeting, I discovered that the principals of the firm were leading the sessions of the firm were conducting the meetings. They were concerned because they were not getting good feedback and the participation was dropping. When I asked who was preparing the content for the meeting, they said that the principals were doing it without input from the employees.

I told them that although they called it an employee meeting, it was a meeting for the principals to tell the employees what they wanted and not about employee needs. I asked them to send out an e-mail asking what some of the concerns were that the employees wanted to discuss in the meeting. When the responses came back, we compared them to the topics the principals had prepared. To their surprise, nothing matched the principals’ lists of concerns. They saw for the first time that the concerns of the employees were not their concerns and that many of the principals were not even aware of the employees’ interests.

The principals realized that if they wanted to increase participation and really have an employee meeting, they would have to change the structure and delivery of the meeting. They would have to let the employees design and deliver the meeting with the principals being facilitators.

Getting out of the way and letting the participants design the meeting is not easy. It feels counterintuitive. As principals, they felt they had to take charge and lead the meeting. If a meeting is essential and it should be, then the design and the topics should speak to the self-interest of the participants.

That brings up another question. How much is the difference between sending an e-mail and having a meeting? An hour or two of wasted time. If the topic of a meeting can be handled in an e-mail, then it should be. If there are only two to five items that can be handled in an e-mail, then they should be. If the subject matter can be explained on a page or two, then it’s an e-mail. This difference is important to consider if meetings are going to have value and represent time well spent.

Questions to ask when preparing a meeting:

• What is the purpose of the meeting?
• If there isn’t a reason to meet, then why meet?
• If the reason for the meeting is to deliver new information about a product or service, then ask:
  • Why is essential for the participants to know?
  • How will the information help them?
  • How will the subject matter make their jobs easier or enhance what they are doing?
• If the meeting’s purpose is to review information or material, then ask:
  • Has anything changed since we last reviewed the material?
  • Has performance lacked by not implementing the information or material?
• If the meeting’s purpose is to evaluate performance, then ask:
  • Is it a positive or negative message?
  • If it is a negative message, then how can the meeting begin with a positive statement about performance?
  • Is there a visual or a video to introduce or summarize the topic of the meeting?

Tips to increase participants’ interest and attention

• Start with an opening that explains the value of the content to the participants.
• Tell them how they will benefit from the information.
• Tell them how the information will help in doing their jobs.

Answering these questions will position the self-interest of the participants right at the start and give a reason why they should listen. Ask for input from the participants. If the number of participants is small, ask them for their suggestions to make the meetings better. If the number of participants is large, create a brief questionnaire, no more than five questions, that you can e-mail asking for their responses. Incorporate the suggestions into the next meeting. If the meeting is a review for employees and is about topics that directly affect their work, become a facilitator. Let the participants run the meeting. Let them organize topics and agendas for the meeting.

Steps to improve meetings:

• Let the participants design the meeting.
• Let the participants create the structure of the meeting.
• Allow them to decide who should present and what topics should be covered.
• Once everyone agrees, facilitate the meeting.

Meetings can become an essential tool again if we treat them as a necessity for communicating information that we can only deliver in person. How else can people be heard and have input into the complex problems facing businesses today?