Meeting Effectiveness – Habits
What if you could focus on improving one single aspect of your business and by doing so create a ripple effect that improved all other areas of your business? Charles Duhigg, the author of the Power of Habit, suggests that some of our habits are more important than others.
He calls these habits, Keystone Habits, and he believes that these important habits have the power to transform our lives and the lives of our organizations.
Power to Change – Meeting Habit Analysis
In the Power of Habit, Duhigg talks about Alcoa’s newly minted CEO, Paul O’Neill, who took the reigns of the company in 1987 and decided to take an unconventional and highly controversial approach to turning the company around.
When Paul O’Neill stood before a prominent gathering of Wall Street investors and stock analysts in October of 1987 he said “I want to talk to you about worker safety. Every year, numerous Alcoa workers are injured so badly that they miss a day of work. I intend to make Alcoa the safest company in America. I intend to go for zero injuries.”
Ripple Effects – New Habits
Needless to say the audience was confused as they were accustomed to hearing new CEOs talk about growing revenue, improving profit margins and other financial metrics that are indicative of a successful company. What they had just heard defied logic and left them wondering what the Board of Alcoa was thinking putting a crank like this in charge of the company.
What they missed and what Paul O’Neill knew was that by changing this one single habit it would trigger a ripple that would have a profound effect on the company and set it on a new unprecedented trajectory of success.
Over the next decade Alcoa’s income increased five times over and 27 Billion was added to Alcoa’s market capitalization. Certainly a worthy accomplishment and most definitely vindication for O’Neill’s unorthodox approach.
Meeting Habits – Time to Refresh
Let’s revisit the question that we posed at the beginning of this article. What if you, like Paul O’Neill did, could identify one habit in your organization to focus on improving and by doing so set your company on a new trajectory of success. At Meeting Result we believe that most if not all organizations struggle with meetings.
They have deeply ingrained habits or rituals when it comes to how meetings are handled. Although they rely on meetings so heavily for communication, these negative engrained meeting habits sabotage their good intentions and deliver subpar results while consuming an enormous percentage of employee’s workdays.
Reset Expectations with Meeting Results
There are many reasons why this happens and we explore these reasons in great detail in other articles and our book, but in this article we want to focus your thinking on the possibilities that could result from transforming your organization’s meetings.
What if instead of being an unproductive time consuming waste, your meetings were efficient, driving decisions and action and enabling the collaborative communication that is required to move your business forward.
What if you could do all this while actually spending less time in meetings and have more time to get important work done. I doubt any of you were hired to attend meetings all day but in many organizations this becomes the status quo.
Ready to Usher New Meeting Effectiveness Habits
If you believe in the power of Keystone Habits and you are looking for a way to transform your organization then we encourage you to consider focusing on improving your organization’s meeting habit. By improving your meetings each and every project or initiative that your organization is undertaking is going to see the benefits of more productive meetings that drive results.
We have developed a comprehensive system to help organizations, just like yours, transform their meeting culture. We call our system Powerfully Simple Meetings (PSM). Implementing PSM in your organization is broken down into three main steps:
- Step 1 – Identify the challenges and opportunities with your existing meeting culture – we offer an assessment that baselines your organization’s current meeting effectiveness.
- Step 2 – Tailor a training program to teach your organization a standard meeting process, essential communication skills for meeting leaders and tools for conducting highly effective meetings – we tailor our standard training program to focus on the challenges identified during the assessment.
- Step 3 – Implement our meeting management software, MeetingResult, to help streamline and automate the implementation of your new meeting process and provide a centralized knowledge base of meeting information – our software lowers the discipline required to implement our standard meeting process ensuring a greater level of adoption and providing a valuable source of information.
O’Neill’s success at Alcoa is just one example of a Keystone Habit, a pattern that has the power to start a chain reaction, changing other habits as it moves through an organization. We believe meetings are one commonly overlooked Keystone Habit that can have far-reaching positive effects for your organization. If you would like to learn about how to get started with implementing our meeting system send us an email at sales@meetingresult.com.
Transform Your Meetings and Organization
If you would like to schedule a complimentary exploratory session to discuss these ideas further Click Here and choose the MeetingResult Consultation option and select an available time that works for you. We look forward to hearing from you and helping you to either adopt a new keystone meeting habit or improve the one you already have to help you reach new levels of success for you and your organization.
Efficient Meeting Flow – MeetingResult
Helpful links for running more efficient business meetings.
Meeting Effectiveness Evaluation ToolPowerfully Simple Meetings WorkshopPowerfully Simple Meetings BookMeeting Management Web Software