Imagine a typical project meeting in your organization. Does everyone arrive/login on time? Does everyone stay for the entire meeting? Does everyone ignore incoming calls and e-mails? Does everyone participate, interact, and share ideas? Does everyone stay awake?
If you answered “no” to one or more of these questions, then your project meetings are–unfortunately for most of us in Corporate America–NORMAL.
As an instructor and a consultant, I interact with dozens of project teams each week. One of their most frequent concerns is a lack of meaningful stakeholder participation. We all know why this happens: we are like Gumby pulled in many directions, most days involve back-to-back meetings with no time to actually do our work, and we can’t do our jobs without multitasking.
Constant multitasking is one of the biggest problems in American business. This lack of focus kills collaboration and innovation. It increases project risks and is the cause of many missed or incorrect project requirements.
So how do we get the attention of our stakeholders? How do we get people to focus and participate? Here are five suggestions for virtual or face to face meetings:
- Bring simple but meaningful visuals. Bring visuals that remove complexity, add clarity, and align with discussion topics.
- Ask participants to break into teams or small groups to discuss ideas and bring them back to large group.
- Draw! Use a whiteboard, a flip chart, a napkin, or a virtual equivalent to diagram, model, and frame up the discussion.
- Ask participants to use post-it notes (there are many virtual versions) to write down ideas, questions, risks, next steps, etc.
- Inspire innovation and creativity. Use facilitation activities in which participants generate the meeting outputs DURING the meeting in a fun and interactive way.
These are 5 of the key ingredients in the “secret sauce” of my April workshops! Join me and learn how to mix up your meetings and engage your stakeholders.