CHAPTER 5
Mastering Meetings with Small Groups
The effective man always states at the outset of a meeting the specific purpose and contribution it is to achieve. He always, at the end of his meetings, goes back to the opening statement and relates the final conclusions to the original intent.
—PETER DRUCKER
Your ability to speak well and persuasively in small meetings can have an extraordinary impact on your life and career. In business, others continually assess and evaluate you. Consciously and subconsciously, they are upgrading or downgrading their opinions of your personality, ability, competence, and level of confidence. For this reason, you must think of business meetings as important events in your career. You cannot allow a meeting with two or more people to unfold by chance, especially when fully 50 percent of management time is spent in meetings of some kind and most people feel that 50 percent of this time is wasted because of poor planning and organization.
Peter Drucker once wrote, “The meeting is an essential tool of the executive.” An executive is defined as anyone who is responsible for results. According to this definition, virtually everyone is an executive of some kind, including yourself.
Small-Group Meetings Are Important
Many of your presentations and speaking engagements will be with smaller groups of people, sometimes as few as one or two others. These meetings, just like a large talk or presentation, must be prepared for and planned with care. How you perform can make or break your career.
Some years ago, I was conducting a strategic-planning exercise with a large company. Executives were brought in from all over the country and from distant branches. At the meeting, several of the executives from the head office were clearly detached and uncaring about how the strategic-planning session unfolded. But there were two young executives from distant branches who were thoroughly prepared and active participants in every question brought up during the discussions.
At one of the breaks, I was doing a debrief with the president of the company about the progress of the meeting. He said to me, “Did you notice how important the contributions of those two guys have been to this meeting?” It was clear to everyone that these two executives were more prepared and involved than any of the others. He was obviously impressed.
About a month later, in the business section of the local newspaper, there was an announcement that both of these executives had been promoted to vice president. Some years later, one of those executives became the president of a billion-dollar company. His contributions at the meeting as a young manager registered with everyone and reverberated throughout his career.
A few months after that, the company also announced the “early retirements” of the senior executives from the head office who had sat there silently and contributed nothing to the meeting. Their careers in that company were finished.
Prepare Thoroughly
The starting point of meeting effectiveness is thorough preparation. Preparation is immediately obvious to everyone who attends, as is the failure to prepare.
If you are running the meeting, plan it. Prepare an agenda. Select the people whom you are going to invite and inform them of their expected contributions. Organize the meeting as though it were an important part of your business life, because it is.
If you are an attendee at a meeting, plan your participation. Find out the purpose for the meeting and then be sure that you have something to contribute. Many people who attend business meetings sit quietly while the meeting goes on. But unfortunately, those who say nothing at a meeting are presumed to have nothing to say. This is not the kind of message you want to convey.
Consider the Importance of Seating
Arrive early at the meeting so that you can choose your seat with care. If it is your meeting, sit with your back to a wall, facing the entrance so that you have visual command of the room and you can see everyone entering and leaving. When I hold meetings, especially if they are important, I specifically designate where each person is going to sit in the meeting. This ensures that I have the most important people sitting in the most important places.
If it is someone else’s meeting, select a place where you can sit facing the door and either kitty-corner or directly opposite the meeting leader. If you are not sure, ask the meeting leader where he or she would like you to sit. But you still have some control, and you should use it to your best advantage. Don’t be afraid to ask if you can sit in a particular place or if you can change seats with someone else so that you have your back to a wall, or where you have greater eye contact with the key person in the meeting. This is essential to making your most valuable contribution and to being the most persuasive.
Be Punctual
Start on time. Assume that the latecomer is not coming, and begin. Thank the participants for coming and give the reason for the meeting. Explain the structure of the meeting and how it will be conducted. Give the end time for the meeting so that everyone knows when it will be over.
Types of Meetings
There are four different types of business meetings. These include:
- Problem Solving. The purpose of the meeting is to discuss a problem and agree on a solution.
- Information Sharing. The purpose of the meeting is to share new information, make announcements, and be sure that everyone is informed of changes and assignments.
