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In this episode Katie and Carol discuss Tips 8 and 9 from Skirt Strategies: 249 Success Tips for Women in Leadership. Hear some great ideas and discussion on how to have better and more productive meetings!
Tip #8. Set an example of always being punctual to meetings, as well as starting and ending your meetings on time.
Your goal in life – make people’s time count. Get there on time. It is a sign of respect as well as efficient time-management.
An observation about your start and end times. Have you ever noticed that when a meeting perpetually begins late, it becomes a meeting that rewards latecomers. And you know the rest of the story …
Tip #9. Respect others’ time by always having an agenda at meetings.
I have yet to conclude why a lack of an agenda is tolerated. So simple to fix. Perhaps there is a fear of writing a good agenda.
Here is your easy fix for the worst case: Coming to a meeting in which YOU were responsible for the agenda AND you have none. Begin with four statements or questions:
1 – “I want to spend 3 minutes sketching out the road map for the meeting today”.
2 – “What do we want to walk away with?” A plain way to get to the objectives.
3 – “What major elements will we need to talk about?”
4 – “How much time should that take?”
There will be a strong urge to discuss each topic. Resist. This should only be a discussion about how to map out the topic for agenda-creating, not discuss or problem-solve.
As a footnote, you can use these same four questions to prepare an agenda before your meeting.
Of note, if a rule about requiring an agenda becomes a standard, others will begin showing up and attending meetings more faithfully.
And yes, I have been guilty of throwing together an agenda. But it was better than none, so don’t over think it. In fact, here’s a link to a proven agenda template (PDF File). It covers all the bases. NICE!
All of the 249 Success Tips are in the book Skirt Strategies: 249 Success Tips for Women in Leadership and is available at Amazon Buy Now
PODCAST TRANSCRIPTION
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Hello and welcome to the Skirt Strategies podcast, the podcast to help you get the support, validation, and skills you need to accomplish your goals and really succeed in a male-dominated world, all without having to give up your incredible female strengths.
It’s another podcast of Skirt Strategies for women in leadership.
Katie: Skirt Strategies podcast – another installment.
Carol: Of Skirt Strategies the book, Tip Number 8.
Katie: I’m Katie.
Carol: And I’m Carol.
Katie: Bringing to you some tips as women in leadership. Tip Number 8.
Carol: Set an example of always being punctual to meetings as well as starting and ending your meetings on time.
Katie: This is a very straightforward tip. It’s not very interesting. All you have to do is go do it, which is why we are adding Number 9 onto this. So 8 and 9 in this episode –
Carol: Yes so 9 is respect other’s time by always having an agenda at meetings. So 8 and 9 really go together. It has to do with respecting other people’s time.
I don’t care if you are always late to your –
Katie: To your own meeting?
Carol: I don’t care if you are late when you get home. I think it is very, very important that if you have an appointment, you are on time.
Katie: Don’t you get a little edgy if you are running late?
Carol: I get horrified.
Katie: If somebody is waiting on me I don’t like it.
Carol: My father was a marine sergeant so we were on time always.
Katie: Did you also have your phones out on rings, so that they rang in the middle of a podcast?
Katie: Oh I threw you under the bus.
Carol: You just did.
Katie: I am so sorry. I think there’s a tip about that.
Katie: That’s entertaining. Don’t insult somebody in public.
Katie: We’re not in public. It’s just you and me in this room together.
Some of the tips in Skirt Strategies are more practical. Some of them are kind of lofty. Some of them are quirky. Some of them are, think about this. This is one of those practical ones.
Carol: Yes, professional.
Katie: Professional and practical. You may know it but maintaining it, sustaining, keep on doing it, sometimes you need to hear it and get it repeated. That’s what this is about.
Somebody counted up for me, you’ve probably seen this done before but let’s say you call a meeting of the managers in your organization or a team or it doesn’t matter, and there are ten people in a room for three hours. That’s 30 hours of man hours, or ten women hours because we are more effective. I’ll backtrack on that. That’s 30 people hours. That’s pretty expensive. And what if two or three of them didn’t need to be there? You’ve really wasted their time.
So when I do some bigger corporation stuff, Fortune 500 or bigger companies, it’s funny because a VP is seen as walking on water or we’re waiting for the president to come into the meeting and they are just revered like, “Oh my God.”
Well for some reason their schedule, and usually they have an admin that keeps them on time very nicely, but I’ve been in meetings before where they were a whole bunch of top level managers waiting for this VP to come in and sometimes we’ll get a massage that says, “Jim is running late. He won’t be here for another half an hour.” Now everyone is sitting there for half an hour.
