by John J. Walters

I ran across the best PowerPoint presentation I have ever seen today about the evil among us that is known as PowerPoint.  This is a bit of a curiosity.  While others are content to make lists such as “Top 10 Reasons Your Presentation Sucks!” (there are actually two of these on the same site, each with their own helpful hints on how to stop the suckage), this man boldly made a PowerPoint presentation that illustrates his point: that most PowerPoint presentations are horrible.

Here is the link to the presentation, which was prepared by Alexei Kapterev four years ago.  I highly suggest flipping through it.  If nothing else, it’s a good work-time diversion and a break from the monotony.  But take a moment to appreciate that — a PowerPoint presentation that you actually want to see?  Now there is a rare thing.

Of course, I’ve seen some pretty interesting PowerPoint presentations.  Usually they’re the ones that people make as parodies of real presentations and then upload them to YouTube with funny voices and inappropriate pictures.  Yet this one is a real presentation, with real information.  Moreover, it’s 61 slides long, and yet you can breeze through it in five minutes and still learn a thing or two.  Truly, a rare thing indeed.

I’d like to point out a couple things that make Kapterev’s presentation so exemplary:

• It reads very quickly.
• It has plenty of information.
• It breaks this info up so you’re not reading one slide for very long.
• It works on its own but obviously could be supplemented by a good speaker.
• It introduces, explains, and then reiterates its main points to reinforce them.
• It is scalable, meaning it can be read through in five minutes or expanded.
• It makes good use of imagery to keep you interested but the focus is on the text.
• It doesn’t use any gimmicky transitions or sound effects to distract from the message.

I’m not a huge fan of PowerPoint, but I do recognize it has a place in the corporate world as the standard method for conveying information to a room full of professionals.  The trick is not to let this become a crutch so that you don’t have to work on making your presentation worthwhile.  It should, instead, be used as a supplement to your talk — a way to keep the audience interested and to illustrate the information that you are sharing.

If you want, you can even “supplement the supplement” with a handout that includes both the slides and your speaker notes so that people will have something to use as a reference later on.  But be careful: if you can’t think of a good reason why they would want to reference your presentation after it’s over, perhaps you should be taking everything back to the drawing board.  After all, your meeting will still be a waste of time if you didn’t have a good reason for calling it, no matter how well you prepared.

by John J. Walters

I’ve been writing a lot of posts about how to make meetings the best they can be for meeting organizers.  But what about those unfortunate souls who get dragged into boring meetings from which there is no escape?  How do you keep yourself from screaming?  Often, we zone out, but the problem with that is it runs the risk of us zoning out so completely that we fall asleep.

So I did a quick Google search for “staying awake during meetings” and found a few short articles full of hints and tips to keep your mind from snoozing away during your next boring business meeting.  Most of them gave a bunch of simple tricks you can do to keep yourself awake that I’m sure we all figured out when we were in college.  Several of them recommended pretending to have to go to the bathroom so you have an excuse to leave the room.

Two articles stood out from the rest.  One because it was such a towering example of a bad idea that I feel like I just have to pass it along so that you too will be tempted the next time you get dragged into a corporate crap-fest.  The other because it actually gave some very helpful hints on what you should do to not only get through the meeting but to stand out from the rest of the herd at work and get noticed by your boss.

I’ll start with the silly one.  In a nutshell, it gives simple rules for how to play a game that basically amounts to “corporate-speak bingo.”  Not only would this be a terrible idea that might get you fired, it also requires a small amount of prep-work that workers would presumably do instead of actually preparing for the meeting.  I do have to give it some credit, though: it’s clever, creative, and if you actually find yourself in a meeting where people are talking like this then I feel deeply sorry for you.

On to the good one.  This one has a couple generic hints and tips but also advises workers to do such unconventional things as prepare in advance, take careful notes, and participate.  It advises that the best way to get through a boring meeting is to do everything you can to make it meaningful, productive, and worthwhile.  Imagine that!

