Guest Post: Anirudh Bhargava

Anirudh is one of Chris' Summer 2011 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon. Here he writes about real-world presentations and entertaining your audience.

John, an undergrad student in computer science school decided to prepare a 50-slide presentation, fill it up with as much content as he could to impress his audience, and show how much research he had done. On the day of presentation he slogged through his presentation, could not complete the presentation in the given time, and worst of all, a few people left the room in middle of presentation. What went wrong?

The most important thing people forget now and then is that the presentation is mainly about the people who came to listen to the presentation and not about the presenter. That’s right: Know your Audience! If you think about it, the audience just looks for benefits from the presentation. So, it is better to focus the presentation around the people by talking about features that make them feel like this is time worth spending. As stated by Chris Labash, renowned professor at Carnegie Mellon University, remember three simple P’s to build a striking presentation -

Prepare for your presentation well. To begin with, know your objective of the presentation. If possible, define why, who, how, when and where. This will help you define your point of view, and then you may complete your research on the topic. Make sure you document the final point of your research, the benefits from the study, and the other supporting facts or experience.

Produce – Start building your presentation. If you are using PowerPoint, make sure you use as few meaningful slides as possible. Think of it this way: you are delivering the idea to the people in 30 seconds per slide. However, this time could vary depending on your content. To make your presentation more interesting, you can add some supporting facts you gathered while preparing or any personal experience. Finally, conclude the presentation with action for your audience. This will help the audience to understand motive of your presentation.

Present with energy and enthusiasm. Show your passion towards the subject and let the audience feel the importance of it. There are several styles of presenting information – Educate, Entertain, or Explain. Depending on the type of your audience, you want to pick appropriate style. You may use handouts, whiteboard, or any audio or video aids to help you present your work. Your focus must be to engage the people, and so you must have proper eye contact with your audience. Avoid common errors such as reading the presentation or looking anywhere else but the audience. Finally, relax, smile and have fun!

Now, you are all set for an excellent presentation. Good Luck!

Guest Post: Rosstin Murphy

Rosstin is one of Chris' Summer 2011 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon. Here he writes about his personal experience with real-world presentation.

KICK-STARTING YOUR FIRST TEFL CLASSROOM

Serving in the Peace Corps means that you're thrust into a new environment where you have to learn a completely new skill set to survive. When I joined up, I became an English teacher at the Guiyang College of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Teaching TEFL in a foreign country had many hurdles: huge class sizes, wide gaps between student skill levels, and student shyness all made it difficult to grab students' attention and get them speaking English. My students were used to a teaching style that emphasized teacher presentation: they expected to be entertained and educated by silently observing me.

I knew that trying to engage 100 students at once, one at a time, was suicide. I also knew that I didn't want to spend 2 years on stage with everyone staring at me with their huge, innocent, owl-eyes. My first hurdle was to establish new classroom norms that encouraged students to become the main speakers.

After being eaten alive the first semester, I turned to the advice of a more experienced TEFL teacher, my friend Patrick Sansbury. He told me that the way to handle a classroom was through activities: "Model activities yourself, and then hand the mantle back to the students. Rather than presenting a lesson, present an activity to the students and engage them in that activity. Then have the students present the activity back to each other. As long as you, the teacher, are talking, you're losing."

I started the new semester with a redesigned curriculum. I opened the new class by walking in and shouting "I am BEAUTIFUL!" I got the whole class to say it with me. Then I addressed them to fill in the blank of this simple sentence with a positive adjective: "I am (adj) ." Each student's job was to stand up and shout their statement as loud as they could. As each student stood to shout their slogan, I looked them in the eyes and smiled. This simple activity was quick and set a great tone for our first class: positive, self-affirming, interactive.

My next task was to establish the TEFL classroom as an interactive forum rather than a presentation. For our first group activity, I pulled out a fistful of photocopied hundred-dollar bills. Adopting a debonair demeanor, I fanned myself and asked my students, "Why should I give you this money?" I was immediately met with a torrent of replies. After modeling the activity, I handed out a stack of bills to each group. It was a simple game: whoever had the money in hand by the end of the activity was the de facto winner. If you ever wanted to see a hundred students cajoling, begging, and lying to each other in a foreign language, that was the day. This type of competitive activity got students talking to each other and kept them talking: whoever lacked the money would continue trying to get it. By designing discussion activities with conflicting objectives, I was able to raise the interest level and pull myself out of the picture. Then, as the teacher, I was free to spend quality time engaging the individual groups in conversation.

