It might not surprise you to learn that research shows meetings have increased in length and frequency over the past 50 years, to the point where people spend an average of nearly 23 hours a week in them, up from less than 10 hours in the 1960s.
While the meetings are longer, the better question to ask is, are these meetings effective? Your role as a leader is more important than ever to communicate effectively and efficiently. However, most leaders hold meetings that do nothing to address the various ways that people innately process information or learn ways to inspire action.
Far too often, meeting leaders are not managing the communication process. As a leader, your job is to engage your team and communicate in ways where the message is received.
Keep Your Team Engaged While Reducing Meeting Times
To engage your team, keep in mind that everyone has a unique way they learn and process information. When you know how your team learns, you can deliver your communication in highly effective ways helping you to reduce meeting times.
For example, if your team is made up of people who are innately wired to learn by trial and error, they also like to put their thumbprint on ideas to make it their own. If you are talking non-stop, giving a lot of information, and telling them what they should do, you’re not giving them the opportunity to make it their own, which is what some of your team members may innately need. What happens, then, is that your message or ideas will fall flat. You spend more time convincing rather than involving.
Your role as a leader is to shape each meeting so that you deliver communication in the way your team members need to receive it. In this example where your team likes to put their thumbprint on ideas to make it their own, the leader should prepare an interactive meeting where the team members can actively participate and provide their input. Ask thought-provoking questions and have your team brainstorm new possibilities. In this way, you constructed the meeting so that they can put their thumbprint on ideas inspiring them to implement their ideas.
This is just one example of what you can do to reduce meeting times and increase your effectiveness. Most meetings, however, have a mix of human wiring. The question then becomes: Is it possible to communicate and construct meetings to address everyone’s wiring?
The short answer is yes! Let’s say you also have people who are wired with a high degree of certainty. By their nature, they need to understand the “why.” If a policy, procedure, or process needs to be changed, it’s important to address why it needs to be changed. If you don’t fill in the blanks, they will ask many questions so they understand how they will approach the change.
Masterful leaders engage others in the process by understanding what each person innately needs so that the message can be delivered in the way others innately receive their information. Human wiring is simply at the heart of your communication and a solution to being a highly-effective leader.
To become masterful in leadership and communication, join us for Wired to Win Master Class on August 19-20, 2021. Visit https://www.excellerateassociates.com/wired-to-win/ to register, for class information, and to maximize your own human wiring and leadership.
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Lisa Mininni is the best selling author of Me, Myself, and Why? The Secrets to Navigating Change and President, Excellerate Associates, a business mentoring, and leadership/organizational development company. She is also the Founder of the Business Innovation Lab, an 8100 square foot coworking and conference center located in Livonia, Michigan.
For upcoming events on human wiring and other business-building events, please visit https://www.excellerateassociates.com/events
At the end of the day, a strategy is only as good as its execution. One of the most difficult challenges to implementing a strategy is consistent execution of the action plan that materializes the strategy.