Of course, these tips won’t always work.  Sometimes you’re tired or you get dragged into a meeting at the last minute that has nothing to do with you.  In that case, maybe trying out a few of those tips and tricks might be a good idea (because it’s never a good idea to sack out).  But if you’re frustrated with the kind of meetings that your company keeps having, make every attempt to get involved to make them better.  If your higher-ups don’t want to encourage that sort of thing, then maybe it’s time to start looking for a career elsewhere…

by John J. Walters

I was surprised to discover recently that a Google search for the best time to schedule a meeting came up with only one helpful post suggesting a productive time and the rest of the hits were mostly just how-to posts from the various meeting organizer programs out there with nothing to offer on when people are most alert.  So I set out to fix that.

What is the best time to schedule a meeting?  When are people ready to be productive?  I stumbled across a BBC News article about a “simple formula for staying awake” (you do want people to stay awake during your meetings, right?) that I thought might give me some indication of the time most people are alert, but it lacked a real explanation of how to apply the formula.  Apparently the key to staying awake is — you guessed it — getting enough sleep.  In fact, the British Sleep Society has concluded that, “If people are tired during the day then they are not getting enough sleep.”  Shocker.

Another study suggests that the time that people, on average, are most alert is early evening (between 6 and 7 pm).  This is because humans used to spend their evening time “securing the hearth for a safe night’s sleep.”  I’m never one to discredit evolutionary conditioning, but it would seem to me that the evening is a less-than-optimal time to schedule a meeting, as most people have already gone home for the day by then.  The study’s second choice, dawn, is an even less likely time to find your coworkers at the office — unless you’re a farmer, perhaps.

The American Time Use Survey provides an excellent (and interactive) way to look at how most Americans spend each day.  If the graph is to be believed, the most likely time to find your co-workers at the office is between 9 am and 3 pm, so logically the best time to schedule a work meeting is somewhere between these hours (although when attempting to schedule a non-work meeting you should clearly look at other times, such as the early evening).

If you schedule the meeting well enough in advance and do all the necessary prep-work (preparation is very important) then you’re already “semi-there.”  People generally have no problem arranging their schedules around a meeting that they know is important and will be relevant to their work.  But what about when you don’t have enough time to schedule something a week in advance?

I guess you could always take the WikiAnswers route and shoot for 2 pm on a Wednesday, as this is a nice midpoint in the week after people have returned from lunch and before they’re checking out for the day.  Or you could let your attendees do some deciding and make use of a helpful program that allows you to propose times and take a vote of when everyone invited will be available — like MeetingCaptain.

by John J. Walters

I started thinking about phone interviews today because I saw one of my Facebook buddies posted that he had accidentally scheduled two of them for this afternoon.  Then I started thinking about how phone interviews are pretty much no different from conference calls, except there often won’t be too many other people listening.  So if phone interviews are similar to conference calls then it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump to liken them to meetings in general.  And you know what that means, right?  It means I get to write about them — as if I know what I’m talking about!

As a matter of fact, I do know what I’m talking about.  I’m no stranger to the phone interview.  I’ve been conducting them semi-regularly for the past year for various projects for Wasabi Ventures and have also had to do quite a few for my other employer, The Maryland Public Policy Institute.  In fact, nearly a quarter of my job consists of calling folks and talking to them about this or that.  So I figured I’d share a little bit of what I’ve learned over the past year about phone interviews.

First of all, in answer to my own question: no, I don’t wear a tie to a phone interview.  But I do make a point to try and be as professional as possible when I conduct one.  In fact, I try to make sure that I’m at least presentable whenever I sit at my desk and work, even though I work from home.  This helps create a clearer divide between my work and home life.  If a tie helped me do that, I’d wear one.  It’s about feeling comfortable, but also like you’re “at work.”  Ties kinda lost that feeling for me when I had to wear one every single day in high school.

Phone interviews have become pretty normal to me, but I can remember how I felt about them before they became my bread and butter.  Until I became comfortable, I had to make it a point to make sure that I was in a familiar location and that I knew I was well-prepared.  This meant reviewing notes or articles about the subject beforehand while listening to relaxing music.  I would make a point of being in my office with the door closed at least ten minutes before the interview was scheduled just to focus.

Knowing your material is also very important.  I would review for my interviews starting a day ahead of time and then again a little bit beforehand just to make sure I remembered what I was looking at earlier (just like a test at school).  If you’re asking the questions your job is a little easier, but you still need to prepare or else it’s easy to get lost and ask a whole lot of useless questions that don’t pertain to the topic at hand.  Having been on both sides several times I would say both can be a challenge, and it certainly helps to do some rehearsing on your own.

