Lessons

Lesson Info

Agendas

Let me start with, in the handout that you have, but I'll walk through this in the slide behind me. One of my favorite meeting acronyms, it's SALT. And what I always remember is when I learned to cook I was told often, don't forget to add the salt. So that's where this came from. The words down that left hand side or as I'm thinking through this process of thinking about attending or leading a meeting. The acronym SALT, it stands for summary of the meeting, the agenda of what we're gonna talk about, maybe even the time that we're going to talk about those things, what logistics need to be, or need to have been handled, and the actual time of the meeting itself. I will give one of my favorite tactics for those us who work in a more corporate world where we have to coordinate schedule or be invited to meetings. Most meetings on this side of corporate that I've been in, they always wanna start them on the hour and end them on the hour. I've seen this over and over again in my life. I'll g...

et a meeting invite via email, "Hey Jason can we get together?" "We'd like to meet you from nine to 10 in the morning" "two to three in the afternoon." Let me share one and I'm gonna come back to this as one of our checklist tools later in the course, but I'll give you one early in the process. The next five meetings that you plan, that you are in charge of, the next five that you're in charge of start 'em on the and end 'em on the zero. Just five. Not the ones you get invited you to, because they invited you to the nine to or the two to three, but the ones that you invite other people to? Here's the experiment. Just five. We're gonna meet from 9:15 a.m. to 10 in the morning. We're gonna meet from 2:15 p.m. to 3 in the afternoon. Now I've been doing this for more than a decade and I've got two quick stories that I can tell. Number one, most meetings that we actually scheduled a full hour for, we didn't need the whole hour. Most meetings. Now the problem is if I get down to it. If we start a meeting and we're in the 35th or 45th minute, if we still have until the top of the hour most people just keep talking. So when I compressed it to the back three quarters, 9:15 a.m. to 10 a.m. or 2:15 p.m. to 3 p.m. The other thing is two learnings about this, the other one is don't start this on the zero to end on the 45. It won't work, at least it hasn't for me. So that's one that I wanted to give out of the gate just because the last one here. So, let me share an example of SALT for this course. And I'm gonna read this because I wrote it for this course so that you could see exactly how this works. Summary, to provide specific tactics to attend participate in as well as lead, manage, facilitate effective meetings and conversations with people that you work and live with. So when CreativeLive called and asked, "Jason would you put together a class" "on leading and attending effective meetings?" I had to do, add the salt. The first thing I did was build the summary. If I have this much time, what is it that I wanna do? And what I hope you're seeing about this is the summary statement, that starts to filter what I do and don't teach. And by the way, this is my symbol for filter. This is my symbol for hashtag. So those are the differences that you'll see through the course today. As far as the agenda. Well, I had to think back to myself and I had to wonder. Okay, if I had a certain amount of time with a group of people in studio and online what would I want to make sure to cover throughout that period of time that I've got? Well, I'd want to take a look at, and I'll just read the bold words so that you can get a sense of this. Define, learn, identify, discuss, review slash build. So again, I'm looking at this as the constraints so that I can be free. And this is something that I teach quite a bit that once I have a border, or once I know the rules of the game, now I can push against that border. I think sometimes people look at borders or rules as constraints in amongst themselves. Here's what I know. The moment I know what game we're playing, now I can get creative about how to win. And speaking of winning, I've got to know whatever meeting that I'm stepping into, what are the logistics of that discussion, conversation or meeting? Because I've mentioned a few times that a meeting is anytime two or more people come together and one or more person walks away from a, from that conversation with a task, well that means that you could be in line at the coffee shop and a colleague comes over and says, "Hey, did you get that?" "Did you do that?" "Are we gonna?" It also means that I could be, get up from my desk, walk down the hallway, see a manager, a colleague, an intern and have a quick conversation. So in this case the logistics that I knew about for the CreativeLive session on leading and attending effective meetings, was we were gonna have an in studio and online audience. And by the way, just as a quick aside, if anybody wants to add a layer of complexity and stress to their life, teach something to 12 people who are in front of you and the world who's out in front of you and know that it's gonna be recorded and served up again. All those logistics needed to go into the planning that I had, the filtering that I did. Because, in 90 minutes, in about an hour and a half, there's only so much we can do. And so one quick take away for you, the next time you get invited to a meeting, the next time you send a meeting invite, the next time you sit down across from a roommate or a partner or your spouse, a child, a friend, a coach, a mentor. If you have a block of time, the logistics allow, what would you want to bring to the conversation and where is that direction going? Do you see how I went in reverse right there? If I have 15 minutes with