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. I just want to say thank you for being here. Thank you for coming here to pick up another leadership skill, another tip, another strategy that you can incorporate and take out today to make your next meeting better, to improve as a leader incrementally that 5% today, 10% tomorrow, that kind of approach. 

00:48 – For leaders who appreciate the value of measuring progress

It really is good to have you here and if you’re the type of leader who really appreciates the value of measuring your progress, you’re going to get a lot out of today’s episode because today, we’re going to talk about how to rate your staff meetings so you can improve productivity and to help you rank the performance of your team, I’ve created a scale from one to 10.

01:05 – The 1 to 10 scale

One being the worst, 10 being the best, and I’m going to talk about the things that are associated with the numbers all along that scale. Then by the end of this episode, you’ll be able to assign a number for where your team is at right now and also an aspirational number of where you want to get to. With that in mind, let’s jump right into the lower part of the scale. 

01:30 – Signs of a low rating (1-4) on the scale

Now, if you’re going to give your team a one, two or three or maybe even a four out of 10, that means the meetings are not going well. We’re seeing behaviors like this. There’s no trust or very low trust. Often in these situations, there’s open conflict. People are actually having arguments out loud. There’s definitely no agenda and no one is running the situation from a facilitative point of view, people are often late. They’re talking about their personal issues and things that are unrelated to what you’re supposed to be meeting about. They’re often in these moments, they’re on their phones because they’re disengaged, they don’t want to be there, and so they’re not paying attention. If things are really bad, they’re making offensive comments, maybe off colored jokes. I’ve been in these types of meetings. They are a disaster because it just puts a chill on everybody and the output of those meetings, it is absolutely lousy.

02:21 – Signs of a moderate rating (5-8) on the scale

Hopefully you and your team are not in a position where you’re giving yourself that low score out of 10, but if you are, you might want to consider canceling the meetings, or you can dig in and really get ready to change the behaviors in your meetings so that you can actually give yourselves a five to eight out of 10. When you can give your team this type of rating, here’s some of the things that we see in these meetings. There’s a basic level of trust, they’re often consistent and they’re orderly. People often in these meetings or following a structured agenda and they’re doing it well. The facilitator is engaged in, they’re competent, and everybody for the most part is really nice and there maybe some conflicts, but nobody wants to dig into it.

03:14 – Signs of a high rating (9-10) on the scale

They’re avoided in this range and when you put all of those things together, the output of these types of meetings, well, it produces average results, which is adequate, but there’s another level because if you’re in a position to give your team a ranking of nine or 10 out of 10, that is an absolutely outstanding score. Now, what’s happening in these types of meetings? There’s a high, high level of trust. There are conflicts, but they are healthy. The leader of the meeting is confident. They’ve put the effort in to be an outstanding facilitator. Everybody is contributing, everybody is speaking up, and you’re getting all kinds of innovative ideas. People are laughing, they’re encouraging each other, and really they can’t wait to get to the next meeting.

04:03 – Rate your meetings honestly and imagine how you can reach your goals

Can you imagine having that type of situation? Isn’t that a great thing to aspire to? Of course in the end, if you get your meetings up to this level, this is where your best product, service, innovation, outcomes can come from when your team is really, really cooking with gas, and now we come to the moment of truth. I mentioned the behaviors if you’re giving your team a one to four out of 10. I mentioned the behaviors if you’re giving your team of five to eight or 10 and I just described a nine or 10 out of 10, so write the score that you would give your team out of 10 right now, and then take a few minutes to think about it and imagine what score do you actually want to give them in the future. Now you’ve got a gap. How are you going to get there?

If you’re in the low end, really you should just cancel the meeting, but if you’re in that middle zone, wouldn’t it be great to aspire to move it up to that nine or 10 out of 10 because if you can do that, not only will your meetings be better, the outcomes from your meetings will start to spill out across the organization. You’ll actually be influencing other meeting teams around the organization and this will definitely flow through to the customers and the community that you serve at the end. If you actually take the time to do the rating and then improve your rating, please get in touch with me. let me know what happened.

05:07 – The Meeting Leadership Solution – https://meetingleadershipinc.com/book

I would love to know the results, and if you’d like to get a copy of this team meeting ranking scale, it’s available in my book called the Meeting Leadership Solution. Now I set up a 10-step system in this book and this piece that I just described is a small part of those 10 steps. Professionals all around the world are using parts of this book to go into their next meeting to make it significantly better and you can too. If you’d like to check it out, go to meetingleadershipinc.com/book, and I also want to let that this episode of the Meeting Leadership Podcast is brought to you by the Meeting Leadership Academy. If you and your team really want to get it up to a nine or a 10 out of 10, then consider the live training options there, the online training options there.

05:63 – Meeting Leadership Academy – https://meetingleadershipinc.com/academy 

People are using them to build their leadership skills and learn how to run outstanding meetings. Visit meetingleadershipinc.com/academy to learn more. As always, thank you so much for listening and we’ll see you tomorrow on the Meeting Leadership Podcast.

06:17 – Podcast Outro

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.