Are you frustrated with meetings spinning off on tangents and not
sticking to the agenda? It's really easy for meetings to be very unproductive.
Stay tuned to this video because I'm going to give you five efficient
techniques on how to be effective in your meetings. As well, stay tuned to the
end because I have some awesome tips that's gonna keep you productive and
knock your productivity out of the park. For tips on accelerating your
professional career, subscribe to my channel, hit that bell button and you'll
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Hi, I'm Adriana Girdler, a productivity and meeting facilitator expert and I've
been doing this for over 20 years in the business helping teams become successful.
Listen, if you don't master your meetings, someone else will and I have, with tried
and true techniques, have learned how to do this and I'm going to share with you
my strategies. Use a time out. What? Can you actually time out a colleague?
Absolutely. Sports teams do it all the time that's how they keep things strategic and
ensure that the players know what they're supposed to do, same thing
applies to meetings. So, how do you do this?
Well, I use a T and I go around the room and at the beginning of the meeting
please don't do that at the end or in the middle because people have no idea
what you're talking about, ask for permission to time them out and explain
why because you want to keep things on track not only are you a facilitator but
you're the timekeeper and you want to make sure that anything that is not on
agenda is stopped so you can stay and stick to your agenda items, so what do
you do with that important information that you just called the timeout on? Well,
you put it on a parking lot and I'm gonna get to that in a sec. Parking Lot
Patrol. Your parking lot is a real efficient tool that you use in order to
capture all of your non agenda items that are distracting you in your meeting
so if someone goes off topic, guess what? You call a timeout. You now know how to
do that and you place it on the parking lot. What's really important about this,
it's not just the physicality of placing something on a parking lot, it's
psychologically, people get off-topic for a reason, they either have a hidden
agenda, or something's really passionate and important to them, so what you want
to do is you don't want to ignore it because it will stay with them and
they'll be distracted throughout the whole meeting, they won't participate. You
want to be able to call it out for what it is, give it a timeout, capture it,
capture your notes here so now that they see it, they can drop it and release it.
Now what's really really important with parking lots is what do you do with this
afterwards? You just don't rip it and put it in the garbage because what? You're
throwing thoughts and important information in the garbage, you got to do
something with it. So you either put it on action items, you put it in your
meeting minutes or you send it off to the people who had items on this
parking lot and you set up some one-on-one meetings with them to get
this information from them further that was not part of your original meeting
agenda. If you've ever attended a meeting that
would benefit from this particular productivity technique, write down
PARKING LOT in the comment below. The ground rules.
This is another amazing technique that will instantly transform your meetings. I
love my ground rules session rules and it is something that at the beginning of
the meeting I actually lay it out, post them up and review each one with
everyone. Now, what's really cool is when people don't follow these ground rules,
guess what you do? You time them out. The important part is to really ensure that
you set this up at the beginning of the meeting so everyone is really clear with
expectations. It's when everyone knows what they can and can't do that makes a
huge difference with the productivity of your meeting. Now, if you want one of
these babies I have it on my website, check it out
by grabbing the link below, you can also create your own but I do have one set up
for you, just for you. The art of getting a yes, gaining consensus. Now, what do we
want in meetings? We want to move forward, we want to get everyone to agree to what it
is that we're trying to do, we want to get a yes but if you're going to get a
hundred percent agreement, forget it, you're gonna get nowhere. A lot of times
you have to kind of do some negotiation and a technique that I use if you cannot
get a full 100 percent yes is gaining consensus and that is, I may not 100%
agree but I can and will live with support and carry through with the
group's decision so I share this definition of consensus with everybody
and we actually use it. Do I have your
consensus? And so now that we know that definition, getting that yes has a lot
more value so even if they don't agree they will support it and that's really
critical for success on a lot of project items and business in general. Surprise
your meeting participants with some fun! Yay! No, like seriously, I think you
really should have some fun. Sometimes meetings are so static and it's all
about strategy and just pushing things forward. Sometimes doing something really
simple can bridge people together. Now, when I talk about this I sometimes have
clients who say to me, okay we don't want games, we don't want the typical stuff, so
I've created something really cool that bridges the gap of just doing your
standard meeting but allows people to getting to know each other a little bit
more and actually become really connected that has huge positive
consequences and I created this homemade little spin the wheel with real cool
questions that what you do is you just pass it around and it lands and you
learn something new about someone in the meeting. Now how cool is that? That just
keeps us connected which actually allows us to move forward and do really awesome
work collectively as a group. Now that you know how to keep your meetings on
track like a pro, now take a look at the rest of the stuff you're doing so you
can excel with that, too. I've created just for you an awesome download, 21 days
to getting shit done at work, I promise you, full of amazing tips and tricks, you can
grab it by going to the link below. Please subscribe to my channel, give this
video a thumbs up and share it with all the professionals that you know. If you
feel more confident now running meetings, let me know, I'd love to hear from you.
Until the next video, see ya!