The Encrypted Cultural Language of a Meeting
One of the challenges that I find from time to time is the need of leaders of an organization to word the messages of a meeting in such a politically correct manner for concerns such as being perceived as displaying behaviors less than at the heights level of a professional. I often wonder if this form of communication prevents others from giving their input or even participation at all. I’m not saying that there isn’t value or that it’s not important in presetting yourself as best as possible because there is, but there is also something to be said about polite, open and candid communication where participants fell safe if in fact your intent is to encourage opinions, creativity, and solutions to ultimately achieve results.
What do you think?
For a meeting to be truly effective everyone has to buy-in on it. If there is a really large group together(where it feels more like a conference instead of a meeting) people are more likely to not participate (insert cricket noise here).Smaller meetings will definitely help, gettting more people to buy-in for that. when people feel they can be candid with their ideas, I thnk they are more likely to participate.
I think that making the other participants feel safe to be truly "included" in the meeting is important. I know that for myself personally it is hard to speak up at times regarding my opinions or creative ideas, because the meeting is too far regimented and often is accelerated just to get through the meeting and back to daily work. It's interesting!
