FULL TRANSCRIPT

00:00 – Show Opening

Are you a professional who wants to become a more effective leader? Then get ready for daily tips from the coach with the experience and inspiration to help you succeed in any leadership situation. You’re listening to the Meeting Leadership podcast with Gordon Sheppard.

00:27 – Podcast content starts here

Welcome to another episode of the Meeting Leadership Podcast. My name is Gordon Sheppard and I want to say thank you so much for being the type of professional who wants to become a great leader, a great leader that knows how to run outstanding meetings and you choose the Meeting Leadership Podcast to pick up the tips, the strategies, and the practical advice that you need to do just that. It is really honestly great to have you here.

00:50 – You can’t communicate too much

And to kick off the show, please tell me if you can relate to this. You are a leader who is saying the same things over and over again and you really kind of feel like people just aren’t getting it. Well, here’s what I can say. You actually can’t over-communicate enough. And while that might be really, really frustrating, you have to be in a position as a leader to really go over and over again until you absolutely know for sure that people are taking on the message that you’re trying to send to them.

01:19 – My experience with overcommunication

And one of the stories that I can share to confirm that over-communication is absolutely necessary comes from a time when I was working as a manager of creative services and marketing and we were producing commercials for clients. Now what would happen is those commercials would go on air but often they weren’t successful for like six months, 12 months, 18 months. But the clients, they were really excited because they had paid for production and they got them on air. They wanted to see something happening in the first month.

Well the reality is it takes a long time for messages to register. In fact, if you look at sort of those basic premises of marketing, it could be as many as seven to 14 times for someone to actually hear a message to actually get it to sink in. And it’s no different for you and the team that you’re leading during meetings. And I honestly hope that you can keep that wisdom in mind as we dig into part five of our five-part series called How to Create an Effective Team Meeting Agenda.

Now in the other four parts leading up to today, we’ve really been giving you a lot of tips and suggestions about how to reinvision your agenda, turn it into something that people want to read before the meeting, turn it into something that during the meeting is really well used and makes your meetings highly productive and something that also creates a lot of accountability after the meetings.

02:39 – Free AGENDA download – https://meetingleadershipinc.com/71download

And if you haven’t got it yet, please take a moment to download the free PDF that explains the agenda acronym that we explained in the other four episodes and it’s available at meetingleadershipinc.com/71download. That’s meetingleadershipinc.com/71download.

02:59 – Borrowing ideas from Hollywood marketing

And because I know that so many of you are action takers, you’ve actually listened to the other episodes, you’ve learned the agenda acronym, you’ve put those things into your agendas and now you’ve created essentially an agenda masterpiece. Well, today’s episode is going to really help you to over communicate the great information that you’ve got in that agenda so your team really absorbs it and really starts to do something about it. Because like our favorite Hollywood movies that we’ve been talking about throughout this entire series, you really know about them because they’ve got great marketing campaigns. So we’re going to borrow a few things from their marketing campaigns that you can actually implement to promote your agenda.

03:37 – Produce a meeting agenda trailer

And the first suggestion that I have to help you promote your agenda is that you actually get out your phone and produce a meeting agenda trailer. And here’s what I mean when I say this. Let’s say it’s a very special thing for you to order lunch for your weekly staff updates meeting. Well, instead of just typing that into your email and sending that out to everybody, you get your phone out, you talk into the phone and you say, “Guess what, we’re ordering Thai food” or Indian or whatever your staff’s favorite food is, you put that into a little video, you attach it to the email going out, and that’s going to start to create buy-in.

Now, of course it’s fun to talk about food and that kind of thing, but I think if there’s an issue that you really want people to pay attention to. Let’s say for example, you’ve got to really go into that next meeting and come up with some terrific sales ideas because your company is actually in trouble. You could then put a focused message into something that you’re talking into your phone about, record that video, and they’re going to see that and they’re going to see the feeling and the emotion on your face. That way, they’ll be primed when they arrive at that meeting and they won’t be picking up your emotion for the first time. So I can’t say enough about producing a meeting agenda trailer that really takes the best parts of your agenda out and really gets people to pay attention.

04:49 – Write personal notes on the back of each agenda document

And the second suggestion that I have for making sure that people pay attention to the agenda is this. Let’s say you’re preparing an agenda for a really important meeting. Well, what you could do is you could actually print it out and print a copy for each person that’s going to be attending the meeting. Then on the back of each copy, you could write a personal note to each person and this would really help them to focus on the things that they need to think about in that meeting. And then here’s the crazy part, you actually stick it in an envelope, you put a stamp on the envelope and you mail it to their house. This is a great way to get people’s attention. It’s obviously pretty extreme and doesn’t kind of work for regular meetings, but if your agenda is for a really important meeting, this is a great way to make an impact.

