executive support staff

More professionals in C-level support are working from home now than ever before. Leaders in the field have had to adjust their approach rapidly to ensure meetings remain focused, engaging, and effective. Below are some tips on how to improve your remote team meetings.

Keep Meetings Small

Remote meetings work best if there are fewer than twelve attendees. Before sending out invites, think about who needs to be in the meeting and who doesn’t. Larger meetings tend to be ineffective in a remote setting because it becomes harder for leaders to maintain the team’s focus. In addition, when there are too many people, not everyone will be able to participate equally, which may leave some of your team members feeling like you’re wasting their time. If the information discussed in the meeting is important but specific team members don’t need to be part of the conversation, you can also record the meeting and have them listen to it later.

Establish Guidelines

Many of your team members probably have an unclear understanding of what behaviors make virtual meetings successful. It helps to have periodic discussions with your team about meeting etiquette. For example, team members may need to know how long to make their responses and when it is alright to interrupt a speaker. Guidelines like this prevent meetings from lasting longer than they need to and ensure your team knows what to expect from remote conferences. Other guidelines you should address include whether attendees should have their video turned on, when should they mute their mic, and how they should approach disruptions, such as a phone ringing or baby crying.

Set Time Strategically

Long meetings put everyone in a foul mood, especially if the team has a lot of other tasks they need to complete for the day. Thus, you have to be strategic about time. Make sure necessary technology is set up before the start of the meeting and all documents are ready to go. Have a clear agenda and distribute the agenda to the attendees. Strict agendas keep the meeting focused and ensure everyone is on the same page. Adequate preparation is the key to hosting an effective virtual meeting. Technical difficulties that push the start of the meeting back stresses everyone out, hindering the team’s ability to create and cooperate.

Check for Understanding

It is a lot easier to tell if someone is confused in-person because you can see facial expressions better. In a remote setting, not everyone may have their cameras on. Even with video, images may be small or distorted. Additionally, not everyone will be comfortable interrupting you while you’re talking to ask for clarification. For these reasons, it is crucial you to pause for questions periodically throughout the meeting. This will ensure no one feels lost and everyone feels heard.

It can be difficult to lead team meetings in general, but it is especially challenging when the meetings are virtual. In a remote environment, there is more opportunity for technical difficulties and other disruptions and a lot of nonverbal communication is lost in translation. You can improve virtual meetings by limiting the number of attendees, setting clear guidelines, being strategic about time, and checking for understanding.

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There are many clichés about leadership. Often when advice and buzzwords become overused it’s because they come from a place of wisdom, but this isn’t always the case. Here are 4 cliches about leadership you should avoid.

All Opinions Count

The idea of a democracy makes us all feel good. It is nice to think that ever employee has a voice that should be heard. The reality is a company is not a government. You cannot consult all your employees whenever a decision needs to be made. This creates inefficiency and disorganization. Sometimes you will need to make quick decisions that might even step on other people’s toes. Ultimately, you have to if you want the company to grow.

There’s No “I” in Team

This saying has been used ad nauseam. There is no denying that teamwork is essential for a successful workplace. Yet every member of a team is also an individual, which needs to be recognized. Encourage cooperation and collaboration, but not to the point that the people just become cogs in a machine. There needs to be a balance.

The Customer Is Always Right

You want your clients to be happy, of course. But you also need your employees to be happy. Even more importantly, you need their trust and respect. If you consistently take the side of your customers over the side of your employees, they will start to feel like you do not trust or value them. Sometimes the customer is right and sometimes they are wrong. Assess the situation and be honest about it.

Don’t Come with a Problem Unless You have a Solution

This cliché can be tricky. While having a team that can problem solve is ideal, not every problem has an easy solution. Shutting down employees when they have problems does not always encourage accountability. Instead, it can discourage them from speaking up. You want the team to come together to solve problems. They can’t do so if the individual employees are afraid to speak up.

You’ve probably heard these four clichés more times than you can count. They come up often in the workplace. Take clichés with a grain of salt. They’re not all without merit, but you are better off avoiding them.

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Most would say the cliché that they are their own worst critic but should consider putting a formal structure to this process. Individuals tend to fall into one of two categories. The first has an incessant looming cloud of pressure creeping in from all angles, resulting in a never-ending feeling of not living up to their potential. The other lives in naive bliss, refusing to make eye contact with the person they see staring back in the mirror. Regardless of which category describes you, the best leaders have a supreme level of self-awareness and emotional intelligence. Introspective reflection is essential for leaders. It gives the brain time to take a break from the noise, unravel cause and effect, and create meaning. This meaning creates a catalyst for actions rooted in purpose and significance.

The Questions

In experiential learning, enlightenment comes from taking the opportunity to think about what you experience, both personally and professionally.

• What are the things I’m most passionate about?
• What are my greatest accomplishments in life so far?
• What am I most grateful for?
• What are the biggest things I’ve learned in life to date?
• What are my goals in life? (health, career, family, financial, spiritual)
• Who are the people in my life who have achieved similar goals? What can I learn from them?
• Who are the five people I spend the most time with? Are they enabling or holding me back, or inspiring me to be a better person than I am today?
• If I were to die tomorrow, what would be my biggest regret?
• What limiting beliefs am I holding on to? Are they helping me achieve my goals, or holding me back?
• What bad habits do I want to break? How?
• What good habits do I want to cultivate? How?
• Am I living my life to the fullest right now? If not, what would represent a fuller life for me?
• Who do I want to be one year from today? What do I need to do to initiate that growth?
• How hard am I willing to work to get what I want?

Rationalizing Failure

Most people would agree that the things worth having and achieving in life do not come easily. When things get tough, we have a tendency to rationalize why we are not succeeding in our pursuits:

•  “I don’t have enough time.”
• “It just wasn’t in the cards.”
• “I decided it wasn’t really what I wanted.”
• “It is not the right time. I will pursue when I have more balance.”

Rationalization is the use of feeble but plausible arguments either to justify something that is difficult to accept or to make it seem ‘not so bad after all’. We do this because it’s hard to accept the reality that if you want to succeed in any endeavor worth pursing, you have to put in the time and often be comfortable with being uncomfortable. We all know that it is easier to blame external factors instead of blaming oneself, and this habit can be one of the toughest to break but is a true necessity for a high level of self-awareness.

The Problem

What holds us back from taking action on the change needed to improve ourselves? In other words, why do 98% of New Year’s Resolutions fail? It’s simple: the rewards of these changes are in the future when the discomfort and discipline are happening right now. When there’s an absence of a compelling reason or drive, you will be like a thermostat. You’ll work as hard as necessary to keep the temperature comfortable, and when it reaches that temperature, you’ll turn off until needed again. Discussing change and goals can be inspiring, energizing, and stimulating. Yet it can feel tough, awkward, annoying, frightening, and completely unpleasant to discuss the discipline needed to reach those goals. There is no shame in being average or competent if you are unwilling to pay the price of excellence. Simply ask yourself if you are willing to pay that price, and what the price looks like for you.

Allocating Attention

Most of us are used to focusing on externally oriented attention. It is simpler and more straightforward to focus on something outside of ourselves, such as work, television, a significant other, children, or almost anything that engages our senses. Our internal world is far more complicated, with a varied landscape of emotions, feelings, and perceptions. Yet it is often the internal world that determines whether we are having a good day or not, or whether we are happy or unhappy. That’s why we can feel angry despite beautiful surroundings or feel perfectly happy despite being stuck in traffic. Perhaps for that reason, this newly discovered pathway of attention may hold the key to greater well-being.

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