FULL TRANSCRIPT

00:00 – Show Opening

Are you a professional who wants to become a more affective 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, and thanks for taking the time to make an investment in yourself by listening to this podcast, because you know that when you come here, you’re going to get another leadership skill. You’re going to pick up another tip, or a strategy to learn how to run an outstanding meeting, and you’re going to apply that almost immediately to get great results. It’s really, really good to have you here.

00:54 – For leaders who value educating their employees

If you are the type of leader who really appreciates the value of getting education for their people, then you’re going to get a lot out of today’s episode, because today we’re going to talk about why Meeting Leadership Training is an investment, and let me kick this off by asking a few key questions. 

01:07 – A few key questions

Here’s the first one, does your organization invest in its people? Do you say that you invest in people, but then, you don’t actually follow through? How would your company benefit if your team meeting leader was also an excellent facilitator? The final question that I really think is worth asking is, if you sent that team meeting leader for facilitation training, would you consider that a cost, or an investment?

Let me give you a large company example where they didn’t make an investment in a manager, and it cost a lot of time, and money. Now, I actually work as a professional facilitator sometimes in crisis situations. I was brought into a team setting in a large organization, and what had happened was the manager had kind of, they say, “Lost the plot.” They had really lost the respect of their team, and they were in a situation where they had to bring in an outsider like me to come in, and try, and mitigate the situation to get the dialogue started again in this kind of thing.

01:44 – How well are you supporting your employees?

But, if you go back to the root of where this crisis started, I think we have to look squarely at the manager themselves, and how well the company supported them to be the best that they could be, and given the feedback that I gathered from both sides, because that’s what I do in the facilitation work. You listen to the folks that are kind of disgruntled as the employees, and then, you hear the managers side as well. I heard all those typical communication problems that started a long, long time ago, and because they hadn’t invested enough earlier on to make that manager kind of the best leader, and meeting leader they could be, now we were at this crisis point.

02:33 – The cost of not investing in training leaders

What was the cost of this crisis point? Well, they had to pay me to come in. They had to get all the senior leaders to gather, and have lots and lots of meetings to figure all these different things out. They had disgruntled employees who were definitely not as productive as they could be, so the actual entire workflow was slowed down, and so, it is easy to estimate that, because this manager had not been trained about how to handle this group, this exercise now was costing thousands, tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars in so many different ways to lose, and where they had to spend in that kind of thing.

03:17 – A cautionary tale – Losing the trust of your team

Let me give you another example of a manager who was not properly trained. I can really speak to this, because it is my own story. Now, I’ve been running my own business for many, many years now, and I’m really excited to do it, and it’s great to be able to be the outsider in the room, but I can tell you a lot of my work is based on my own experience in a large corporate setting where I was actually running a team. Now, there was a moment in that time in the corporate setting when I was an employee, and when I was an employee, I died to be a manager. I wished I could be a manager until I became a manager, and had to actually experience the reality of what that was. I got this nice sort of title boost going from employee to manager, and then, suddenly I was running a team of nine people. Now, I can tell you earlier on from a meetings perspective what used to really bug me when I was a member on that team, as an employee, well, it was the weekly staff updates meeting. I felt it was a waste of time, I judged it, I didn’t like the way, there was no agenda. I mean, it just drove me crazy. Now, for better or for worse, that’s what I thought about it, and I don’t mean to say, put anything on the people that actually ran it the way that they did. But, when I got a chance to manage that meeting, and the first time I actually did it, I went in there, and guess how long that meeting lasted? It was nine minutes long. I thought I was being so efficient. I went to each person. I was like, “What are you doing, and what are you doing, and what are you doing next?” And then, I walked out the door. I patted myself on the back, and I thought I’d done a great job. Well, that is an example of how to lose the trust of your team for months, and months, and months. I didn’t have meeting leadership training, I didn’t know what to do, I simply was kind of drunk on having a new title, and thinking, “Well, now I’m gonna do it my way.”

04:58 – Investing in training can save money in the short and long term

It was a disaster, and as I honestly reflect, and learn from that story, it’s easy to say that a few hundred dollars of training would have really helped me to build the self awareness that I need, would have helped me to build a plan to take people through the transition as I became the new leader, and this is something that so many people going through a title change have to face when suddenly they are at the front of the room. Another really low cost solution that could have been applied in that situation would have been to assign a meeting mentor.

05:20 – Assigning a meeting mentor

Now, so many people understand one on one mentorship, but what I advocate for is having a mentor assigned to meetings, especially those where someone has undergone a title change. 

05:44 – MLP 09: How A Meeting Mentor Can Improve Your Leadership Skills – https://meetingleadershipinc.com/9

The basic premise of meeting mentorship is to get somebody assigned to a meeting team to make sure that the meetings run really smoothly, and if you’d like to learn more about this concept, then just check out episode nine on the Meeting Leadership Podcast. It’s called How a Meeting Mentor Can Improve Your Leadership Skills, and you can get that by going to meetingleadershipinc.com/nine.

06:00 – Why meeting leadership training is an investment and not a cost

After hearing those stories, and thinking about the ones that you’ve either experienced directly, or observed, isn’t it easy to see why meeting leadership training is an investment, and not a cost? Because, if you can ensure that every facilitator of every meeting in your organization is working at the highest possible level, you know that productivity is going to go way up, and productivity improvements are definitely worth a real dollar investment, because you know that, that will lead to overall profitability.

06:30 – Meeting Leadership Academy – https://meetingleadershipinc.com/academy

Speaking of ways to improve productivity, I want to let you know that this episode of the Meeting Leadership Podcast is brought to you by the Meeting Leadership Academy. There you’re going to find great live training options, and online training options to help anyone on your team build their leadership skills, and learn how to run outstanding meetings, and you can learn all about it by visiting meetingleadershipinc.com/academy. As always, thank you so much for listening, and we’ll see you tomorrow on the Meeting Leadership Podcast.

07:01 – 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.