Tips from your CorporateTraining Company!
Which sounds more like a post meeting comment in your organization?
“That was a great meeting everyone-we’re making a lot of progress from these weeklies.”
“Well there’s an hour of my day I’m never getting back. Why do we have these weekly meetings anyways?”
If you said number two, sadly you’re not alone.
In fact, studies reveal that 15% of an organization’s collective time is spent in meetings and this continues to increase year after year. Furthermore $37 billion per year is spent on unproductive meetings and there are 25 million meeting per day in the U.S. alone!
There are many reasons that your meeting can flop- from logistics, to clear goals, to follow up accountability. But, one of the main hindrances to an effective meetings training program can be the facilitator’s inability to manage the participants’ personalities.
Everyone in your organization works differently and this can be attributed back to their work personality type. Knowing which ones you’re faced with is a huge step in the right direction to being able to manage your meetings more effectively. Here are five of your most popular meeting makers and breakers!
The Authoritarian
Are you thinking of one now? This person feels that they know the answer to everything and is not afraid to ensure that everyone else knows it! Whether it be positive or negative, this person tends to control the conversation and can take over the facilitators role without much effort.
Negative Nancy
This is the team member that constantly focuses on the negative aspects of the topics for your meeting. Whenever someone may suggest an idea this is the first person to push back which eventually can lead to less actionable outcomes.
The Phone Fanatic
This personality has emerged in the workplace over the past few decades and is one who’s body language and unspoken communication can relay a very negative message to others in the meeting-that is, that they have much more important things to do. This is the person that comes into the meeting likely finishing up a call on their cell phone or sending off another email or IM as you kick off the meeting. The rest of the meeting consists of some participation but can’t seem to put their mobile device down to do so.
The Strong Silent Type
The extreme opposite to your Authoritarian, this person is usually engaged and collaborative however, will not speak up or out with their own ideas, thoughts or reservations. Having this personality in your meeting can be great when it comes to trying to get through items but can also hurt if great contributions are never heard.
Hostile Takeover
This is your highjacker! The person that seems to take the group of course at every turn by rambling, talking about items off agenda or adding to the conversation with unrelated content. Meeting facilitators may find this personality one of the most challenging since they can directly impact the flow of a meeting.
It’s no wonder that effective meetings have become more of a myth than a reality in many corporate environments today. Given all of these personalities plus the emergence of the virtual meeting and finally the fact that many businesses simply do not spend the time in developing an effective meeting structure for business leaders and employees to follow is at really that surprising?
The good news is that all is not lost! Dedicated business leaders and owners can turn their meetings back into the purposeful events that they are meant to be, with the right tools and understanding of personality management. The first step is to create an effective meeting which can be done by establishing and sticking to key steps pre, during and after each meeting.
The next integral part of effective meetings of course is managing your attendee personalities. At TrainingFolks we use a highly effective behavior assessment tool Everything DiSC® Workplace to help our clients understand the four main behavior traits categorized as dominance, influence, steadiness, and consciences. Once a business leader knows themselves and whom they are dealing with, they can then apply specific methods to help communicate to others better and more importantly, achieve higher levels of team collaboration and productivity.
Imagine the cost to your organization for up to four work days a month being wasted in unproductive meetings in money, time, morale and productively![i] The next time you have a meeting, try implementing the tools provided in our Free Productive Meetings Checklist. Then in your meeting try and categorize your attendees to see if you’re sensing personality issues as a main contributor to lacking success. From there a behavior assessment module or exercise could be the one thing to take your teams from dreading the weekly update meeting to energizing them to not only attend but also participate and follow up with results.
Best of luck and remember if you’re looking for experts to come in and help create the right meeting program and training for your organization, get in touch with TrainingFolks today.
If you have a strategic planning meeting coming up, it may be the best time to introduce an Everything DiSC® Workplace session. Book your session today for improved results tomorrow.
[i] A network MCI Conferencing White Paper. Meetings in America: A study of trends, costs and attitudes toward business travel, teleconferencing, and their impact on productivity (Greenwich, CT: INFOCOMM, 1998), 3
TrainingFolks is an Authorized Partner of Everything DiSC® series of products