So Jim’s half an hour is costing ten VP’s around the room, however that’s an exaggeration, but ten VPs around the room at whatever astronomical rate they are paid, why is his half an hour more important?
So I’m just complaining a little bit.
Carol: We have some public officials that are consistently late and it’s not fair to hold everybody up because you think you are so important.
Katie: I do understand that people have crazy schedules and I have had people in very high level say, “You have no idea what my day is like.” I understand, but I also know those people have a lot of help. Some of them have 2 admins. Once you get up in a big company at a big level, you have a lot of people helping you and you have a lot of people you can delegate to.
Carol: So at the least, have somebody call and say, “I’m sorry. I’m not going to make it on time and is there somebody else that can go on before me to prep the audience or whatever.” I just think no matter how big you are you need to make your schedule.
And I have to tell everybody that I called you today at 20 minutes until we were going to meet and I said, “Oh my God, I am running late. I’ve got a conference call scheduled and I am not going to make it on time.” But I did try to give you some time to – do as I say, not as I do.
Katie: It happens.
Carol: It does happen. I think the least you can do is make that call, give somebody else the heads up, “I’m not going to make it.” It gives you a little more time to do whatever you are doing, sit at your desk and not have to rush to meet me.
Katie: It’s a good reminder that using an invite in a calendar is a great little tool. I have an appointment tomorrow morning with somebody on our advisory board, Gene Block, wonderful women, and she and I are meeting for coffee and we did that over email. I’m just hoping that she put it on her calendar. I know I have it on my calendar. I should have just sent, one of the two of us, should have initiated a meeting request. The problem is, I don’t know what her technology habits are so I don’t even know if she knows how to use that. My guess is she does.
Carol: She’s pretty savvy about that, and some people aren’t. What I have come to do now is if I’m on phone with somebody and I’m not necessary in front of a computer, I will ask them if I think they are in front of a computer to sent me an invite or if we are going back and forth about a time, I will say, “2 o’clock on Friday works for me. Send me an invite if it works for you.” That way we don’t go back that extra time and we don’t get it in a schedule.
So I’m getting to the point where I start asking people to send me calendar invites.
Katie: Then you know they can do it and you can receive it.
Carol: And if they can’t, I totally understand that but if they can, it gets us both on the same page and we don’t have to think about it again.
Katie: If you have an iPhone, and you don’t use Siri, I have to tell you it is so easy. If you are one of those people that is listening on an iPhone and you are intimidated by all the options on it, you can hold down that home button for like 3 seconds until you hear this, ding-ding bell and all you have to say is, “Siri, send me a reminder for tomorrow morning at 9 a.m. to call Gene about coffee.” And she understands it.
Carol: Interesting because she doesn’t understand a freaking thing I say.
Katie: It’s you.
Katie: Let’s talk about agenda. That’s a Greek word and the pleural is agenda. Remember I’m cum laude.
Carol: I’ll never forget now.
Katie: Never. Agendas don’t have to be, this will sound counter intuitive, agendas don’t have to be well thought out too much.
Now this is coming from Katie who is the expert at shortcuts, right?
When I was first doing a whole lot of facilitating with my friends at the Cumberland Group, we’d have classes that we were doing in front of groups and I had a high level of anxiety because I didn’t have a lot of content on the tip of my tongue and I had to stay up at night, the night before and work on, what comes after that, I really had to study.
I don’t have to do that so much anymore because I have so much of it in my head, but when I first had to do that, it was a little bit nerve wracking. And then you are a little nervous about am I going to do it the right way and so for the period of time I had a lot of that.
Then there was a short period of time where business was slow for a couple of months and then I started getting anxiety about getting back into the classroom. So a nightmare that I had the night before getting back into the classroom was that, kind of like the showing up in your underwear thing, but I showed up in a classroom with 20 people, nobody had any books, nobody knew what the topic was, and my facilitation partner was my little sister who has hardly worked a day in her life.
So there is the ultimate anxiety. In my dream I resolved it by turning to the group and saying, “Here’s our first exercise. I’d like you all to work in some small groups and determine what you think the agenda is.”
Carol: Interesting.
Katie: It was brilliant, right? My philosophy as a leader of a group taking them through anything is, the answer is almost always with the group. When you are a leader and you’ve got folks reporting to you, if you are in a quandary, they can almost always maybe not give you the right idea, but they’ll give you ideas for how to move things forward.
So agendas can be the same thing. I will spend, if I end up being in a meeting for some reason and we don’t have an agenda, the group will appreciate listening to, “Does anyone know what we want to get accomplished today?”
