Wondering “Why aren’t these people talking to each other?”, Craig offers his advice for how to make the most of pre-meeting time: put away your screen and start a conversation with someone. It just might result in better meeting outcomes.
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Here’s what Craig says in the video
Hi everybody! Hey it’s Craig Freshley here.
I run a lot of meetings where I walk into the meeting room before it starts and people are here, you know, waiting for the meeting to start. And everybody’s, like, looking at their phone or looking at their laptop. People aren’t talking to each other. And I’m thinking to myself, “Why aren’t these people talking to each other?”
Now, I get it – a lot of times the meeting is a group of staff that have a chance to talk to each other all the time, and before the meeting starts they just want to get stuff done. But a lot of times the people in the meeting room are perhaps meeting together for the first time, or they only meet together once in a while. And in those situations I’m wondering why somebody thinks that a screen is more important than a conversation with another person, because honestly that’s what it looks like to me. If I walk into a room and see a person with their head down looking at a screen, I receive a message that that machine is more important to them than I am.
I love it when I walk into a room and somebody closes their screen and looks up at me and starts a conversation. Or better yet, hasn’t been looking at a screen at all; is simply available for me to start a conversation with them.
Now we might say, “Look, the meeting hasn’t started yet. I don’t need to pay attention to other people before the start of the meeting. I’ll get to do that when it starts.” But I have come to realize that a big part of the magic that happens in meetings happens before it starts, during the break, and after the meeting ends. It’s that unprogrammed casual time where we get to know each other. We ask questions about each other, and we learn that we have things in common that we never even suspected. Sometimes it’s those things that help us be most productive in the meeting and in doing stuff together after the meeting.
Thanks for listening everybody.
I hope this helps your group make good group decisions.