Of course, none of these are hard and fast rules.  I’ve also conducted interviews in my car in a Wal-Mart parking lot with my laptop on my knees (although that was more out of necessity than choice).  But the keys to successfully getting your point across are preparation and relaxation.  You would do the same if you were walking into an office and speaking with someone in person, so don’t forget to take the phone interview just as seriously.  Take advantage of whatever helps you do that, be it a tie or a security blanket.

Also, keep in mind that what works for conversations between two people can also work in larger groups.  These same recommendations go equally for conference calls.

by John J. Walters

Alright, we’re back from our little “hiatus” promoting the site’s beta launch.  Now it’s back to the real content.  I had promised a second post about effective communication last week, and it’s time to deliver on that promise.

We have all heard that good communication starts with attentive listening.  That idea is practically a cliché at this point, but just because it’s a cliché doesn’t mean it isn’t true.  As Shakespeare once said, I’m sure, “It doth taketh two to tango.”  Even the most effective orator will have a hard time getting his message across if his listeners aren’t paying attention.

I gave a very brief rundown on a few ways to listen more effectively, as well as why you should care enough to do so.  So you already have some stuff to practice in your daily life, both at home and at work.  We are asked to spend a lot of time every day listening, and this doesn’t decrease with rank.  When we become bosses and managers we’ll be asked to listen to endless reports and summaries of the company’s activities, and our ability to retain and process that information is what will determine our success.

The trick is, we won’t ever get to be the boss if we can’t communicate to others that we know what we’re talking about.  As with the deceptively simple skill of listening, communicating is highly nuanced and subtle art.  I say “communication” instead of “speaking” as we are asked to communicate in a variety of different ways these days, each with its own set of complications.

There is some disagreement about the exact percentage, but I think the general consensus is that communication is only 15% about the words we choose.  The rest is elsewhere — in our tone, our pacing, our body language, or the context of the conversation.  This gives us a good amount to consider before we even open our mouths.  Sadly, we often don’t.

TechRepublic has a nice article by Steven A. Watson about how to maximize managerial success with good communication practices.  The best part is by far the example story he tells, in which a new employee enthusiastically begins laying the groundwork for a revised LAN setup.  When support lags and disappears entirely she is both surprised and frustrated.  Then she realizes that she forgot to get to know the team and their thoughts, experiences, and needs before implementation.

That’s where listening comes in — but once you’ve got your listening skills down, you need to be able to show others that you understand and that you can help.  Enter the “Four C’s of Communication” as explained by Isabelle Albanese.  In a nutshell, these involve making sure your audience trusts you, understands you, has common ground with you, and remembers your message after you’re finished.

Each of these things is extremely valuable in a business setting: Trust, understanding, camaraderie, and being remembered.  Since meetings are often the place where the most communication goes on in a business, effective communication becomes exceedingly important during meetings.  Honing your listening and your communication skills could be your ticket to increased productivity — or even the corner office.

by John J. Walters

I was wracking my brain trying to think of something to write about that was at least partially meeting related while listening to music (as I usually do while I work) when it hit me — what is it you’re asked to do for the majority of nearly every meeting?  Listen!

I’ve always admired the people I’ve met that possess the skill of listening more than they speak.  It is certainly not something that I do very often, although I really wish it was.  When I speak I give my opinion, my advice, or my reaction to something.  I am rarely surprised at what comes out of my mouth, and I rarely ever learn anything.  When I listen, however, I never know what I am going to hear.  So long as I am “tuned to the right station,” anything is possible.

A quick Google search for “listening” will pull up a ton of articles on the subject.  I grabbed three from the first page at random and read through them quickly to see what they had to offer, which I will summarize briefly here.

The first article was written by Larry Alan Nading, PhD.  Its value is in its simplicity, and in the broad number of topics that it covers.  The most important lesson to learn from it is about the three basic listening modes.  There’s competitive (where we’re only waiting for our turn to speak), passive (where we listen but do not participate) and active (where we listen and then seek to understand completely through verification).  Simply being aware of what type of listening you are employing in a given situation will often make you a better listener.  The article is a good introduction to the art of listening, if you’ve never really given it any thought.

