MICE (Meeting, Incentive, Convetion, Exhibition)

The world moves fast. We often rely on technology to help us keep up. When making a connection with another person is critical, nothing tops an in-person meeting. Sitting in a room with someone face-to-face allows the other party to completely experience your personal brand. This experience takes place on many levels. The expression on your face, the tone of your voice, the look in your eyes all helps represent who you are and the nature of your visit.

Many people take this idea lightly. I often hear people say that in-person meetings are a waste of time and money. While it is true that you can save money by having conference calls and video conferences, the in-person meeting still has a place in business.

Whenever people question the value of a face-to-face meeting I tell them the story of a young hotel manager from Northern New Jersey. This young man was wide-eyed and aggressive. He was tasked with marketing a new hotel that was opening in an industrial area. The young manager spent a significant amount of time researching the market and putting together a marketing plan. He believed that he had thought of every detail.

When the time came to share this plan with the Senior Vice President (SVP) of Marketing in his company, the manager made a compelling case. He cited his facts and figures. He referenced the market segmentation study he had completed. He articulated a simple yet effective plan for his new hotel. Or so he thought

After the presentation, the SVP berated the young manager and told him that the plan would never work. She said it was too simplistic. She said that she would come up with a better plan and present it to the hotel’s owner.

The SVP of Marketing had always felt threatened by the young manager. She did not want the owner to see the true talent this manager possessed. She also wanted to make sure the owner did not establish a direct relationship with this manager. The SVP feared that the owner would see the young man’s marketing talent and replace her with him.

The manager was furious with this situation. He felt strongly that his plan was solid. He knew in his heart that it would work. He could not stand by and watch as his ideas were summarily dismissed. The manager knew that he would need to speak with the owner directly to make certain that his ideas were given a fair review. The manager felt that it was his job to do what he thought was best for his business. He also felt that this was a meeting that needed to take place in-person. The owner needed to see the passion the manager had for his hotel.

The manager drove eight hours to the owner’s office for their appointment. He made a compelling presentation. At the end of the meeting the owner thanked the young man for his ideas and his passion for the business. The manager left the meeting and felt good as he drove eight hours back to his hotel.

About one week later the manager received some interesting news. The owner met with the SVP of Marketing (after he met with the manager). It seems that she presented the manager’s plan as her own – down to the last detail. The owner immediately saw what had happened and fired the SVP of Marketing.

In the end, it was not the fact that the SVP of Marketing adopted her subordinates work as her own that prompted the owner to fire her. It was the fact that the manager was passionate about his business and the SVP of Marketing was beating that passion out of him.

Had the manager just met with the owner over the phone, the meeting would have not had the same impact.

Two years later when the hotel manager was promoted the owner used that meeting as an example of his passion and dedication to the firm.

There is no substitute for an in-person meeting to give the other party a sense of your personal brand.

David Lorenzo has more than 20 years of business experience as a successful corporate executive, entrepreneur, strategist, author, and speaker. He has worked with and mentored some of the world’s most successful businesspeople while helping lead many large organizations to unprecedented success. His latest book is titled: Career Intensity: Business Strategy for Workplace Warriors and Entrepreneurs.

Mr. Lorenzo’s experience in starting new business enterprises and repositioning under-performing business units, along with his ability to implement innovative performance improvement solutions, makes him one of today’s most sought-after trusted advisors.

Mr. Lorenzo is a participant in the Wharton Fellows Program at the University of Pennsylvania, a management think tank that meets regularly to analyze and address timely business issues. He received his MBA from the Lubin School of Business at Pace University, and he received a Masters of Science in Strategic Communications from Columbia University in New York City.

Dave’s blog is http://www.careerintensity.com/blog.

How would you describe meetings you have attended in the past? Last Tuesday, I was facilitating a workshop on how to lead better meetings, and to start things off, I asked the group that very question. The answers that they provided were very similar to answers that I have received from hundreds of workshop participants over the last ten years.

The first two responses were

“Meetings are looooooooooong,” and
“Meetings are BOW-ring (this workshop was actually held in my hometown of Fort Worth, Texas – thus the Texas twang.)”

Those two responses almost always come up when I ask the question. Others that also come up a lot are: Wastes of time, non-productive, confrontational, inefficient, repetitive, and a number of other negative descriptions. Every once in a while, I get a response like positive, informative, or necessary, but usually the other participants gang-up against the person very quickly.

