Make Meetings Great Again: 4 Funny Trains-of-Thought You Board during a Work Meeting
Whether you are an accountant for a local health care agency in the city or a social worker in the country, you are likely part of an agency. With every agency comes a board room.
Every meeting in the board room bears the potential of becoming a symphony of monotony, sung to a bored room of people.
Like it or not, company meetings are here to stay. They’re essential. They help facilitate the overall company mission and help to move that mission forward. Everybody knows with a vision and mission come the details on the “how to” and the follow-through. Meetings happen because they help gather people for the purpose of communicating, delegating and sometimes, celebrating! And so we have them. Plenty of them. If you are a reflective person I think you will appreciate the humor I will reveal in what I believe most of us feel during these meetings. With every meeting comes the things we are all thinking, but no one is saying. Here are 4 of the most common ones:
1. “I’m seeing but not quite hearing you. I’m busy thinking about how good this muffin tastes. Are these real blueberries?!?”
If your company is in any way relevant, pulsing with fresh ideas at the seams, it’s likely your meetings with be filled with not only the scent of sweet ingenuity, but that of baked goods too. When that happens, I tend to listen with my heart. Not always to what the presenter is saying, rather to what my stomach is thinking while chewing on a blueberry muffin or a fresh cinnamon raisin bagel. “Made with ‘real’ fruit.” Wait! Why does that box say “artificially flavored!?” There’s nothing like walking into a meeting with an aroma of coffee and pastries, or muffins and tea. Scones and jam anyone? From England to America, the board room no longer has to be the “bored room.” Climb aboard with me.
2. Why is My Coworker Looking at Me and Laughing?
This happens when you catch your coworker glance over at you with a smile wide as the box of donuts on the table. But what is he or she laughing at anyway? Did I not button my shirt… Zipper down? What then?! Then you start thinking of what that might be. Did your boss suddenly say something that sparked the likes of an inside joke between you two? Now you are suddenly engaged in your boss’s presentation on the “organizational structure of humpback camels” in a way like never before. You are riding every wave of information that comes out of their mouth to catch it.
3. The Scranton Scribbler
There will always be different levels of engagement in the board room. I do not mean in terms of business, but in terms of who is asking the most questions during the meeting. Meanwhile Fred is dozing off in his chair with his hand over his face, disguising a clear lack of sleep with what he thinks comes off as “his thinking pose.”
On the other hand Raquel is dialed in, with a pen and pad of paper in hand. She is writing furiously, glancing every ten seconds back at the boss. “Now you’ll see on the left where we can find our client charts. Let’s pull up one client, Nina.” Raquel jots something down… “Next to this tab is where you can pull up Nina’s health insurance information…” Raquel scribbles something on the paper again….
“I used to look through all the tabs before I found how to locate it quicker…”
Raquel grabs the pen...
“I once owned a hamster named Nina…she was a great hamster…”
Raquel is back to writing….
“A truly furry companion…”
Raquel taking notes…..
Raquel, I absolutely cannot tell if you’re jotting down this week’s grocery list or if you are actually paying attention. I would love to see your notes though!
4. 99 Questions
Then you have wonderful Jeremy who is asking enough questions for the entire team of people in the room. I guess what I’m saying is, it will often be apparent who is very unclear on what the boss is saying based on the amount of questions they’re asking. Love them anyway. We all get confused once in awhile. For this person, you might say they are… very engaged. In terms of an equation, the rest of us may put it like this: The more one person asks all of the questions, well, the less engaged everyone else becomes. It may quickly become a one-on-one meeting between the question-asker and the presenter. But the boss hones it back in to the rest of the room! Like the superhero of the agency, the board-room “BOSS” comes bearing not only donuts and muffins, but redirection skills too! This meeting has come alive…
If we can truly learn to balance these equations, the ratio of questions to answers, add in enough sweets, and celebrate people for who they are (the scribbler, the 99 questions, and the rest of us) we will truly make meetings “great again!” May your day be sweet and your meeting sweeter…
Thank you for hearing my musings on the everyday. Let us find every sense of sweetness in the “mundane.”
Alex Oram
April 3, 2019
