Meetings Remove the Madness and Save your Sanity

I find it interesting that there are still bad meetings in corporate America.  I have been fighting to improve meetings for more than 3 decades.  I wrote the poem “Meetings– Madness or Sanity?” in 2003 as both a personal observation and a warning to others.  I have been teaching and speaking on both time and meeting management since 1983.  I was asked by many people to write a book on the meeting management concepts I shared in training, so attendees could share it with others so that more people could use them to improve their meetings.  I wrote the book R.A!R.A! A MeetingWizard’s Approach (available on Amazon #ad) to fill that need for more productive meetings.  Mine is not the only book in print (or e-book) to help people hold more effective and efficient meetings.  So why are companies still experiencing bad meetings?  Is it the environment or do the individual people not care if the meetings they attend accomplish little?

I am not the only person who wonders why some meetings are still bad and what the key is to better It is all over social media that is typically used by businesses for marketing or professionals for networking ( i.e. Twitter and LinkedIN aka IN).  Twitter has the hashtag #Meetings as an information feed on the topic.  Using that hashtag, people talk about upcoming events, drone on live about boring meetings they are in, complain about the meeting they just left, and occasionally offer tips to improve meetings. IN offers posts and discussions on better ways to handle meetings.  At the time of my writing this post, IN showed over 5 thousand groups discussing meetings, over 22 thousand companies that mention meetings in their name or profile, and over 4 million people claiming some type of meeting skill.

With so many ways to improve meetings, why do we still have bad meetings?  Meetings that waste time and meetings that other dread to attend.  Is it that people cannot read or just do not want to hold and attend better meetings?  Are people afraid to say “This is meeting is not going well.  How can we improve it?”  Personally, I find these excuses/reasons hard to swallow.  Focusing on the RARA acronym for meetings is an easy answer.  Do we need to make the learning process harder to hold more productive meetings?  Please tell me, what can we do to get the word out to everyone that meetings can be better?  How can we get people to want to improve verses complain?

Team Tension: the Why of Causes and How of Management

Is your team experiencing tension or conflict?  It could be occurring because each member has their own work style and personality traits.  We have discussed personality at work before in relation to the various tools for DiSC styles.  The 16 minute video below presents the same concept using IOPT Style.  It is interesting as a quick introduction to why tension exists at work and how different work styles can result in misinterpretation (input processing) leading to unnecessary conflict or resistance (output processing). 

The idea is similar to SDI profile for technical professionals or MBTI types of HRDQ styles for all workers.  Some of the concepts presented in video are a little technical but the psychology is well researched and documented, so keep watching and you will have a better understanding of why knowing the different types can improve team member communication.   

NOTE:  For a clever idea on measuring team or project milestones, check out Organize This with Style blog post with links to multiple poems including Using Poems to Mark Project Milestones.

 

9/11 Tears Remembered - A Memorial Poem

On 9/11/2001, I had a “meeting cancelled due to what happened today.” I then found out while Americans were at work or on their way to work, a terrible tragedy happened that we now refer to as 9/11. Some were trying to track down what happened to associates or family, while most of us cried and hugged our loved of us or were glued to the television for more bad news.

Some might say a leadership blog is not the place to share the below poem. I would disagree, as great leadership was shown that day. Not only by our president, first responders, and the passengers on 93, but also by many Americans across the nation who both worked and wept trying to turn things around. I wrote the short poem below as a way to express our continued sorrow at the memory of that day, as well as encourage hope and healing.

Please fell free to share the poem with others. You may get the video at http://youtu.be/eEoRlgLcARU. If you want the word text, a slide, or to find out more about the author: go to my OrgThis blog. If you use the poem, please credit the source. Thanks.