Happy Saturday everyone!
The mornings are cooler here in the mid-west which means two things. Kids are heading back to school and college football is in the air.
Today I’d like to talk about running meetings and follow up. I know it is not the most fun topic, but it is one area if business that often goes overlooked and wastes money for organizations. I hope to share some insight on keeping things in order and how to allow for action items to be taken to help promote movement. This topic can be used for customer meetings as well as internal meetings.
I have worked in multiple industries and one thing that has been true in all industries is that people tend to forget what was talked about and what they were supposed to do. This tends to come up in the next meeting when the person is asked where they are at only to give an answer similar to this “ Oh yeah…I forgot. I’ll work on that this week…” It amazes me how much lost time there is in meetings with action items not moving forward.
Most people have a million things flying at them all the time so its also very hard for them to remember all the items talked about in your meeting. With the introduction of the internet and the ability to have a computer in the palm of your hand people are hit in the face with so much information that it becomes overwhelming at times. Don’t get me wrong technology is great, but we are slowly becoming a society with attention deficit disorder. I am not trying to be insensitive to those that have been diagnosed with this, but it is true for everyone that our attention span has been shrinking greatly over the years. It is bad I literally finished that last sentence and picked up my phone for a few seconds.
While working with larger organizations that had multiple business units I learned the need for a way to track what was discussed as well as action items. I was once told by a manager that the person that controls the meeting notes controls the conversation. Take that as you will. I truly like to keep everything discussed and agreed to out for everyone so that we can move forward on tasks and projects. I often running a running log of meeting minutes so that anyone new can review topics and get caught up to speed quicker than walking around talking to others on the project or waiting for the next meeting to ask where we are at.
I have used this format of note taking as well as action items with customers, suppliers, and internal for half a decade and found this to be the best way so far. If you have a better option I am very open to having a discussion and learning about it. One way that I have seen is people put the notes in a body of an email which to me gets lost quite often and there is no way to review past notes very well. It is better than not doing notes all together, but I believe having a way to review easily is a plus.
Keeping things moving forward is often hard to do and I have seen all sorts of ways people try to document items discussed and send out. I have chosen the format that is attached to this blog at the beginning. This has worked for me for years. If you would like a free copy of it feel free to email me at info@kevinsidebottom.com and I can send it to you. Hopefully it helps you.
Have a great weekend everyone! As for me I need to get the college football swag out for the season so that I can help my team by yelling at the tv 😊
Sincerely,
Kevin Sidebottom
Sales and Leadership Enterprises