Obviously, there were many future hurdles in that semester and the semesters to come. But with this strong, interactive start, I won the class over and created the good environment for a TEFL class. Each first class is the beginning of a long relationship, and first impressions count big.

Guest Post: Kelvin U. Mbatu

Kelvin is one of Chris' Summer 2011 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon. Here he writes about virtual communication.

Virtual communication technology refers to any means of interacting with others in virtual reality or cyberspace brought about by computer-mediated communication (CMC).

In our society today, technology has globalized the communication process by making interacting with others more accessible; we can now communicate with a friend or co-worker in another country or continent cheaply and instantaneously, too. We can earn a college degree or take continuous learning classes over the internet with the click of a few buttons. The proliferation of information and communication tools, like e-mail, instant messaging and Internet telephony has revolutionized the way we work and live.

Virtual communication has brought about a myriad of new opportunities and challenges. There has been an increase in communication flow and knowledge sharing, businesses have evolved new strategies for communication and marketing, huge savings have been made on travel cost and time, etc. However, one problem that virtual communication is faced with is how to incorporate nonverbal communication?

Nonverbal communication, such as facial expressions and hand gestures, plays an important role in effective communication and relationship building. In face-to-face communication, we generally tend to search for signals when verbal messages are unclear or ambiguous. This important element of validating understanding is taken away in most virtual communication. Virtual communications tools such instant messengers have attempted to solve this problem by incorporating smiley faces (such as the :) smiley face) and some other new "texting language" as some individuals call it; however, it does lack the emotion of a face to face interaction with someone.

Today, virtual communication skills are being taught in several organizations as virtual communications tools - e-mail, social networks, and instant messengers – are increasing in capacity and global acceptance.

References:
Effective Virtual Communication, eHow.com
Virtual Communications

Guest Post: Brenda Lee Johnston

Brenda is one of Chris' Summer 2011 Professional Speaking students. Here she blogs about real-world presentations.

Please prepare a presentation on…

You’ve been invited to present…

Speak in front of others.

These words strike fear in the hearts of millions of people around the world. And yet preparing and delivering a presentation is something most people do at least once in their lifetime. More often it’s done several times throughout a lifetime and yet many quiver each time at the idea of standing in front of a room (hopefully) full of people.

Countless books have been written on the subject. Consultants get paid lots of money to help clients practice and prepare. Therapies have been designed to cure people of their fear of public speaking (for example: www.social-anxiety.com). Countless “tips” have been provided across generations from “picture your audience in their underwear” to “look over their heads at the back wall.” Truthfully, though, the best way to help a person deliver his/her presentation is practice. Practice by yourself, in front of your mirror. Practice in front of friends and family. Record yourself and study the recording. These are really, in my own humble opinion, the best ways to prepare and give an excellent presentation.

Yes, there are people who believe they do better “ winging it.” I personally have experience in improvisational acting, and thought I did better “making it up on the spot”. But truthfully, I always forgot something I wanted to say when I did this. The Boy Scouts have it right—Be Prepared.

Whether you decide you want to have notes with you or not, write down what you’re going to say. Don’t write it verbatim; rather, outline your plans for your speech. I believe the statistic is that writing something once is equivalent to seeing it 10 times. Writing creates stickiness. The better something sticks, the better your presentation will be because it’s “in you.”

So the next time you have to present to a group of people, give yourself plenty of time. Write what you want to say. Practice what you’re going to say. Revise it. Practice it again. Repeat as necessary. Oh! And my own personal tip: think through your presentation two times before you fall asleep the night before. I’ve always had better performances (theatre and dance) and presentations when I did this. Then the morning of the big show, just visualize how it’s going to go, take a few relaxing breaths and voila, you’ll be great! And you won't spend a dime, unless you decide to buy a video camera.

Guest Post: Eshwar Narayan

Eshwar is one of Chris' Summer 2011 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon. Here he writes about getting the job you want.

Interviewing is one of the most difficult things everyone faces in their life. Interviews are not given daily and hence most of the people face difficulties in preparing for an interview. If you give interviews daily, you will master the skill of giving a very good interview. But interviews happen only intermittently. Once you are settled into a job, you hardly will think of any interviews.