- New-Product Announcements. The purpose of the meeting is to familiarize all the participants with new products and services that the company is offering or thinking about offering.
- Team Building. The purpose of the meeting is to bring people together to talk about what they are doing and the progress they are making. Team-building meetings are powerful forms of developing the esprit de corps that is essential to a company.
The Meeting Leader
If you are leading the meeting, you should be thoroughly prepared with handouts to inform and illustrate to the participants the points you want to cover. If you are using PowerPoint or flip charts, you should prepare and practice with them thoroughly in advance. Be sure that you have everything that you need to conduct the meeting smoothly and professionally.
With your meeting agenda, start with the most important items first. This ensures that if you run out of time because of extended discussions you will have covered the 20 percent of items that account for 80 percent of the value.
The Active Participant
If you are a meeting participant, make a point of asking a question, making a statement, or taking a position within the first five minutes. People who speak up in the first five minutes take on a more dominant and significant role in the meeting in the eyes of other participants. People who fail to speak up until much later are often ignored or not considered to be of particular importance.
The goal of any meeting, to a large group or to a small group, is action of some kind. As the group discusses each item, you or someone else should be asking or insisting upon the action or actions that are going to take place as a result of this discussion and agreement.
Volunteer for Responsibilities
One way to be an active participant is to offer to do what needs doing. In every organization and on every team, 20 percent of the people do 80 percent of the work. The participants who ask for action and continually volunteer for more responsibility are seen by everyone as the most important and significant members of the team.
When a subject has been discussed, you should ask, “What is our action plan for this item? What do we do next?” Raise your hand and volunteer to accept responsibility for action on various items. The more you volunteer, the more valuable you will appear to the most important people in the meeting.
Prepare in Advance
When you are expected to contribute specific information at a meeting, you can always use the PREP Formula. Begin by stating your point of view, give your reasons for holding this point of view, follow up with an example of why your reasoning is correct, and then restate your point of view to round off your contribution. This is an extremely effective way of impressing the meeting planners and participants with your level of preparation.
Persuading Others
The key to success in a meeting is for you to be persuasive. It lets you affect the direction of the discussion and influence the final decisions and conclusions with your input.
To be persuasive in a meeting, the meeting participants must like you. To be liked, you must be likeable. People must willingly support you and approve of your ideas and your positions. The key to increasing your influence and persuading others to support and agree with you is simple: Make others feel important.
There are six things (“the six As”) you can practice to make others feel more valuable in a meeting or any other social or business situation. They are essential if you want to speak to win.
1. Acceptance. One of the deepest human needs is to be unconditionally accepted by others. You express your acceptance of others by looking directly at them and smiling, both when they come in and when they say something or contribute to the meeting. This makes the individual feel valuable and important. It raises his or her self-esteem and improves his or her self-image. It also causes the person, at a subconscious level, to want to support you in the things you suggest or say.
2. Appreciation. Any time that you express appreciation to other people for anything that they have done or said, you raise their self-esteem and increase your likeability in their eyes. The easiest way to express appreciation is simply to say thank you for anything that the person does or says that is helpful or constructive. You can thank people for arriving on time. You can thank people for contributing a piece of information. You can thank people for making a comment and for assisting or correcting you.
Whenever you thank someone for anything, you encourage that person to repeat the behavior and to make even more valuable contributions. When a person is thanked, he feels more valuable, respected, and important. The words thank you are powerful in building your likeability and ensuring that others cooperate with you and support your positions.
3. Admiration. Abraham Lincoln once said, “Everyone likes a compliment.” When you compliment people on anything that they do or say, or on any of their possessions, they feel more valuable and important, and they like you more as a result.
Continually look for ways to compliment people. You can admire a person’s briefcase, purse, or pen. You can admire an item of his clothing or appearance. If he presents a piece of information, you can compliment him on how excellent it looks or sounds. Even looking at a person, smiling, and nodding in a complimentary way can cause him to feel more valuable and important and to like and support you when you propose something later.
4. Approval. You may have heard the saying “Babies cry for it and grown men die for it.” People need approval from others, especially people whom they look up to and respect. Every time you give praise and approval of any kind to anyone for any reason, you raise that person’s self-esteem, improve her self-image, and make her feel better about herself and about you.
