Guest Post - Alex Lola

Alex is one of Chris' Spring 2012 Professional Speaking students at Carnegie Mellon. Here he writes about meetings.

Business communication has its own peculiarities due to a large extent the objectives of the communication partners. Each of them has its own problems, they expect a certain result of communication, think about what methods are optimal for achieving the desired result.

1) Planning of meeting.

Planning is really useful to do.  It helps you to be ready to contingencies which means the probability of meeting success is much higher.

Before the meeting you should know answers on following questions:

What is your goal for this meeting?

      How this meeting is important for you?

      What question are you going to ask? What answers do you expect to get?

      How you can influence your interlocutor?

      What will be your behavior depending on the tone of conversation?

Also, to be successful you need to know your interlocutor. So, before meeting it’s better to know answers on following questions:

-     What do you have common?

-     What his opinion about you and about your organization?

-     What his goals for this meeting?

-     What question can he ask?

2) Conversation

2.1. Introduction

There are different ways how to begin conversation. What to use? It depends on the content of meeting and your personal character. The soft way is when you start with some emotional words or joke. Especially if your interlocutor is a woman you can try to put some complimentary words in your introduction. Another way is when you formulate all reasons and goals in the beginning and then general questions are smoothly changed to more specific.  But I prefer the strict way – when there is no real introduction, and the reasons and goals of meeting are said before anything else, general questions are quickly changed to more specific. This way is the best for boss – staff meeting, and it is not recommended for meeting with partners.

You should keep following recommendations:-

Don’t use complicated word structures and be precise

Respect your interlocutor

Justify all your judgments

Clarify that you follow interlocutor’s words correctly

2.2 Information exchange

This stage is simply consist of 2 components – providing interlocutor by information and listening your interlocutor. I think the second is even more important since if you’re well prepared for this meeting it will not be hard for you to provide information, but you must be a well-listener.

Being a well-listener means to have ability to be concentrated only on discussion topic, to avoid any side thought. Also it is very important to see reactions of interlocutor and interpret it correctly.

2.3. End of the conversation.

On this stage you need to think whether you achieved the goal of meeting or not. You should try to motivate your interlocutor for executing of planned actions. Also you should summarize all key points of conversation and to say them to interlocutor, so that both of you could understand that there was no misunderstanding during the conversation. The last point is that it’s always better to end conversation with positive tone, even if the main part of conversation was negative.

I always try to follow this strategy. It helped me with a lot of meetings on my work. It helps me with my school meetings now. It will help me in the future, I know.