FULL TRANSCRIPT

Gordon Sheppard Speaking

00:27 – Welcome to the Meeting Leadership Podcast. My name is Gordon Sheppard. I’m absolutely so glad that you are here. Because if you are, it means that you are a professional who wants to make a difference. You’re a professional who wants to take their leadership skills up to the next level. You want to do it in a practical way. You don’t want to mess around with reading too much and that kind of thing. And if you’re here for this podcast, it’s absolutely what you’re going to get. Because in this podcast, we help professionals improve their leadership skills by giving them the practical tips and the strategies they need to help them run highly effective meetings.

01:04 Because think about it, you can’t be a leader without getting into a meeting situation. Doesn’t matter if you’re at work, in a volunteer setting or you’re at home, if you want to lead, you’re going to be in a situation where people need to follow. And the best way to do that that I know how is to help people have outstanding meetings.

01:22 The other great thing, we’re going to do all this in just five minutes a day because we know you’re busy, so you’ll get one tip, two tips, put it into action and really that day or the next day, you’re going to be improving yourself as a leader. The teams that you lead will feel significantly more satisfied because they’ll know how active you’re being about things. And I’ve seen the results. I’ve seen people come to my workshops, they attend the sessions that I give at conferences. The light bulbs are going off, they’re going back and they’re getting things done.

01:51 Now in this first episode, let me tell you a little bit about myself and why I started the podcast and really kind of who it’s for. I’m Gordon Sheppard. I’m the president of Meeting Leadership Inc. and I am dedicated to helping people just like you learn how to become better leaders by learning how to run outstanding meetings. If you want to go to learn more about me, you can go to meetingleadershipinc.com and there you’re going to find out about the 25 years I’ve been in business and all the different clients from all the different sectors that I’ve dealt with over this time. But the piece I like to pull out in a short moment is the reality that overall, that time I figure I’ve either run or participated in more than 2,000 meetings.

02:32 Now when I say that at conferences, half the room, they gasp. They’re like oh, I can’t believe it. Then there are some people in there, they start to add it up in their head because they’ve never done it before and they are outpacing me by literally thousands of meetings. There’s some folks out there, 3,000, 4,000 meetings and it’s just so many. So why are we allowing them to be so bad, especially from a leadership perspective?

02:57 Because the problems, they’re common. There’s someone who talks too much, somebody’s late, somebody didn’t prepare the agenda, it goes on and on, the list of problems, but somehow we’re being complicit in allowing these meeting problems to continue. Well, that stops here, it stops with this podcast. It stops with you taking the things that you learn in this podcast and putting them into action.

03:22 Because we don’t need more passive aggressive behavior. We don’t need you to get in a bad meeting and then go home at night like I used to do and complain about the meeting that you were just in. It’s easier to fix the meeting than it is to go home at night and complain to your spouse, your dog, your parents, whoever it is that listens to you. It’s not a good use of your time.

03:41 Let’s find the ways to make them better and find the ways to then ultimately have a better meeting that impacts your organization, and ultimately from that, has a significantly positive effect on the end user, your customer, your client, your community. That’s where we’re headed. That’s the vision for this podcast, to get the tools in your hand to help you to do just that.

04:03 Because here’s the reality. According to businessinsider.com there’s more than $37 billion lost every year in the United States alone due to unproductive meetings. Now, if we extrapolate that for the global economy, it could be $1 trillion being lost every year around the world for bad meetings. And in $100 trillion global economy, well, imagine that 1% of everything that we do is a bad meeting. Well, not any more because you’re here right now. You’re going to get the things to take a few bucks back and I really look forward to seeing you tomorrow in the Meeting Leadership Podcast.