I have been approached by colleagues with the concern that some of my administrative peers have asked that the members of a committee or an inservice close their laptops and "pay attention" to what was going on in a meeting. I am sure we have all had the experience. The one where we are sitting in a meeting listening to someone droning on and on about something inane and totally useless and we as effective laptop users and multi-taskers set about to catch up on an email or two, or even check out the box score from the latest baseball game! Admit it! We have all done it.
On the other hand you may also be a member of the club who are highly engaged in a meeting where the speaker has something to say worth listening to and even might get you thinking that there are a multitude of connections to other parts of the work you do on a daily basis. You then flip open the laptop and do about 10 searches in the time it takes to display 5 bullet points on a presentation slide. Admit it! A few of us have done it, and added depth, research and current links to the subject. We engage on a personal level and raise the level of the discussion on a comunity level.
With the plethora of tools available at the micro-blogging level (ie. twitter) and social network level (ie. ning), we have plenty of opportunities to share, network and add depth to the work we do. With the use of quality networking tools, we can as a professional expand our learning and conversation and bring a true sense of understanding to the communities in which we work. I would even guess that if used properly, we could drag the "parking lot conversations" that are currently happenning online into the staff room and even the administrators office where they could be productively dealt with in effective and productive ways.
In a recent study, Technorati estimates that 70000 new blogs are created everyday. There is clearly a trend to moving our at work time (think "boring meeting here!") to blog work. I have recently written about reflection. What I did NOT mean is disengagement! We as a profession have to step up and take the initiative, the credit and the blame for employee engagement and recognize that shutting the laptop lid does not mean that the person in the committee is engaged! Instead, lets take the blame that IF we are so dull and boring. In an recent article in the Wall Street Journal Digital Network it is noted that "Businesses are increasingly turning to the Internet to run software. Workers are increasingly using the Internet to do, well, whatever they want."
If you ask me, it is at least 50% the responsibility of the "leader" to have the "follower" want to be engaged. I am started to rant about this as of late in my work. My colleagues are starting to avoid the subject. My secretary is handing me tissues when she sees me emerge from meetings where a "leader" has failed to engage the participants and in a desperate step to find some attention, has asked for us to close our lids! Let's face the facts that they have failed as leaders if they fail to engage us. Instead lets consider the alternatives.
1. Encourage your team to build social networks such as ning sites or wikis where they can share and link their work for each others. If your team is not familiar with these tools, help them learn them so they can be on a somewhat level ground with their facebook/myspace using students and faculty do. It would surprise me to see and hear of anyone who would not see power in these tools for collaboration. IMAGINE a faculty meeting where a ning site was set up to allow for followup questions and online conversation.
2. As for feedback (online is the easiest) following meetings. People are more apt to give you accurate and honest feedback immediately following a meeting instead of days and weeks afterward. I used to have paper surveys for parents immediately following parent conferences and adapted my conference model from that feedback. This is what lead my school to student-involved conferences. Surveymonkey is free on a limited basis and will provide you the information you want. Try it!
3. Read Presentation Zen. Learn to deliver "sit and git" presentations with flair and pizzaz.
4. Learn to engage your colleagues. We have found great power in the use of Critical Friends Group protocols. These protocols can, to a point, be applied to the online environment, and indeed, are enhanced by on-the-fly research the internet allows us to do now.
I would like to close this post with a reference to a YouTube video by Charles Leadbetter. Scott McLeod recently referred to this video and I have found it to be very, very profound and engaging. "We Think" is a model that school leaders must consider both for our employees and for our students.
Technorati Tags: Engagement, leadership, "We Think", Digital Leadership, Presentation Zen
We need to be more unforgiving of bad presentations or useless meetings. It's OUR time these people are wasting!
Seth Godin and others write about living in an attention economy. People have to EARN our attention; they no longer can assume they have the monopoly of information delivery. As Godin notes on page 14 of Small Is The New Big, if your target audience isn't listening, it's not their fault, it's yours.
Posted by: Scott McLeod | October 19, 2008 at 11:42 AM
Though I agree that it is primarily the speaker's and or leader's responsibility to capture and maintain the audience's attention, I also believe we are losing sight of some basic courtesies toward our colleagues/fellow humans. Is there an expectation of the audience as well as of the speaker? Do they have any responsibility to communicate their boredom / frustration to the speaker rather than using the laptop? Could the whole process be improved if the speaker were given candid feedback and /or assistance in utilizing different methods / technologies to run an efficient meeting? Can't we all just get along?
Posted by: Diane Brissette | October 21, 2008 at 11:48 AM
The points in this article are wonderful, maybe if we took into account the learning needs of all the players involved, everyone would be on the same page. No one would be off in the distance, way ahead of the group and no one would be lost in the dust.
Posted by: Maureen | October 28, 2008 at 12:00 PM