Have you been at a presentation or meeting recently? It’s easy(ish) to enhance your reputation while you’re delivering a great presentation – but what about when you are sitting in the audience?
3 months ago – I met with Jim, a Manager in a large organisation. He started:
“Every time I have a meeting involving Anne, she doesn’t get very involved. I would be great to hear what’s on her mind and see her contributing more to meetings and presentations.”
Later that week I met with Anne – just mentioned by Jim. Here is what she said:
“I can’t see the point of speaking up at meetings if I’ve nothing to say. Besides, all of the others there are so much more experienced!”
We spend quite a lot of our working lives at meetings with other people. The most obvious benefits of meetings are to set a focus on a problem, work through possible solutions, share approaches and techniques.
However, there are also more subtle things going on – establishing rapport and building better relationships with those around us, seeing others in action in public, letting others know just what kind of people we are – enhancing our reputations.
When I coached Anne – it turned out that she had the following “programming” in her mind:
[get lots of more experience around here THEN have the knowledge to contribute at meetings ONLY IF my area of expertise comes up]
So, we went about changing her “programming” to:
[contribute to meetings EVERY TIME and AS A RESULT enhance my reputation as a problem-solver AND gain more knowledge faster]
You see, Anne saw herself as a great problem-solver – but that skill was mostly hidden from Jim and some of the others. After all, she was only in the job for six months.
And now she was ready to enhance her reputation.
“But, how do I contribute to the meeting if I don’t know the answers – when I have nothing to add?” Anne asked.
What you need are questions, not answers. You need to follow 3 rules to get you up and going.
- Ask at least 3 questions in every meeting.
- Ask your first question no more than 10 minutes into the meeting.
- Make the questions open questions when possible – ones that listener to think.”
Choose one or more of the following types of questions:
- Seek clarification: “Jim, when you say the widgets are overdue, what is the normal timeframe within which they are expected?”
- Start with a statement: “I have a question: Is this an approach that has been taken in the past – and if so, what were the results the last time around?”
- Inoculate: “This may be a stupid question (now nobody can call it a stupid question) – how does what we are discussing here relate to the bigger challenge of getting and keeping new customers?”
Anne started to make an immediate impact at meetings with her new-formed habit. I met Jim a month later and he mentioned: I never realised that Anne was so knowledgeable in so many areas!.
Experts are mostly the people with the best questions – not those with all the answers.
Become an expert at asking questions! Enhance your Reputation.