Most people believe that meetings are necessary evils, and in many cases, they are. But one of the most important things we can remember about meetings is to NOT have one unless the meeting is absolutely necessary. When your employees and coworkers are in staff meetings, they are not producing. Nothing is ever produced until after the meeting is over. Some one of my first pieces of advice to people who want to make meetings more effective is to have fewer of them.

About five years ago, I made this statement in a class, and a young lady in the front row raised her hand and said, “That sounds really good, but my whole job description involves going to meetings.” I was intrigued, so I asked her to tell me more. She was a personal assistant to a manager of a Fortune 500 company, and she was hired by her boss to attend the meetings that he could not attend himself because there were not enough hours in the day. After class, she and I sat down and identified 32-hours of wasted meeting time that she was participating in every week. These were meetings that neither she nor her boss was actually needed for, but that one of them attended every week. Over the next year, this one person increased productivity of her team by over 200%. Granted, this is an extreme case, but there are probably hours in each of our weeks that are wasted by ineffective meetings.

The tips below are strategies that I have collected over the years from class members who swear by their effectiveness. I hope they work for you as well.

1) Have an Agenda: Outline ahead of time what points will be covered in the meeting. Write it out, and distribute it to participants ahead of time. This will help avoid the “chasing of rabbits,” and help participants be more prepared for the meeting.

2) Follow the Agenda: This sounds very elementary, but you’d be surprised by the number of people who take the time to create an agenda, and then totally disregard the agenda during the meeting.

3) Limit the Agenda to Three Points or Less: Ask yourself, “What are the three most important things we need to cover in the meeting?” Limit the agenda to these three points. The rest of the things you wanted to cover, by definition, weren’t really that important anyway, so why waste everyone’s time?

4) Set a Time Limit: I would suggest setting the time limit for the meeting to be no longer than 30-minutes. In future meetings, shorten the time by five minutes until the time limit is 15-minutes or less. The leader of the meeting will become much more efficient, and the participants will become much more focused as well. When the time limit is up, end the meeting. You may not get to cover every single thing that you wanted to the first couple of time you try this, but within a short time, you will find that the major information points are being discussed and decisions are being made very efficiently.

5) Encourage Participation from Everyone, but don’t Force Them: Instead of going around the table and asking for opinions or input, just ask a question and let people volunteer their answers. There will be times during any meeting that each person will “phase out” (especially if it is a looooong and BOW-ring meeting.) If we call on every person, it wastes time, and puts people on the spot. Other ways of encouraging participation is to just ask a question, and after someone answers, say something like, “Good, let’s hear from someone else.” If there are people in your meeting who rarely speak, instead of calling on them directly, you might say something like, “I value the opinion of each of you, does anyone else have something to add.” Then, just look at the person you want to hear from. If he or she has something to say, he or she will say it if encouraged in this way. If he or she doesn’t, then you haven’t embarrassed the person.

Meetings can be a very powerful way to communicate and solve problems. In past workshops that I have facilitated, we have shown leaders how to identify the root-cause of a problem, come up with dozens of possible solutions, come to a consensus as group on the best possible solution, and create a written plan of action that is measurable in 15-minutes or less. Your meetings can be that efficient and that powerful too if you use these simple tips.

Doug Staneart is President of DM Staneart and Associates, http://www.buildingyourteam.com, leadership and team-building training. He can be reached by e-mail at doug@buildingyourteam.com or toll-free at 1-800-872-7830 x-100.

Think about the last meeting you attended at work. After the meeting, did you feel that everyone heard what you had to say and your ideas were taken seriously? Or did you leave frustrated because louder or more forceful people dominated the meeting? If so, you need to take control of the role you play in meetings. Here are 7 quick tips to get your ideas heard in your next meeting:

1) Prepare before the meeting. Know what you’re going to say. If you’re a person that gets tongue-tied in a meeting, make sure you prepare your comments in advance. Look at the agenda and plan the key points you want to cover.

2) Get on the agenda. Don’t wait until the meeting. Ask the meeting leader to put your topic on the agenda so you have a scheduled time to share your ideas.

3) Run the meeting. Talk to the meeting leader and offer to help by running the next meeting. That way you can control the conversation.

4) Offer to take notes on a flip chart. If you’re not comfortable running the meeting, you can offer to stand up and capture the ideas on a flip chart. That will make it easier for you to add to the ideas, since you’re the one recording them.