The second and third articles focus primarily on active listening skills, which is helpful as long as you truly understand what active listening is.  Active listening is more than just carrying on a conversation.  One article summarizes it quite nicely as “being able to repeat back in your own words what they [the speaker] have said to their satisfaction.”  The words are theirs but the emphasis is mine.  When someone talks they are (hopefully) talking for a reason.  If you can’t summarize that reason back to them immediately after listening, then you’re not listening effectively.

Both articles contain some very helpful hints and tips to improve your listening skills.  I highly recommend reading them, especially the one on MindTools.com as it is the most career oriented.  But improving your listening skills doesn’t have to be all about being a more effective meeting participant.  I’m sure your friends and your spouse or significant other would appreciate a little more active listening from you as well.

by John J. Walters

Last week I shared with you my secret for making everyone else shut up and listen to one person at a time.  But what about when you need to make one person shut up and listen while everyone else talks?

This became very important to me when I was working on my first book, which was a team effort of six authors in total.  Each of us wrote two chapters and we would meet once a week to discuss our progress.

Getting people to shut up when their work is being criticized is a difficult thing.  While we may think that responding to each individual critique with a well-reasoned explanation of our intent would be helpful to the discussion, really all we’re doing is defending our work and making the whole process take forever.  And it’s not like well get to sit there as everyone in the world reads our book, pointing out to them what we “meant to say there.”

Because we wanted to discuss everyone’s work each week and we didn’t want to be there all night, we instituted the Infamous Egg-Timer Rule.  This one is pretty much as simple a concept as the Talking Stick.  You give each person a certain amount of time.  Say, 15 minutes.  You allow them to make some introductory remarks about what they think the conversation should focus on that evening,and then they must open up the floor to everyone else and keep their mouth shut until the timer goes off.   Simple as that.

This works quite well for creative work; I would imagine it would work just as well for other things.  It’s amazing how much can actually get done when you eliminate people’s ability to defend their efforts (no matter how much room there may be for improvement) and force them to listen, even for 15 minutes at a time.

by John J. Walters

I’ve been talking a lot about technology in my posts these past two weeks; when to use it and when not to use it.  This week, I thought I would take things back to the first post I wrote six weeks ago on the history of meetings.  There are things that we can learn from ancient cultures that will help us out today, and I’m not just talking about weird medicinal herbs or mystical potions here.

I can’t even remember the first time I heard about “the talking stick” but I think it was from one my elementary school teachers.  If I remembered more specifically, I would name names, because whoever invented it was a genius and whoever told me about it was a saint.  I would love to give credit where credit is due, but both are too far in the past for me, its creator lost to history and its professor lost to other memories.

The general idea of the talking stick is to encourage listening as well as talking — something that any experienced meeting attendee knows can be a difficult thing indeed.  The concept is simple.  At every meeting you have a stick.  It can be a large, ceremonial staff with intricate carvings or something as simple as a paper cup turned upside down with a smiley face drawn on it in magic marker.  The only requirements are that it must be visible, and easy to pass around.

When you hold the stick, you can speak.  When you don’t hold the stick, you listen.  If you want to hold the stick, you raise your hand.  It’s as simple and elegant as that, although you can introduce all kinds of other twists on it.  Below are a couple examples from my own experience:

• The stick can only be passed to the right (or left).  No skipping is allowed so everyone must contribute.
• There is a time limit to holding the stick (I recommend using an egg timer, as it is often very difficult for people to self-regulate when they’re speaking).
• To hold the stick you have to answer a specific question or weigh in on a particular issue before saying anything else.
• To hold the stick you must remove an article of clothing (not actually recommended for business meetings).

You can take this idea and run with it.  You can even claim that you invented it (although some people might have learned about it back in elementary school and call you out).  I’ve used this for meetings and even during family dinners.  It can be adapted to any situation that you think needs more listening and less interrupting.  Good luck.

by John J. Walters

The past two weeks I’ve talked about how meetings generally suck, and that most people who are there would rather be anywhere else.  A quick search of the web will show that there are indeed other people who think meetings suck — and are talking about it!

