Guest Post - Dan Li

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

Meeting is an important part of people’s lives. We take all kinds of meetings every day, and it seems endless. As an international student in CMU, I’ve taken meetings with American, Chinese,  Indian, Japanese, Europeans and so on. People from different countries behave really different, and  I have to say meeting a reflection of culture.

As a Chinese, I was used to keep quite in a meeting. I’d like to listen to other people’s opinions and think carefully about their words. It seems like meeting is a place for me to learn.  The first time I took a meeting with American guys is in C-squad. They really like talking. In other words, they keep talking, which seems never stop. We quickly find a big problem about out meeting. It seems like an outsider of the meeting and I never got a chance to express my idea.  Thus they encourage me to talk and participate in them. I tried very hard to be more active in meetings since It makes meeting more efficient and I believe this is the first step for me to accept their culture.

I also got shock the first time I took a meeting with Indian guys. That’s a meeting we arranged to talk about out finance homework. We set the meeting time to be 10 am at Heinz. I arrived very early since it’s polite to be early for  the first meeting in my country. However, my partner didn’t show up until 10:30. It’s unbelievable in my culture, but now I accept it since it’s their culture. Even though Indian guys may not be on time, but they are very serious and active in meetings. They would express their opinions very clearly and keep exchanging ideas with you until they get a satisfactory result. I think that’s what I need to learn.

I’ve also taken meetings with Japanese. Their meeting culture is much similar with mine. They also polite and quite in meetings and listen to other people’s opinion carefully. There is one thing that impresses me a lot. Most of them are precisian. They would make a detailed schedule of each meeting and keep taking notes of other people’s opinion.

Above are what I’ve experienced in different meetings. They are totally different, but I think good meetings have some common features, such as good schedule, thorough exchange of views, and a clear purpose, which is the most important thing.