#590 How to increase your impact in every meeting

**Helen Tupper** (0:00)
Hi, I'm Helen Tupper, and you are listening to one of our Squiggly Career Shortcuts. These episodes are deliberately short so that we can quickly give you some ideas that you can put into action for your career. And today, I want to talk about meetings. Specifically, I want to talk about how you can increase your impact in every meeting.
I was reading an article in The Times recently that was talking about pointless meetings because the amount of time we are spending in meetings has gone up. Apparently, a quarter of our time is spent in meetings at work. And so you want to make sure that that time is well spent. And there are some things that we can do, like simple things that we can all do to increase our impact in the meetings. I think often when you are in something that frequently, it can be easy to fall into some unhelpful habits or patterns of behaviour where perhaps you are becoming a bit passive. You know, everyone else is talking. Maybe you're multitasking in the meeting with your camera off. And that is a real missed opportunity for you to build your reputation, show up with your strengths. So here is my recommendation for how you can increase your impact in every meeting. It is based on three things which are hopefully easy to remember, and I'm going to talk about each one. So it is a question, it is reflection, and it is suggestion. This is my recommendation for you to do in every single meeting. So let's talk about question first of all. I think you should prepare at least one question to ask in every meeting you are in. Questions show that you are curious. They can also change the direction of a conversation.
Now you can prepare your question in advance, that makes it really, really easy.
Or if you are a very good listener, you can come up with the question in the course of the conversation. But you decide which one you prefer, but aim for one question in every meeting.
The second thing that I would recommend is that you make a suggestion. I think this possibly takes a bit more confidence, but a suggestion might sound like an alternative way that we could do this is.
Or I suggest that next time we're together, we bring in someone from this team who might have a slightly different perspective. So suggestions are quite confident, but they show that you're somebody that can share ideas. You're somebody that helps to move things forward. So it's quite a high level of contribution to a conversation if you're bringing a suggestion in. The third thing to do is a reflection. Reflections are moments that help almost everybody in the meeting to just press pause. So you could be midway through a conversation and you might say, one reflection I've had on the discussion so far, is that we've really focused on the people in this team, but we haven't considered the perspective of people in the other team. And again, this reflection shows a level of deep thought, a level of curiosity.
It helps people to show that you're taking the conversation seriously. Now you might be thinking at the moment, if you're meeting, you're thinking, well, I am quite passive and I have got the camera off. The idea of a question, a suggestion and a reflection might seem quite a way forward at the moment. So here are some ways to get started with it that might be easier. First of all, pick one meeting. Don't try and do this in every meeting. Just look at your calendar. We're supposedly in 13 meetings a week, the average person. So just pick one and think that is the one, that is the one where I'm going to have a question, a suggestion and a reflection. That's the meeting I'm going to do it. That might help you.
Or maybe for now you just think, I'm just going to do a really good question approach. So across all of my meetings, I'm going to aim for one question. Because the more this becomes natural, the easier it is for you to do. But if you think about who you see making the biggest difference in meetings, I guarantee it's because they're doing some of those things. And so the more that you can do this, the more that you will stand out in those situations, the more that your strengths will show up, the more people want you to be in those meetings because of the value that you're actually adding.
So I hope that has helped you think a bit differently about how you can increase your impact in some of those meetings where you're spending 25% of your time. For more Squiggly Shortcuts, make sure that you are subscribed to the Squiggly Careers podcast, wherever you listen or watch.