One of them is Sue Pelletier, whose list of her top ten reasons to bolt from a meeting was the focus of last week’s post.  This week’s seed article is a very well written piece by Craig Borysowich about the importance of keeping your eyes on the prize when it comes to meetings.

It’s no secret that one of the keys to a good meeting is having an agenda so everyone starts off at the same point and on the right foot.  The quality of feedback will vary greatly between a meeting where everyone sits down prepared and one where nobody knows what the topic is until they see the first power point slide.

Can you imagine asking a teacher to waltz into a classroom and teach a class on a topic of your choice without any preparation whatsoever?  They might be able to pull it off if all the conditions are right.  Perhaps they have a good grasp of the chosen subject, or maybe they’ve been to a particularly informative seminar on a similar topic.  But the odds that they’ll stumble around and generally confuse the students are much greater the less preparation you allow them.

Holding a meeting without an agenda, or even with a brief or vague agenda, is kind of like that, except there are multiple teachers in the room.  Everyone is expected to both inform and be informed; participation is mandatory.  There are often large costs (in terms of lost productivity) associated with everyone leaving the meeting and going off on their own to relearn everything they were supposed to learn during the meeting, if this is even possible.

Yes, the stakes are high, but luckily one of the best ways to mitigate the risk that everyone will leave the room saying, “Well that was a complete waste of my life,” is also quite simple.

When planning a meeting, write down everything you want to get accomplished.  Send this list out to all attendees and ask for their input.  Revise this into a solid agenda for the meeting and send it out a few days prior so everyone can show up prepared.  If you can’t do all this, then maybe it’s time to rethink why you’re scheduling the meeting in the first place.

In a nutshell: plan meetings with the agenda right from the start.  Get input, listen to it, and start the process early enough so there are no surprises.

I know this sounds like it may take a bit more time and preparation than your standard meetings, but maybe that’s why standard meetings tend to suck so much.

by John J. Walters

I think it was Charles Dickens who observed that rich folks (back in “the day”) would pay good money to buy and maintain a horse and buggy to ride for pleasure, while they would turn up their noses at a delivery job that required them to drive one every day (and would pay them to do it).

In the same way, employees everywhere complain about meetings, and yet when we all go out to happy hour after work, what exactly is it that we all talk about?  You guessed it — work!  Sure, there might be a good amount of gossip in there too, but the fact is that it’s hard to escape talking about something that you spend so much time focused on.

The key difference here, besides the alcohol, is that there are no rules governing happy hour.  We’re all free to stay as long as we please, and most of us choose to stay longer than the average meeting.  The interesting thing to note is that we could all rush home to do whatever it is we were daydreaming about all day.  But we choose to stay, and (often) to talk about work.

Yes, there is a certain natural resistance to attending meetings, just as there is a certain natural draw to happy hour.  Most likely, this is because everyone has attended more than their fair share of ineffective and inefficient meetings, and so they assume that this will be the case with all meetings.  So, when you’re scheduling a meeting, always remember that people don’t want to be there.

Sue Pelletier of meetingsnet.com even went so far as to create a top-10 list of the best ways to drive her from a meeting, and I have to say that I agree with all of them (and could probably add a few to the list).  As a service to you, the reader who probably doesn’t click hyperlinks, I have condensed the list into a brief list that I call…

The Ten Commandments of Meetings

• Thou shalt not run a meeting entirely from PowerPoint.
• Thou shalt not keep attendees sitting in a dark, uncomfortable room for too long.
• Thou shalt not use too much jargon and too many clever acronyms.
• Thou shalt not impart useful information without leaving time for it to sink in.
• Thou shalt not be too serious all the time.
• Thou shalt not completely ignore the agenda once a meeting begins.
• Thou shalt not hold the meeting in a room nobody can find.
• Thou shalt not open with a completely unrelated keynote speaker.
• Thou shalt not be rude to others in attendance.
• Thou shalt not encourage cliques among your attendees.

I can’t guarantee that following these rules will get you into “meeting heaven” but they do provide a decent jumping off point.  If you can think back to some of the worst meetings you’ve ever attended — the ones you really wanted to leave early — I’ll bet they violated at least one of these commandments.