Team Building In Orlando

How can I improve the quality of my company meetings?

Sharon Fisher, an Orlando team building expert, discusses how Play With A Purpose can help improve the quality of a company’s meetings using their Learn, Feel, Do approach.

“We have a tool that we use with groups and we call it ‘Learn, Feel, Do.’ Basically what we ask clients to do is to go back and look at each piece of their meeting, look at their meeting as a whole, and then look at each piece of their meeting and use the ‘Learn, Feel, Do’ thing. So, basically what we ask them to do is we say, ‘Look at the big broad picture: While your audience is here, what do you want them to learn? What do you want them to take away? What are the key content things they need to do? What are the key techniques or processes they need to learn? What are all the things they need to learn?’

Then, two: How do you want them to feel? You know there’s a big difference between doing a ‘rah-rah’ sales meeting for a group that’s done really, really well–it’s kind of a celebratory kind of a theme–versus doing a meeting for a group that has just acquired another company and half the people are going to get let go and there’s a bad feeling, and there’s bad vibes, and they’re not really sure. There’s a lot of uncertainty and confusion about what’s going to happen. Two entirely different kinds of meetings, so you really need to think about: How do you want your guests to feel? What is the mood and the vibes that they’re coming in with, and what do you want them to leave with? What are the key things that you want them to take away from a feeling standpoint, and then, at the end, what do you want them to do? If it’s a sales meeting, do you want them to increase sales? Do you want them to make more customer calls? Do you want them to be more customer-friendly? What do you want them to do when they walk out that door based on the things that happened at the meeting?

So if you can sit down–a lot of meeting planners are more logistics-oriented as opposed to more content- and strategy-oriented—so, when at the very start of planning the meeting if you can sit down with the stakeholder and, even at a really high level, use that tool to get an idea on what that needs to be and have those conversations and do that with three, or four, or five people that all have a vested interest in the meeting, you might hear something very different from all of them. It will give you a tool to use to get some consensus on what needs to happen at the meeting. You can use it with your association meetings also, not necessarily just corporate meetings, but what do you want people to walk away with? What are the critical learning things in our industry these days? Who’s talking about things we need to do? What is the mood and the energy level we want to set, and then at the end, what tools do we want people to have, and what do we want them to do when they leave? Is there an ongoing community relationship we want to have for them? How do we develop that at the meeting so we can get them engaged in doing things afterwards? Then, you can use that for every piece of your meeting, every little piece. So you could say, ‘For my coffee break, what do I want them to learn? What do I want them to feel? What do I want them to do? What are the key components of that piece?’ Then, you work through your meeting using that tool, and that really helps answer a lot of questions about what kind of things you can plug into your meeting that would be relevant, and would be interesting, and would be different than what you’ve normally done.”