What I’m going to do now is put summarize the things essential for preparing for an interview.

What is an interview? The answer is simple. It is the inner view of you. What are you from inside? For any person to know you, it takes days, weeks and months. But you need to accomplish this in a span of 1-2 hours in an interview.

Remember the basic concept – What’s in it for the interviewer to interview you spending his precious time? Try to know:
What they are looking for in you? Every employer needs a candidate to be active, energetic, have good communication skills, and fit into the organization culture. Try to gather their requirements and try to achieve them and in turn you will achieve your goals.

Why are you here?
There are some basic things that you already have and hence they have called you for an interview. The most basic is that you are good at something that the company works on (like technical skills). It is taken for granted that you know it well. The next core skills they look at are leadership skills and how good are you at networking. As you go to the upper layers of the core values – they look at whether your goals match with the organization’s goals, and how good are your communication skills.

What can you do for us?
How much value can you add to the organization? A person who is hiring you wants to utilize you to increase the revenue of the company or decrease the cost of production or wants to increase the productivity of the company. Try to prove that you can achieve and you will surely impress the interviewer.

What kind of person are you?
Any organization wants to hire people whose goals and ambitions match with the organization goals. This is an obvious fact. It’s a win-win situation for both the organization and the employee. So you need to see if you fit into their organization goals and culture.

What makes you different?
There are thousands of people applying for the same job. If you want to get recognized among the crowd, you need to have some bullet points to showcase yourself that keep you apart from the herd. Try to think differently and give a broader picture about your experiences.

Can we afford you?
Be prepared to give a range of salary you are expecting. You can just tell them that, according to the current market for a person with so many years of experience on this particular domain the market salary range in between X and Y. So you would like to be placed in that range.

Prepare yourself for an interview –

1. Do a research about the company – Find out the facts like who founded the company, what business line are they working on, what are their stock prices, etc. Find out about the culture of the company. Prepare answers that are in sync with the culture of the company. Never try to give practice interviews at any company. Always give 110% at any interview.
2. Resume – The most important part of the interview process. This is like the trailer of a movie. You have very limited time and space to tell about yourself to the company. So keep it small and crisp but use lot of keywords that have a powerful effect on anyone in no time. Always carry multiple copies of your resume along with you to an interview.
3. Interview – Always keep in mind that you will perform better when you start thinking of an interview as a conversation with any other person. This will reduce your stress levels and you will be yourself. Since it is a conversation, there should be questions from each side. So don’t think that you need to wait for the end to ask your questions. You can ask questions about the company in between. By doing so you show your interest towards the company.
4. Before the Day of Interview – Always relax, rehearse and get a good night’s sleep the day before interview.
5. Be Early to the Interviews – Always try to be early to the interviews. 15 minutes early is best way. If you are too early, try to spend some time at the nearby coffee shop and then head to the company.
6. Politeness Rule – always be polite to all the people you meet in the company floor. Your interview is not over until you step out of the office premises.
7. Introduction – Go for a firm handshake with good eye contact. This is a first impression you are making. Get dressed well in formals and have positive body language. Introduce yourself and tell about your hobbies and your passion toward one thing you like.
8. Stories – Always try to build a story of what you are telling to the interviewer. This will keep the interviewer interested in you. Get the interviewer engaged in the conversation.
9. Wrap-up – Wait for the interviewer to end the session and then get up and say goodbye. Don’t be the first one to end any interview.
10. Post interview email – Always send an email; this is one more opportunity to express yourself in a proper way. You can give better answers to some of the questions that you were not able to excel at in the interview and send a thank you note. A paper letter will have more weight than an email.

Guest Post: Junyong Suh

Junyong is one of Chris' Summer 2011 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon's Heinz College. Here he writes about communicating on the job.

I cannot imagine even a single day without communication in my life. No matter what you do, you have to communicate with others, especially if you’re in your work place. Almost everyone agrees that communication plays a huge part in work but most of them also agree that they’ve seen someone just talk but never communicate. What is their problem? Why don’t they listen to others and repeat their opinions? But the thing is, you could be such person to them and the most important thing is we can’t avoid them in our work places. We still need to talk and to work with these types of people.

