Call me old school, but I turn off my cell phones
during meetings…both of them. There’s nothing I find more annoying than
colleagues and business associates who place their phones down on the table
only to have them vibrate spasmodically in circles or chirp some ridiculous
ring tone in the middle of a thought or who can’t seem to make it through the
meeting without crooking their neck down to check for the latest bit of junk
email.
So it wasn’t a surprise that my phones started to sound
off immediately when I turned them back on following a particularly grueling
series of back to back meetings. One message from my son required an immediate
response, so I apologized for the delay by mentioning that I was in meetings;
to which he replied, “you’re always in meetings…how do you ever get anything
done?”
Clearly my offspring’s time spent recently earning a
Penn State, Business Management degree did not go wasted; the lad clearly gets
it. Business meetings, webinar broadcasts, and training sessions have become a
huge time suck that often produce less than stellar results and act as
roadblocks to actually getting things done.
Authors Chris Ertel and Lisa Kay Solomon are hoping to
change the conversation and the way we get things done with their new book; Moments of Impact: How to Design Strategic
Conversations that Accelerate Change. Ertel and Solomon offer up workable
solutions that can be implemented quickly to move an organization forward
quickly by breaking down silos, engendering collaboration and deliver results.
I applied the action steps that Ertel and Solomon spell
out in the book to look back at a recent small team project that I helped to
lead that had a truly impactful result on customer service. Without realizing
it I had hit on utilizing strategic conversations with the small group that I
was later able to roll out to the wider organization by working in concentric
circles and expanding the scope and the impact the group had created.
The “Starter Kit” that is included in the book is a
true road map to accelerating real change that can be adapted and applied to any business model.
No comments:
Post a Comment