The keys to giving approval are to make it both immediate and specific. When someone contributes something of value or presents a piece of helpful information to the group, immediately praise the information by saying something like, “This is very good work.” Be specific. Say something like, “These figures are very impressive. They look great.”
The more that you praise and approve the work and contributions of other people, the more and better contributions they will make, and the more they will like you and support your ideas and points of view later.
5. Attention. People always pay attention to people and things that they most value. As the saying goes, life is the study of attention. Whenever you pay close attention to another person, he or she feels more valuable and important. The key to paying attention is to listen closely when another person speaks and not to interrupt. Look at the person directly and hang on every word. Nod, smile, and agree as if what the other person is saying is extraordinarily important and insightful.
When others feel that they are being closely listened to, their self-esteem goes up. Their brains release endorphins, and they feel happier and more positive about themselves and their work. They associate you with this good feeling, and your influence over them goes up tremendously.
6. Agreement. The final A that you can practice in any meeting with any number of people is to be generally agreeable with others. You can be agreeable even if you disagree with someone’s point of view.
When someone says something or makes a point that you don’t agree with, instead of challenging him (which puts him on the defensive and makes him angry) say something like, “That is an interesting point. I had not thought of that before. It clashes a bit with my own idea, but I would like to understand it better.”
If you must disagree, use what is called “Third-Party Disagreement.” Instead of saying, “I disagree with you,” you can say, “That is an interesting point. How would you answer the question that another person might ask if he or she were to challenge this point by saying such and such a thing?”
In other words, put your disagreement into the mouth of a nonexistent third party. Ask the person to defend his point of view to a person who is not present. This takes the pressure off of the individual and it enables him to defend his point of view without having to feel defensive or under attack by anyone in that particular meeting.
Avoid Criticism or Negativity
If you are leading a meeting, you have tremendous power. Everyone looks up to and defers to you as the leader. Everything you say is magnified and multiplied, either in a positive or negative way.
When other people are contributing to the meeting, you should nod, smile, and support them. When someone is in a meeting with others, he is on the stage when he speaks. Any comment from anyone in the room, especially from a person senior to him, puts him under a spotlight. It can either make him feel valuable and important or make him feel vulnerable and defensive. Be careful about what you say.
Even a small criticism, a raise of the eyebrow, or a disgruntled look directed at a meeting participant is observed by everyone, and it makes the meeting participant feel diminished and insecure. You must use your position as the meeting leader with tremendous care, maintaining the self-esteem and self-respect of each meeting participant, irrespective of how you might feel about his or her ideas and comments.
If you are not happy about something another person does or says, remain calm and positive in front of the others and take the situation “off line.” Arrange to meet with the person privately. The rule is to praise in public, appraise in private.
Avoid Barriers to Communication
When you sit opposite a person—across a table or desk, for example—the furniture can act as a physical and psychological barrier to communication. It subconsciously suggests that you are on opposite sides and that your points of view are antagonistic.
To resolve this dilemma, one of the best things you can do is to ask to sit kitty-corner to the key person. When you sit next to a person rather than opposite him, unseen psychological barriers seem to drop and you communicate with greater warmth and friendliness. Don’t be afraid to make it clear that you would prefer not to sit opposite the person but would prefer to sit next to him or her, where you can have direct eye contact.
In all my years, I have never had the person opposite me resist or refuse this request. In most cases, he had not thought of it himself and was happy that I brought it up.
Summary
The mark of the professional in every field is preparation. The more thoroughly you prepare for a meeting of any kind, even with just one other person, the more effective you will appear and the better results you will get.
The power is always on the side of the person who has prepared the most thoroughly. The individual who comes into a meeting unprepared has diminished power and sometimes no power at all.
Your job is to speak to win on every occasion. Your goal is to be seen as an important player in every conversation. Your aim is to persuade others to your point of view and to make an impact on your world. You do this by thoroughly preparing for every meeting that you hold or that you participate in, and you do it by using techniques that make others feel important.