When I think of difficult conversations, I recall my terrible experience in my previous work place that I had such person as my boss. He was the classic example of a difficult person who doesn’t listen but talks in a way he likes—and I was the only one working on his team. I was having a hard time and I realized that I was not the only one who thought he was difficult. I found other colleagues even from other departments knew him as a difficult person and even a janitor told me about him. So to speak, he was notorious.

During the year-and-half I worked with him, I summarized what my boss said right after any meeting or talking and sent it to him to confirm. If I didn’t, he would say something else later and blame me. I had to keep those reports simple and direct, not to make my boss complain about wasting his time reading them. I also had to include every point that might be misunderstood. Although he complained most of the time that I didn’t get it at once, I could get what he wanted at the end. Based on the reports, I got through the time until he moved to another department.

After that time, I had two bosses and they both pointed out that my reports were very good for preventing miscommunication. I feel good that I acquired a good skill but at the same time I feel some irony that I learned how to communicate with my bosses from the notorious difficult person. I paid a year-and-half of harsh time to get this communication skill.

Guest Post: Anup Shete

Anup is one of Chris' Summer 2011 Professional Speaking students. Here he blogs about virtual communication.

Virtual communication is the process of meeting in virtual reality. There are basically two types of virtual communication processes. One is synchronous communication which includes video conferencing, phone and chat. In this type, all parties involved interact and respond immediately (or at the same time). The other type of virtual communication is asynchronous communication. This includes email, forums, blogs, etc. Here the response can be delayed (or is not expected at all). Virtual communication is catching up very fast in today’s hectic world as people find less time to travel and prefer meeting or staying in touch online and getting things done faster. However, virtual communication does come with its set of pros and cons. We’ll concentrate on active communication viz. synchronous communication in the professional scenario.

One of the best things about synchronous communication is that it saves you the time of having to physically travel to the location to meet the person. You can interact with multiple people through video conferencing and phone while cutting down on traveling time and cost. Multi-country meetings are possible without even leaving the office. I have personally had most of my client meetings as teleconference or video-conference calls. This gives you the ability to interact with the client immediately every time you have a query or need to discuss something in general. For personal interactions, applications like Skype make it easy for one to see one's family and talk to them at the same time.

Although virtual communication has its benefits, there are some downsides to communicating without being physically present. The most important one is that there is no face-to-face interaction, which can be daunting for some people. We miss out on subtle non-verbal cues like facial expressions, body language, etc., when we meet in the virtual space. As part of a study done for the Cornell Daily Sun, Christine Duffy of the Maritz travel company and Mary Beth McEuen from the Maritz institute found that virtual communication is less effective than face to face meeting (http://cornellsun.co/node/44228). The study mentions facial expressions and body language as critical factors in the process of communication which are missing in virtual interactions.

I remember an instance from one of our client meetings. It was a teleconference call between two teams, one in India and the other in the United States. Since everyone was connecting virtually, they preferred joining in from their homes. Most of the people involved in the conference thought they could multi-task and manage something else while on the call. In the end, it was complete chaos. People were trying to interact with each other while the other person was doing something else. Although a virtual meeting was the best option in this case, the idea of the meeting became casual once everyone realized it was not face to face.

On a more personal note, I agree with the study mentioned above that face-to-face meetings are more personal as well as effective. Meeting someone in person automatically straightens you up and makes you pay attention. However, there are some instances when it is not possible to be present physically, and that’s when virtual meetings come in handy. Especially with globalization, the need to interact with people from all over the world has increased, and it is definitely cheaper and more convenient to interact virtually despite its drawbacks.

Guest Post: Syenny (Wen-Hsien) Lee

Syenny is one of Chris' Summer 2011 Professional Speaking students at Heinz College, Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Here she blogs about getting the job you want.

Have you found the company you want to work for? Congratulations if you have! If not, don’t be dismayed. Here are a few steps to find the kinds of companies you’d want to work for.

Step 1: Know who you are. Ask yourself these questions, “What are the things that I am passionate about?” “Do I like to work in an A/C office with a computer or do I like to be outdoors and meeting different people?” “Are there ways to turn those into business opportunities?” If you are not sure about what your passion is, start eliminating some jobs or industries by asking, “What are the things that I definitely won’t enjoy doing?” Make a list and see if there are any correlations to it.

