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 – Start Here – Podcast content starts here!

Welcome to another episode of the Meeting Leadership Podcast. I just want to honestly say, thanks for being here, because if you’re here, you’re the type of professional who wants to up their leadership game. You know that you can do that by creating highly effective meetings and you know that this is the place to get the practical tips to help you learn how to do just that. Thank you so much for being here. 

00:50 – Strategy and Effective Meetings – Learn how to connect every meeting to your organization strategy

Now today we’re going to be dealing with what I’m going to call a cornerstone issue. This is a blockbuster, a game changer, whatever you want to call it, because today we’re going to talk about how your strategic plan can help you run effective meetings. Now, as many of you know, I’ve already started this idea back in episode two of the podcast and I’ll make sure you get a link in the show notes to go back and find that episode if you need it, but here’s why I’m bringing back this idea. Now, I believe that you should be able to stop any meeting at any moment and connect that moment directly to your strategy. I believe this so strongly, I always say it twice. I believe that you should be able to stop any meeting at any moment and connect that moment directly to your strategy. Now, in episode two, I talked about how to really get your vision statement ingrained in every meeting that you’re in, and today I want to give you sort of a different set of tools to think about, maybe, how you can use your strategic plan to deal with something like disrespect.

01:48 – Strategic Values – Learn how to use the values from you strategic plan to stop bad behaviour

Now, this comes up in meetings, sometimes people don’t get along. What’s one of the ways that you can deal with this? Well, you can actually go to your strategic plan and in many of them they’ll have a set of values about the way that your organization behaves. Now, often in those values, they’ll have literally the word, respect. Here’s how you can use that part of your strategic plan in your next meeting. At the beginning of your next meeting, say, “One of our core values from our strat plan is respect,” then you can have your meeting. At the end of the meeting, leave a little bit of time and take a moment to reflect on whether or not that meeting upheld that value. Now, if it did, it was a great meeting, and if it didn’t, this is your opportunity, because you’ll be able to say, “Hey, people weren’t getting along in this meeting. There was some moments where things got personal, and this kind of thing and that’s just not right because remember, it’s not the way that we do things in this organization.”

2:44 – Strategic Objectives – Learn how to use the key objectives from your strategic plan to improve meetings

Another way that you can use the strategic plan when you’re dealing with bad behavior in meetings is to check out your strategic objectives. Now, I’m going to guess one of them says something like, “We want to make this place the best place to work.” Now, imagine saying that at the beginning of your next meeting, having your meeting where the bad behavior is going on and then having a few minutes at the end of the meeting to say, “One of our core objectives for the entire organization is to actually make it the best place to work. That meeting that we just had, it definitely is not making it the best place to work. What are we going to do about it?” 

03:20 – Organizational Alignment – Use your strategic plan to make every meeting count!

Can you see how putting parts of your strategic plan into action in every meeting that you are in is going to be a way to not only bring alignment to the entire organization, but be away for you and your team to really get centered, to really get focused, to really make every second of every meeting count?

3:40 – Feedback Loop – Help your boss to understand whether or not the strategic plan is working

Another way that you can leverage this idea is that if you’ve had the meeting, you’ve brought the strat plan ideas into it and things aren’t working, you can feed that information back to the senior leaders who created the strategic plan. You can say, “You said you wanted it to be the best place to work, but I can clearly give you an example of why that’s not happening right now.” Then they can either adjust the plan and say, “Well, we actually wanted it to be a mediocre place to work,” or they can get engaged to give you the tools and the resources that you need to turn things around.

04:11 – Using Your Vision Statement – MLP 002: How To Connect Your Meetings To Your Strategy https://meetingleadershipinc.com/002

If you’d like to learn more about how your strategic plan can help you run effective meetings, you may want to refer to episode two of the Meeting Leadership Podcast, and you can get there by going to meetingleadershipinc.com/002

04:25 – Ground Rules – MLP 012: Ground Rules For Great Meetings –  https://meetingleadershipinc.com/012

and if you’re actually having conflict in your meetings, you may want to check out episode 12 of the podcast where I help you learn how to use ground rules to overcome that. You’ll get there by going to meetingleadershipinc.com/012.

4:37 – Meeting Leadership Academy – https://meetingleadershipinc.com/academy

Right now, I just want to let you know that this episode of the Meeting Leadership Podcast is brought to you by the Meeting Leadership Academy. One of the pieces in there that I am super proud of is the live training. So if you’re interested in getting the Meeting Leadership Workshop in for you and your team, go to meetingleadershipinc.com/academy to learn more.

04:58 – Shout Out! – Bert Roach – Economic Development Officer – Town of Beaumont

Of course, I always love getting great feedback, and if you send in feedback to the podcast, I will definitely read it out on air. Here’s a piece of feedback that I got from doing some professional facilitation work with the town of Beaumont. It’s from Bert Roche, the economic development officer, and he says this, “The Beaumont Chamber of Commerce is a young organization, but we have the benefit of having a number of experienced and talented board members. Gord was very helpful in getting this diverse group of individuals working together efficiently, effectively with purpose and some fun.” Thanks Bert and thanks to you for listening. We’ll see you tomorrow on the meeting leadership podcast. (singing).

5:36 – 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.