So spend a couple of minutes asking yourself, what do we want to walk away with? What major elements do we need to talk about? And how much time should we take?
There will be times when you are in charge of something, a project, if you don’t know that answer ahead of time you really can’t do that until you get in front of the group, just do those three or four questions, and next thing you know, you’ve got something that everybody agrees to. Then you go into the process of the meeting.
Carol: Nice. I like it. I like the simplicity of putting an agenda together with the people in the room. What are our major outcomes? What do we want our outcome to be for this meeting?
And then you’ve got their input. They are not just participating in your agenda. They are participating in their agenda.
Katie: Yes and as we say in the book, in the description of the tip, there is a feeling when you start talking about, “What do we want to talk about today?” The group will start to try to talk about that so these three questions and a setup, well actually it’s four questions.
I want to spend three minutes sketching out the road map for the minute today. That’s a statement not a question. Then the three questions, what do we want to walk away with? What are the major elements we need to talk about? And how much time should we take?
When they start giving you answers to any of those, they will want to start to talk it –
Carol: They will want to go back up to two, when you are talking about four.
Katie: Or they will want to talk about the actual content of the meeting of that.
Carol: So keep them on track with the agenda.
Katie: Yes, how might you say it? How would you say that if you were facilitating a group?
Carol: I would say, “We want to get into that and we want to do that soon, but right now let’s figure out this agenda and then let’s get back to that. Let’s put that in the parking lot.”
Katie: “Hold off on that, not yet. Shut up. Quit blabbing. Listen to me.” Whatever your style of facilitation is.
Carol: So an agenda is important and have one if it is your meeting. If somebody else doesn’t have one, especially if you want to show them up, say, “I notice there is no agenda in this meeting. What are we going to be here for? What do we want to walk away with?”
Katie: I would say only an imbecile would not have an agenda at this point.
Katie: I don’t think we have this as a tip in our book but there’s something I call meeting movers. I have had it as a tip at better leadership. It might be on a blog somewhere but I call these statements meeting movers. I learned them from my friend Tim. Kasey, that’s your husband, my friend Tim who was always such a great process thinker and would be the one person in the room that would bring the group back to focus, so a meeting mover question sounds like – anybody in the room can say this by the way, assuming that you feel comfortable speaking with the group, “Where do we want to go with this?” That’s a meeting mover.
“How much time do we want to spend on this specific thing?” That’s a meeting mover but it’s also a structural focus. Let’s get a process for how much time we want to spend.
Carol: Right, because you could go on forever and if you have a time specific, everybody can respect it.
Katie: And then some people are very good at this and if you are good at this and you think it but you don’t say it, which is part of your intuition model, part of your style, consider saying it. If you are good at observing groups and summarizing what’s happening in your head, say it out loud. Have you ever heard somebody around a table say, “It sounds to me like we have three different ideas for making this project happen.” So that is a summarizing statement of what they’ve heard.
Carol: I always love the person in the room that does that because it wraps it up. “Okay I’m hearing three different things and it’s kind of a theme and here they are and where do we go from here?” Fabulous, love to hear that.
Katie: If you have any hesitation you can always bring it up as a question like, “Does it sound to everyone else like we’ve drilled down the same thing over and over again?” Dead horse.
Carol: Does it sound like we are beating a dead horse?
Katie: Does anyone else smell a dead horse or is it just me?
Carol: The other thing – a facilitator that I have been working with lately, she has a brilliant statement and it is, “If there are no major objections can we move on?” You would really have to have a major objection to stop, right?
Katie: You could even say, “Since there are no major objections. . .” That would be the type A personality.
Carol: But if there are no major objections, or does anybody have a major objection about this? And you are like, “Well not major. Mine is minor.” I guess not. She really moves things through by saying that so it’s kind of fun.
Katie: What if you are sitting in a meeting and you are not in charge and ladies, don’t think of yourself as a wall flower, ever. What if you are sitting in a meeting and you feel like your role is maybe secondary, you are a support function or you are just there to listen and take notes, could you say, “If there are no major objections does anybody think we should move forward?” Could you do that in a secondary role or does it look a bit boisterous?
Carol: I never see myself in a secondary role.
Katie: That’s good.
Carol: There are probably some times I should. I will always say what I think in a meeting. And a lot of times what I’m doing is maybe not summarizing for groups of thought processes or themes that are going on out there, but a lot of times I’m asking the questions that people are afraid to ask because they think it sounds stupid and I don’t want to sound like I’m the stupid one in the group, but I see somebody head cocked to the side and they are like “I don’t quite understand that.”