Step 2: Make a list of companies. Once you have an idea of which industries you are interested in, you can research for the most well-known companies/organizations in those industries. Research thoroughly on the companies: Fact, culture, story. The goal is to find the best fit. According to the article “What Kind of Company Do You Want to Work For?” by Joyce Gioia, Herman Group, here is a list of questions to ask yourself to find out the makeup and styles of a specific company you want to work for:

• Do you want to work for a market leader or a start-up?
• Do you want to work for a company with solid name recognition?
• Do you want to work in a large organization or a small one?
• Do you want to know where the company has been, and where it is headed?
• Is the quality of a company’s goods and services a deciding factor?

Step 3: Find job openings through different media, channels and connections.
Here are some tools I use to obtain job opening information:

• Social media: LinkedIn. Join an alumni group of your school and you will receive job posting emails regularly.
• Personal relationships: Go to networking events; network through colleagues who know someone else who can connect you to a potential employer; talk to alumni who are working in your targeted industry; engage with guest speakers whom you identify with and are in your dream field.
• School resources: Career service provides counseling and email job openings updates very often; pay attention to those emails and follow with ones that interest you. Don’t delete the emails, keep an archive. You may find it useful one day.
• Conferences/Exhibitions: Attend big conferences in the industry you are interested in. Besides taking the lessons provided at the conference, also attend social events such as business luncheons and dinner events. You will meet people with similar backgrounds who are already in the industry. This is a chance to build a professional network. I have been to the American Association of Museums Annual Conference (AAM) and met so many museum professionals and exchanged thoughts and experiences with them. They are great resources for future references.

Step 4: A few reminders on interviewing

• Be early. I always arrive 30 minutes to 10 minutes early. Once I interviewed an applicant who was late, which immediately left me with a bad impression.
• Bring work samples and projects (or anything that can demonstrate your skills tangibly) to show and tell (especially if your job is related to marketing).
• Ask questions. I always ask questions, to gain information I don’t know and to show the interviewer that I am serious about this job.
• Smile, be confident. Have a positive attitude. People like to be with happy people.
  

Be honest to your heart. Be prepared, and relax!

Guest Post: Madhusudan Srinivasa Raghavan

Madhusudan is one of Chris' Summer 2011 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon. Here he writes about the power of virtual communication.

It was summer 2010 when our management team at my previous organization was conducting a post mortem on an executive review meeting that ended with the client walking out of the room. The meeting feedback portal had a lot of suggestions for improvement and a plethora of things to address. However, one item that stood out as an important area of concern was the fact that our presentation was poorly structured as it never conveyed what it had for the customer. It was a moment of reckoning for us as we realized the power of virtual communication.

More often than not, most presenters fail to impress the audience primarily because of the fact that the audience never understands what is in it for them until the end of the presentation. While it is important that the presenter conveys his point of view, it is also vital that the presentation must be oriented towards the audience and must have some take-away for the listeners.

A sound structure is pretty important as the flow of the speaker would keep the audience engaged through the course of the presentation. The presentation must have an interesting introduction, good details backed with facts and a powerful conclusion. The attention span of the listeners does not remain constant throughout the lecture and hence adding stories will always help the cause as it is bound to capture the audience’s imagination.

The logistics available must be fully utilized based on need. While details are an integral part of the presentation, it is a given that the presenter is at the focal point and not the slide deck. Hence, having content that are visual and creative will help the audience relate to things better than when conveyed through slides that are too verbose or complicated. Also, too much focus on the slide deck would mean that the presenter loses out on eye contact with the audience during the process of reading through the slides. The presentation must focus on conveying the message and slide decks would just aid the speaker in the process, while the limelight is on the presenter.

It is inevitable that there will be logistical glitches that might disrupt the flow of the presentation. The wit and the presence of mind of the presenter must come into play to engage the audience with humor. The presenters could avoid such logistical interruptions by reaching the venue ahead of time and conducting a dry run with the equipment that would be used for the final presentation. This implicitly means that the presenter needs be there ahead of time to the presentation. Reaching the venue late would not only mean gaining a bad first impression, but also would create a sense of panic which might upset the morale of the presenter.