5) Interrupt other people. For many of us this is very uncomfortable. We want to be polite and wait our turn. Unfortunately, in some meetings, only the loud and pushy people get heard. Realize that sometimes, you can’t wait for a break in the conversation and interrupting is the only way to get your point across.

6) When you don’t get a response to an idea, repeat it again. In some meetings, so much is going on at the same time, you may need to say your comments again. Or you may need to rephrase then so people understand their importance.

7) Take credit for your ideas. If someone else repeats something you’ve said as their idea, don’t get upset. You can remind the group that it was your idea by thanking the other person for supporting it. You can say, “John, that ties right into what I said a few minutes about the delivery problem. As I mentioned, this is a key area we need to address. Thanks for your suggestion.”

If you really want to get heard in meetings, you need to work at it. Try new strategies and see what works best for you. At the end of every meeting, ask yourself what went well and what else you could have done. Make notes and use those ideas to prepare for the next meeting to make sure that you get heard.

This article comes with reprint rights providing no changes are made and the resource box below accompanies it.

Laura Browne is the author of a practical & easy-to-use book for women, Why Can’t You Communicate Like Me? How Smart Women Get Results At Work. To register for her Free Teleconference on How To Deal With Difficult People, go to http://www.inyourfaceink.com (This book is available at the website and at Barnes & Noble online.)

When Laura isn’t writing, she helps women be more successful through WOMEN Unlimited, a nationally recognized resource for cultivating leadership excellence, http://www.women-unlimited.com

[Erie, Pennsylvania]

Chris Wright, between the his release from the Army in 1971, at the end of his Vietnam tour, and his reactivation into the Armed Forces in 1974, and his Army career, he had met Ms O ‘Day and they had chummed about, living together now and then. She was quite young and he seven years older, and during this time when she was of legal age to live with Chris, she seventeen, moved in. It would prove to be an ongoing entanglement, a moody one, yet for her it was a battle also, not knowing where the moods came from.

During this time, she’d break the relationship off a number of times only to return for lack of direction, which was, perhaps an issue on both their parts; yet they would both reunite.

It was in the fall of 1973, while they both were living in Erie, Pennsylvania, by their sisters’ house, Veronica, that it all came apart. Veronica had invited them up to her house, and in the course of doing so, both sold all their things to start a new life up there. Chris being a traveler at heart grabbed the opportunity. But while living their, and working for Malibu Iron, and then shifting to Pennsylvania Electric, Veronica asked them both to leave their house, having one kid, and one on the way. And so they did, after finding a house a few miles away, things smoothed out a bit. This is also where Chris started to see her peculiarities; her odd moods, behavior, such things he could not account for. At times her moods were up, other times racy, and still on other occasions down right depressing. She had rages like her brother, and her thinking was distorted.

In the mists of not having much money, and Katie wanting to remain in the house at times, Chris adapted a lost police dog, joined the Russian Club, even meeting Jack Benny one night there, just trying to avoid an unpleasant romance, yet not letting go, and not knowing why he wasn’t, perhaps he was as ill as her, he concluded somewhere along the way.

Things did get a little bad for them, money wise, so bad once they had to count their pennies and take them to the supermarket to buy some hot dogs, the cashier told them to go to the bank and put them in some penny wrappers, and then she’d sell them the hot dogs, in which they did, and the Bank teller told them to go outside the bank and do it, it was too much of a bother to do it inside: put the pennies in the rollers, and they did, and then bring it back in, and then they gave him the pennies, and then they brought the roll of pennies back to the supermarket and bought the hot dogs: it was an odyssey at best.

After a struggling year, he returned with Katie, back to Minnesota, and moved out, finding an apartment of his own, with his friend Kevin, a younger lad than he, but a fine one. They both seemed to have drinking problems during those days, but who was watching, no one so they of course kept on drinking. And their small apartment was quite suitable for two bachelors. But Katie kept coming around, trying to fix things up. And Chris for some odd reason didn’t put a halt to it, but Kevin tried, telling her to leave Chris alone, and so that broke up Kevin and Chris’s relationship.

It was then, in 1974, Chris decided to go back into the Army, build a career, go to college, and become what he wanted to become, all he could become, possibly do some traveling, with the Army paying the way. And he did just that, ending back in Germany, where he had been prior to Vietnam, in 1971, that is to say, he was in Augsburg Germany for ten-months during that year. And so Mu