Can meetings be tedious and boring when the facilitator/speaker is not prepared? Absolutely!
Lack of preparation and understanding of your objective is a terrible waste of time for everyone. If your business calender is filled with important meetings, whenever you get to one where a key person is just not prepared, you going to be miffed. Should we flog them?
Should we walk out early in disgust? Stamp our feet impatiently? Stomp around the room steaming? Rattle something on the table or chair? Hit them in the back of the head with hastily scrawled note in a paper airplane?
What if this is a remote meeting, with people from all across the country? You just cannot flog, stamp or stomp enough to get their attention! At least in a live meeting there is some satisfaction. Remote meetings require more tact.
Our new business modus operandus includes more and more remote meetings using Internet-based technologies for meetings. We can share voice, text and desktop applications. It works well…if everyone is prepared. Being prepared means if there is a large document to discuss, everyone has a copy of it. If your meeting has desktop or application sharing, the facilitator has a copy to display, if necessary, or some form of presentation, like PowerPoint slides.
The time should be appropriate in length and everyone informed well in advance.
If you’re leading this meeting, be proactive – get to know the technology, understand what information needs to be disseminated, review what you are delivering. In essence, be prepared!
If you have slides and or notes, great; forward them, but DO NOT just read the content. The slides are supposed to awaken the presenter’s deepest, inner thoughts. These should trigger the speaker to spew out enrapturing, imaginative prose. Assume I, and everyone else, can read what is on the screen.
Also, assume that I cannot read your mind across the Internet. If you have something that requires a depth of knowledge, it’s is probably a good topic to review closely, to detail verbosely.
I have had several meetings in the past week. Most of the time, the speakers were prepared, except for this one reallllllly unprepared facilitator. An hour filled with ummms and ahhhs. It was almost painful. The speaker read directly from the slides - information we already generally knew. He failed to realize and address the real issue, which was the differences between the old version and the new version of a document.
Being a live meeting, we could ask questions. Only then could we further prepare ourselves for our next client meetings. Reviewing the obvious, or material that we already had access to, was a waste of time. Not to mention boring.
Think to the next meeting you have, are you prepared, and will the audience be prepared? Do they already have the material they need? Are you prepared to discuss the changes, the highlights, the specific issues and not the mundane? Did you give enough notice and a good reason for them to attend?
You should be pleasantly surprised at how efficient a well-prepared meeting will seem.
This is why we spend so much time planning a project. We really want to know what is expected to be spent as the project progresses, and any fluctuations have to be understood before acceptance. This is where the double and triple checks should be used.
