Precious Seconds While Waiting

Watching the Tour De France has reminded me of the essence of holding on to one’s lead. When the leading rider holds an eight-second lead, it would be hard to get it back at the latter stages of the race. These elite cyclists and their teams spend the great part of their work-year training their behinds off to earn those valuable seconds on the three, grueling weeks in the beautiful French scenery.

If you are ever ahead in your meeting agenda, keep on plowing until you reach its termination. We are so fashionably intent on running a meeting past the hour. Granted that some meetings require more time for team decisions, most routine meetings can be accomplished within the hour, thus, the notion of the poor Secretary recording the [60] minutes of the meeting. What an awesome and awful task!

I am reminded of the CBS news programme, 60 Minutes. The producers of this highly-rate programme attempt to capture features stories within an hour, with depth, insight and clarity. There is certainly much to be decided within those 60 minutes of your company or volunteer’s time. Having appeared on television interviews, I value the director’s vision to compress the relevant content within seconds – that is one of the challenges!

Team leaders should be mindful and purposeful about how to deliver themselves at meeting. It would be pointless to lead in a meeting intuitively without discipline, respect, direction and outcome. It would be more useful that between meetings that the so-called Chairperson learns to lead meetings, through productive conversations with those competent in leading meetings.

To reiterate, three major reported outcomes of the 60-minute meeting are:

1)    What was discussed

2)    What was agreed

3)    Who will take action, and the dateline

We do not manage meetings; we lead them.