Last but not the least, any form of communication in an organizational context must result in action. Most presentations fail miserably as the audience go out of the room with the “SO-WHAT” question. As a presenter, it is very important that enough time is spent on preparation to address the need of the presentation. The success of any presentation can be attributed to the fact that audience had a clear message in it, in terms of what was the situation or detail and what is the take away and, most importantly, what would be the next steps. This, according to me, would be the most challenging part to the presenter as he/she needs to keep in mind that the presentation leads to action.

Guest Post: Hemant Mohan

Hemant is one of Chris' Summer 2011 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon's Heinz College. Here he writes about getting the job you want.

The job market is like a box full of chocolates. Jobs are available in all sorts of flavors and sizes. The trick is to pick the one job that best suits your palate. Finding the right company that fits your bill requires introspection. Know what it is you want to do. Recognizing your talents and skills is important, so that you can understand the way you can make a career out of them. Once you clear this stage, you start researching companies that do business, which require a workforce with your skills and talents. More often than not, your skills and talents are the areas of work that would interest you the most.

To find the kinds of companies you’d want to work for, it is important that you connect with present and ex-employees of such prospective companies. They are the best resources to give you an idea of the working environment of a company. Understand if the company’s culture fits your own personality. Ask such questions as, do I enjoy dressing up in formal business attire everyday or am I comfortable in going to work in casuals? Do I like to be bossed around or am I more of an independent worker? What are the employee benefits? What is the company’s vision and mission statement? It is very important that you fit with the prospective company’s culture else down the line you might be reading this article again!

Making the right connections with present or ex-employees within a company of your choice might land you a job interview through employee referrals. Posting your resume on the career services websites or on the prospective company’s website is also recommended. Make sure that your resume clearly draws a connection between your previous work experience or education and the job requirement that you want to interview for. The more focused you are in your job search, the more likely you are to find a job that matches your career and life goals.

Guest Post: Jayesh Nachnani

Jayesh is one of Chris' Summer 2011 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon University. In this post, he writes about getting the job you want.

There are two fundamental questions one needs to ask oneself before looking for a job. These are:

What kind of role is he/she looking for? and

Which companies best suit his/her requirements?

Finding companies and roles first requires that we find out more about ourselves. Knowing what we are looking for is often not a straight forward question and requires some amount of soul searching on our part. For example, working for a small start-up in California is very different from working for a huge bank in New York. People also prefer different types of roles and companies at different times in their career. Once we have analyzed our preferences (along with our strengths and weaknesses) it is time to look for companies and roles that match these.

An excellent way to research what qualifications and responsibilities each role requires is to go through the Occupational Outlook handbook (http://bls.gov/oco/).The handbook contains up to date and comprehensive information regarding the nature of work, job outlook, projections and earnings of various roles in diverse industries. Matching these with our own preferences is a good way to shortlist the roles.

Researching the kinds of companies we want to work for is extremely important. This can be done in various ways. Websites like vault.com and glassdoor.com provide valuable information. Other ways to find about companies is through alumni or personal networks. Information sessions by companies and networking events can be great ways to find out more about our dream companies. Once a few potential companies are identified, going through the company websites provides valuable insight into the inner workings of the organizations.

One of the most important things to do in order to get a job interview is to be proactive. We should always have a few copies of our current resume and business cards handy. The function of the resume is to get us the job interview. The resume should always be up to date. It should highlight our strengths, past work experience and achievements that ‘fit’ with the job we are looking for. In this day and age of social and professional networks, having an updated and presentable public profile is also extremely important. Employers tend to look up people on social and professional networks.

One of the best ways to get an interview is to get referred. Often, we don’t realize that we could get ourselves referred through various people. Attending conferences and networking events and handing out our business cards and resume are also brute force ways of getting the job interviews. For those of us in college, career services are one of the most important ways to land interviews. If the above stated methods cannot be used for certain companies, posting our resume in response to requirements listed on company websites can be a useful way to get a few calls.

Guest Post: Akshat Sinha

Akshat is one of Chris' Summer 2011 Professional Speaking students. Here he writes about real-world meetings.

Executives of company A, along with supervisors from the development and testing teams from both companies met at company B’s premises to discuss about a product they had been developing together. A room with twelve people chaired by Mr. Doe from company B ‘kicked-off’ with the top item on the agenda - status updates from each team. At that time, there were two unoccupied seats in the room, but the time was five minutes past ten already. A’s developing supervisor started with his updates and touched bases with the members of the other team. At twenty minutes into the meeting , a serious discussion about a critical procedure with potential legal implications was on the third PowerPoint slide and the door opened. The two people missing from the meeting, entered the room with an apology.

