Meeting Skills: an essential management tool

Meeting skills are communication skills. Meeting skills are essential management tools. That's why I've been conducting workshops on meeting skills for many years, and that's why they form a whole stage in my non-traditional approach to management skills, The Manager's Journey.

How are YOUR meeting skills? The first meeting skills is knowing whether or not a meeting is even necessary or appropriate.

Before you call that meeting, ask yourself if it is really necessary, or if your objective could more easily be achieved by other means. What about a series of telephone calls? Could you just send out e-mail messages to the appropriate people? Perhaps even the lowly memo would serve the same purpose. If your purpose is simply to give out information, with little or no two-way interaction, one of these is often the most effective vehicle. Why take busy people away from their desks for a set amount of time (usually too much time) and sit them around a table—just so that you can fire information at them?

On the other hand, action-oriented, decision-making discussions often demand the face-to-face interaction that is only possible at a meeting. So, how do you decide? Here are three indications of the need for a meeting.

Engage your employees for better business results

Here's yet another article giving evidence (surveys, polls etc.) that having employees actively engaged with their organizations is good for the organization as a whole. Well now there's a surprise!

Don't we all know this already? Haven't we read it over and over in other studies? Thousands of managers worldwide will no doubt read this article, nod in agreement and move on.

But what do we DO with this information? In most cases it seems almost like the evidence that smoking causes cancer --- everyone knows it by now, but it doesn't stop smokers from smoking. No matter how many times we read that engaging employees through better communication is not only the right thing to do but the profitable thing, I see little evidence in the course of my consulting work that people have actually taken any action on the advice.

So here's my advice. Don't wait for the whole organization to change. Don't wait for the CEO and senior management to see the light and make changes. As a manager, department head or team leader, YOU can take action within your own domain. Please go and read the article using the link below and THEN COME BACK and read the rest of my post. Go on now, click on the link, and then come back.

domain-B : Indian business : management : hrd : Does it pay to have employees actively engaged?

Did you notice the part right at the end where he says you must start with an internal communications audit? Well you can do your own audit just within your own department or team. Here are the steps.

1. Gather your team together and tell them frankly what you are doing and why. You have to let them see that you are looking out for their interests as well as your own and that of the company. When they understand that the end result will benefit them, they will be more likely to be open with their responses to your questions.

2. Start with a specific area of communication, such as perhaps e-mail or voicemail. Design a brief questionnaire to elicit such information as how many e-mail messages they send and receive each day, how much time they spend managing their e-mail, whether they receive e-mail that has little bearing on their jobs simply because they are on someone's distribution list, etc.

3. After you've studied the results, conduct some individual interviews to elicit your people's own views on how they can improve e-mail communication and make it more efficient, not to mention less time consuming.

4. Create a protocol based on their input as well as your own ideas. By the way, if you need more help with the e-mail issue, I recommend you get a copy of my special report on the subject. Get it here.

5. Bring the group together again and share the results and the new protocol. Put it into effect and say you will be reviewing the results after a specified time.

6. At the stated time, bring everyone together again to discuss the results. Whether the results are good or bad, people will be engaged in the process. If further refinements are needed, make them with your people's input so that they can take ownership in the results.

Now move on to the next area for improvement and repeat the process. Everyone wants to know "what's in it for me?" This process makes that abundantly clear to your people --- and that's what creates employee engagement. And next time you read one of these articles you'll know that at least in YOUR department, employees ARE engaged.

Let me know how it works out for you!