someone I may choose a different place, agenda, and focus of the conversation than if I had an hour and 15 minutes with somebody. Meetings in context. In the old, again you'll hear me talk a lot about this idea of casting out to future you. If you have the opportunity to open up your notebook, some of you who take notes in meetings, if you have a notebook or a whiteboard that you're in front of right now, I even think there's some of you who are watching this course live in a conference room with your colleagues at work or church or school. Welcome. For those of you here today, if you have a piece of paper or a journal entry, write down today's date 12 months from today. And in specific context to this idea about meetings, conversations, and discussions, I invite you to ask yourself 12 months from today, what will they have been meeting, discussing, and talking about? They, my clients. They, my vendors. They, my family. They, the people I live and work and love with. Because if I can get on board with what they're meeting and talking about now I can contribute. Or I can walk away. If the people around me are looking at their future of their company, of their organization, of their team, of their product and I know they're having conversations and I want to be a part of those, I'll do anything I can to enter myself into those. I've been known over the years when I start working with a new client, whether that's at a large organization or an individual entrepreneur or founder, one of the things I do early in the process. Well, there's two things. One, I get invited into their office. 'Cause if I can get invited into your office, I'm gonna look around. I'm gonna see what book you're reading, what magazine you're subscribed to, and what the last website was that you visited. And next thing I'm gonna get you to do is I'm gonna get you to complain. If I can get you to complain, I know how to serve. If I can get you to complain, I know what information to bring, what product to recommend, what course that you can take. So if I can get someone to tell me what's going wrong, where they're off course, where they're not achieving what they think they should be able to achieve. Now we have the context to bring in the content. So this is something that I'm gonna encourage you to do, is to think to yourself looking out into the future what do you think the people around you will have been meeting about, talking about or thinking about? And so what I'd like to do right now is we're gonna do a in studio process. I'm gonna ask you to turn to the person sitting next to ya and we're gonna do this in groups of two. So this is gonna be um, actually this is gonna be totally easy. We're totally gonna figure this out. So those of you watching online, I've got odd seats around, so bear with me for one moment. Let me give you the prompt. What I'm gonna ask you to do is turn to the person sitting next to ya. We're gonna go in groups of two. And what I want you to do between the two of you, is I want you to share one thing that you believe the people that you serve, the people that you want to be more engaged with, what they are they gonna be thinking about, talking about, and if you can, meeting about? Can I give you a quick example? Is that okay if I do this? So I know for me, there's a client that I serve the United States Air Force. And I know over the next 12 months they're gonna be talking about distributed education a little bit more. How do we get information from one Air Force base to go to other Air Force bases? So for me, if I know that they're gonna be talking about distributing education across base to base to base that'd be something that if I want to follow that stream, that I may want to get invited to a meeting for, that I may want to contribute some of our research towards. So it's kind of a two fold activity. One you get to talk to the person sitting next ya and go, "Wow, what are you interested in?" "What are you workin' on?" And what is going on in your world that you can just off the cuff share with the person sitting next to ya. So, um, I'm gonna look at the studio. What I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna pair you up. So that way I think this'll be the fastest. The only thing that I'm gonna do is I'm gonna have you two corner up together, alright? So for those of you watching live what I'd ask you to do, if you're watching this in tandem with someone have this quick conversation. We're gonna go for 60 seconds. So I'll be right back. For those of you in studio, we'll do the real quick pair up. The question, what will they have met about and discussed 12 months from now? So pick the they and share the topic. I'll be back in about one minute, we'll see how this goes. (gentle murmuring) And for those of you who are watching online if you want to do this in your journal, it's a great exercise for you to start to think about, to your self, the people you serve, the product you're building, the whatever it is you're working on, the people who are involved in that, what might they be talking about, meeting about, and discussing? Alrighty, CreativeLive. Come on back. Obviously, if you liked that exercise you can thank your partner. Or quickly turn away. (laughing) Whatever works the easiest for you. So again, I'll do this every time. But for those of you online, watch what happens. Quick show of hands. How many of you turned and talked to someone that you'd never talked to in your life before? Keep doing that. For those of you online, if you can share what it is you're working on with someone who you haven't met yet you at least have the opportunity. Now when I think about this, what will they have met and talked about. What will they have discussed over the next 12 months? I can then start to put myself in a position of service.