After the meeting was over, there was some confusion around the critical procedure that was being discussed at twenty minutes past when the meeting had begun. Participants who were in doubt over the relevance of the procedure did not question-and-clarify in the room for having been thought of as the dumb fellows. They pretended to understand everything. Eventually, there was another meeting held for the same topic two days later. What I described above was an experience that I had a few years ago. Was the first meeting successful? Were the chances for the second one to be successful, grim?

Meeting – the dictionary definition is “an assembly or conference of persons for a specific purpose.” We are a social species. Even with the rise in technology and the presence of voice and video gadgets everywhere, traditional style face-to-face meetings are still the choice of people where ever possible. Why? Because a person’s truth value, confidence and self-presentation give the on-looker an impression with which the meeting is likely to be driven and result in an outcome. Being a ‘servant’ [HBS April, 1977] of a meeting is what determines the success of that multi-person rendezvous. By success, I simply mean – there is no meeting after the meeting to discuss the same subject again, neither officially nor a small talk between the participants. The whole point of the meeting is to get everybody in the room to present their ideas, thoughts, expertise, experience, criticisms, observations, etc., and get them reviewed by others.

I have a strong belief that one must do everything in his/her power before, during and after the meeting to ensure the meeting’s success. Each individual in the room is present to learn something and share his knowledge with others, in effect modifying the cognizance in the room, so that a collective decision is made. Research shows that to get commitment from people, one must get them to say ‘I will do it’ by the end of the meeting. The keyword for the duration of the meeting is “Action.” Chris Labash’s 5Ps, as he thoughtfully quotes, “are very important to get the most out of a conference.” These include ‘Purpose,’ ‘People,’ ‘Preparation,’ ‘Participation’ and ‘Point.’ The very basic question, ‘Do we need a meeting in the first place?’ is the one most important element that determines if the meeting will be driven to an outcome. The key elements of a great meeting, if put in hierarchy, would follow a common path. Each element is important to ensure a result-oriented delivery.

After the purpose is determined, chalking out an ‘agenda’ enables a smooth topic-by-topic discussion without digression, again an important factor! “Stick to what we want to discuss today” should speak for this point. Next, the number of participants would make the list at number three. Research shows that in meetings with more than ten participants, a challenge bigger than driving the meeting is to handle the people first. Associated with the participants is the ‘time of day’ factor, which also has a big hand in determining the likelihood of how good or bad the meeting would be. It is Tuesday and you’ve made plans with family over the weekend. Tickets are booked. Reservations are made. Boss sends a meeting invite for Friday 4PM. Uncomfortable and uneasy feelings usually engulf the room. Was that meeting perfect? May be, or may be far from it! Latter is most likely.

Next question, “is the ‘location’ well equipped with the tools/electronic items such as projectors, A/V products etc. which are necessary for this meeting?” Absence of a projector, for example, in a business proposal meeting could show how a company is organized and decisions would be made rather quickly. The next item in the hierarchy is the meeting ‘invitation’. Depending on the kind of workplace, culture, topics, agenda etc. the aesthetics and content of the invitation play an important role. Attaching a draft agenda is always the best idea for people to be prepared. The contents of the invitation also drive our next important handler – “What should I bring to the meeting? Paper to take notes, perhaps!” The above are the so called ‘before(s)’ of a meeting. What follows next is the actual meeting.

Being late for a meeting should always be a capital ‘NO.’ Arrive early, distribute the final agenda, start the meeting with introductions and the purpose of the get-together and run the meeting! Behavioral ground rules for the meeting become apparent from the person who drives the meeting. Bluntly put, “If a person speaks, others should listen!” is how the meeting should run. The confidence and attitude of the chair should send a message across participants of what they are there for and what is expected.

After all, a meeting without action is nothing but conversation, which is not effective. The metric of the meeting is its outcome, the solution to a problem – in any form, document, individual assignments, pictures, videos, etc.. The elements described above are a tool which, when used religiously, would simply inculcate the necessary steps in a person over-time. These could be highly effective for the person in the long run with no extra effort pulled from within. The essentials of how to lead and run meetings would simply come by habit.