Boring Meetings, Solved: Toss in some design thinking & emotional intelligence

How many meetings are you in a week? How many leave you energized and ready to rock? If the answer isn't "most" then something's wrong, and there's an easy* fix. We just need to apply basic principle of Design Thinking and a super-simple emotional intelligence strategy.

The fundamental reason most meetings are bad: They're planned for the wrong person.

Think about it. When most of us plan a meeting, we're thinking of ourselves. "What I need to cover is..." or "I need people to know about...." or "I need 10 minutes to go over..." The basic principle of Design Thinking is: Start with your customer. So, if you're the person holding the meeting, who's the "customer" and what do they need?

There are two parts of the answer: Rational & emotional. At a rational level, what are the questions and concerns of the people in the room? What are the roadblocks they're facing that we can remove in this meeting? What are the key facts that will help them do a better job starting today?

If you don't know, don't have a meeting. If, in fact, the point of the meeting is for you to tell people what you want to tell them, an email with a simple survey response is much more effective. At Six Seconds, as a distributed org with leaders and team members all over the world, many of our "meetings" have shifted to a Google Doc where we comment and consider. Then sometimes that gives me enough data to make a decision, or to have a worthwhile meeting.

And now, the touchy feely part... a simply powerful emotional intelligence question:

How are people feeling now... and how do you want them to feel at the end of the meeting?

This rocket-science emotional intelligence question should be the equivalent of putting on your trousers before you go to work. In other words, it's emotionally dumb not to think about this. Like it or not, we are not solely rational creatures, and trying to leave emotions out of your thinking is ignorant (if you're disagreeing with that, it's your emotions driving you).

Years ago, I was scared to ask people how they were feeling, because God forbid, they might tell me. Or cry. I was under a common misassumption that talking about feelings would make them worse - Pandora's box. Research says the opposite: Naming emotions is one of the most powerful ways to make them useful.

If that's you, no worries mate. *I lied about it being easy, that was just to get you to read the article. But it's totally do-able. You don't need to ask anyone (yet). You don't need to talk about feelings (yet). Just don't hide your head in the sand. To start, just consider the question for yourself, and plan accordingly.

According to our research on feelings at work around the world, the most likely answer, BY FAR, is FRUSTRATED. Take a look at this wordle, larger feelings are more frequent:

We've been working on this study of emotions in the workplace since 2006. You can join the latest segment of the study here by answering an in-depth questionnaire on your emotional intelligence skills, leadership, and your workplace climate: 6sec.org/vitality19

So if in doubt, assume people are walking into the meeting frustrated, anxious and overwhelmed. If that's not how you want them to leave the meeting, you're going to need some EQ ninja skills... such as recognizing their feelings, expressing your own and getting people talking to one another.