05:31 – Cold calling/pre-interview calls

And the third suggestion that I have for marketing the agendas that you’re going to put a lot of effort into is a tried and true marketing technique, and that is cold calling. Call it pre-interviewing, call it cold calling, call it whatever you’d like, but honestly, do a one on one call before the meeting with each person who’s going to attend. And this is a great way to find out if your meeting agenda is on track. It’s a great way to kind of get the mood of everyone before they actually get into the room and actually say some things to them that are going to inspire them to do their best and be really well prepared for your meeting.

And like I said at the beginning of this episode, it may feel like over-communication is kind of a burden, but if you think about the actual results that you’re getting from your meetings right now and the level of meeting engagement with your team, this might be the level that you need to take it to to become highly productive.

06:24 – Recap of all 5 episodes – The AGENDA acronym

And now I’d like to take a moment to recap the key concepts from the five episodes in the How to Create an Effective Team Meeting Agenda series. In part one, we talked about the importance of meeting agendas and why they are really worth your time to invest in, in terms of creating highly productive meetings. And we also introduced the concept of using the word agenda itself as an acronym that you can use to spice them up.

And then in part two, we covered the A and the G from our AGENDA acronym. A stands for attention grabber. And that means that the first thing on your agenda should really get people’s attention. And the G from our AGENDA acronym stands for great goals. And what I mean by that is you need to start using some adjectives and really not writing boring language into your agendas, but put something in there that people actually want to read and then go the extra step and start to pull some of the inspiration from your strategic plan and get the language from there incorporated into every agenda that you produce.

And then in part three, we introduced the E and the N. the E stands for excitement and that means you put an inspirational quote on there, something that somebody’s done really well but really broadcast it right there on your agenda to create excitement in your meetings. And of course the N in our acronym stands for navigation tools or ground rules or whatever you want to call it. But basically you want to put the rules of engagement, how we behave right there on your agenda underneath the words navigation tools.

And then in part four, we got onto the D and the A from our acronym. Now I used the D to say decide now and I recommended that you put those words beside every action item on your agenda and really avoid tabling, avoid carrying things over from one meeting to the next.

And the final A in our AGENDA acronym stands for accountability check-in. Now as a facilitator or a meeting leader, you can go to each person at the end of any meeting and you can say, “Given what we’ve talked about here today, what are you going to do? And when are you going to do it?” And then I recommended that you take that information and you record it on your agenda and you bring that back to your next meeting to create a higher level of accountability.

And because I really understand how much effort it takes to create a great agenda, and I know that you’ve put that entire acronym into action, I created part five of the series that we just went over in this episode today to give you the marketing ideas that you need to over-communicate every aspect of your agenda to make sure that your people are aligned and they’re carrying your message forward in the best way possible.

09:00 – Previous episodes in this series – Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4

And if you’d like to go back and check out part one in this series, then visit meetingleadershipinc.com/71. That’s meetingleadershi​meetingleadershipinc.com/71​​​pinc.com/71. And like I’ve been saying throughout the week, what would happen if every one of your meetings felt like your favorite Hollywood blockbuster movie, like Star Wars, Iron Man, The Wizard of Oz, or maybe even Titanic? Wouldn’t it be worth preparing and promoting a blockbuster meeting agenda to make that happen? And what would happen if you made every meeting outstanding? The results would be things like higher profits, your team would be more satisfied, you might impact the entire organization with your great meetings and ultimately that will flow through and have a really positive impact on your customers and your community.

09:53 – How To Be A Good Facilitator – https://meetingleadershipinc.com/44 

And if you’ve enjoyed this five-part series called How to Create an Effective Team Meeting Agenda, then I think you’re going to really enjoy our three-part series called How To Be a Good Facilitator. And you can get part one of that series by going to meetingleadershipinc.com/44.

10:11 – Meeting Leadership Academy – https://meetingleadershipinc.com/academy

I also want to let you know that this episode of the Meeting Leadership Podcast is brought to you by the Meeting Leadership Academy. Now there you’re going to find great live training options for your team, but you’re also going to find online course title options like this, How To Be a Good Facilitator, How To Create an Effective Team Meeting Agenda so you can go deeper in that online course setting, and How To Connect Your Meetings Directly To Your Strategy. And there are more courses arriving all the time. If you’d like to check it out, then visit meetingleadershipinc.com/academy.

As always, thank you so much for listening and we’ll see you tomorrow for another episode of the Meeting Leadership Podcast.

10:52 – Podcast Outro

Thanks for listening to the Meeting Leadership Podcast. Be sure to subscribe for more strategies to help you become an outstanding leader. And don’t forget to rate and review so we can bring you fresh content every day. We’ll see you tomorrow, right here on the Meeting Leadership Podcast.