One new behavior for managing your meetings
Meetings have become a staple of professional life in our fast-paced world, especially with the shift toward virtual workspaces. However, not all meetings are created equal, and their effectiveness often hinges on how they are conducted. From the challenge of maintaining focus in lengthy sessions to the pitfalls of poor preparation, meetings can quickly go from productivity powerhouses to time-consuming detours.
What is commonly known for successfully transforming these gatherings are a few strategic changes:
This piece will delve further into the art of meeting mastery, using one straightforward behavior to focus any team to relevancy and impact.
The Problem
Meetings, inherently designed for collaborative discourse, often veer off course for a myriad of reasons, ranging from divergent thinking to the participants' varied interpretations of the meeting's objectives. At times, participants in a meeting need help to remain anchored to the central theme. Consider a scenario where an individual shifts the conversation to a different project they oversee during a critical discussion to perfect a marketing strategy for a new client. While this information is pertinent to the broader scope of the team's activities, it strays from the specific objective of that gathering. Such deviations divert attention from the task at hand and hinder the group's ability to finalize their strategy with the necessary focus and swiftness. This act of chasing unrelated topics not only squanders valuable time but also breeds frustration among team members.
Best Practice
One best practice is to have an agenda and additionally create a visual outcome of what you want to accomplish. Having a visual representation of the meeting's goal is not just a tactic but a foundational principle in cognitive psychology. Visual stimuli are processed 60,000 times faster in the brain than text, making visual outcomes a powerful tool to maintain focus. Go beyond your agenda and visually display the outcome of your meeting. You engage more cognitive resources by employing visual outcomes, enhancing retention and focus. This sets the stage for our one behavior you can use to create focus in your meeting.
The Relevancy Challenge
When a participant's contribution seems tangential, the prompt, "I hear what you said, and I am not sure how what you are saying is relevant," referencing back to the displayed visual outcome, acts as a cognitive recalibration tool. When you challenge relevancy, it serves two critical functions. First, it respectfully challenges the speaker to introspect and realign their contribution with the meeting's visualized goals, ensuring that the discourse remains tethered to the agenda. This technique is rooted in Socratic questioning, encouraging speakers to critically examine and articulate the relevance of their points, fostering a deeper understanding and engagement with the topic at hand. If it is relevant, then you have added it to the conversation. If it isn't, you shift the focus to where it needs to be, take the tangential point, and put it into a parking lot for later discussion.
Why It Works
Second, this approach subtly reinforces the principle of relevance among all participants, cultivating a group norm that values direct alignment with the meeting's objectives. Over time, this norm becomes internalized, promoting a culture of focused, efficient, and purpose-driven meetings. It also reduces participants' cognitive load, as they are not forced to make leaps of logic to connect disparate points, thereby maintaining a more straightforward, more accessible cognitive map of the meeting's discourse.
Moreover, this technique encourages a form of active listening, where participants are not just passive recipients but are engaged in a dynamic process of evaluating and synthesizing information related to the meeting's goals. This enhances the quality of contributions and fosters a more inclusive environment where every participant feels their input is valued and scrutinized for relevance.
Effective Meeting Culture
In conclusion, using a relevancy challenge like "Explain to me how this is relevant?" is a sophisticated approach that taps into fundamental principles of cognitive psychology and group dynamics. This method ensures that meetings remain on track and enhances the overall productivity and effectiveness of the collaborative process. By adopting this strategy, leaders can cultivate a meeting culture prioritizing focus, relevance, and efficiency, driving towards more meaningful and actionable outcomes.