And so I want to clarify for them. If I’m questioning at all I want to make sure that they are clear and that everybody else in the room is clear and usually the question is a good question because everybody is, “I’m so glad you asked that.”
Katie: Yes, completely. Well if you are good at reading body language, which many women are, you know this is a great – we have talked about the intuition model a couple of times in the podcast, in the last one and in this one.
A reminder for those of you that want to focus more on what your leadership style is, we don’t have like a Myers-Briggs style but we have more of what we call the women’s intuition model, how do you interact with others? How do you sense things and are you a situation person or are you a people person? And our online assessment, Assessmyskills.com is a quick rundown of where you might be on that visual.
Carol: On that women’s intuition scale.
Katie: On the scale so of the 16 natural female leadership traits that we identify as or on the forefront, you just do a quick one through five, where you are on it, and it will – there are a bunch of little people that are behind your screen making the formula and then they create an output for you and so you have a little report on where you are.
Carol: Yes and we will be getting to those 16 traits in one of our tips coming up very soon.
Katie: After this station identification. Anything else about agenda? I have worked with companies where it’s a ground rule or I don’t think they’d make it an official policy but they may make it an informal policy, you always have to have an agenda.
Carol: Nice.
Katie: I would almost say how much time you want to spend is the most important thing. What would you say was the most important thing on an agenda?
Carol: Well the interesting thing is people will fill the time that you have given them. So if you have a meeting from 9 to 11, and you only have an hour’s worth of work, you will still fill that extra hour.
And it’s unfortunate. What I say is everybody loves the person who gets them out early. So don’t schedule, over-schedule your meeting but if you can get people out early, if the conversation or the meeting is over, let it be over. Dismiss folks so that they can go and get to other things.
Katie: Let it be over.
Carol: Let it be done.
Katie: Then go listen to what’s being talked about in the hallway because that’s where the real meeting goes on.
Carol: Well really, a lot of times, after you turn off the conference call, you hang up on everybody then the room has an extra little meeting because you are not under the pressure of the agenda.
Katie: Have you ever looked at the dynamics of that? Is that why? Is it because you are not under the pressure of the agenda?
Carol: I this so because the people who can stay then can relax and stay, those people that have to go can go. So –
Katie: What are they adding to the conversation after the meeting is over? Is it stuff they should have said during the meeting?
Carol: Not really. I think it’s more gossip. And golf and how was your ski weekend? You get to know people. It’s the relationships that happen.
Katie: How is your bladder infection? Sorry. I had to say that. I was thinking about what are four things, when we were talking about public speaking in the last tip, I mean it could be anything. You could write four things that I think are great for preventing a bladder infection. Am I off track?
Carol: You are a little off track.
Katie: So this was a test. What do you do when someone is off track in a meeting?
Carol: You bring them back.
Katie: How?
Carol: You say, “If there are no major objections, we are moving on.” No, how do you bring people back?
Katie: I do that. If it’s a team and someone is kind of going on, or I might go stand behind them, depending on how we are seated. I might go stand behind them and kind of put my hand on their shoulder and often that works for a side conversation by the way, very well. Just having me stand there behind them will make them stop. That’s all it takes. Or I’ll stop the group.
If somebody is off topic, I might give them a signal. In team training or in high performance groups I do give them non-verbals to give to one another.
Here is one. Here is another. I am not doing anything.
Carol: She is not. We both know it’s a podcast and you can’t really do that but wrap up – the wrap up signal is pretty much the same. Just take your finger and twist it in the noose.
Katie: The noose works. I actually have a symbol for a dead horse. So if you were to take your left hand and right hand and put them in peace signs, facing each other, and then touching each other it looks like a dead horse. That works real well.
When groups start using it, someone that might be hesitant to say, “Does anybody feel like we are off tar get?” might be comfortable doing a nonverbal because it’s just a quick action.
The other one is peace sign that looks like two little bunny ears, so I curl them just a little bit, then they bounce along like little bunny foo-foo that is going down a rabbit trail. If we are off track –
Carol: I love it and we are teaching non-verbals on a podcast.
Katie: Nobody has ever done that before. That’s why we really break barriers at Skirt Strategies.
Carol: We do. All right. Enough of that. We have talked about being punctual. We have talked about respecting others time.
Katie: That’s another meeting mover, by the way – enough of that.
Carol: We have talked about respecting other’s time so we are respecting your time and ending this podcast.
Katie: We are ending it.
Carol: Love you.
(Music plays)
That’s it for this episode of the Skirt Strategies podcast. Thank you for joining us and please be sure to leave a question or comment at Skirtstrategies.com. Remember that success comes when you lead using your natural female strengths.
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