Post Meeting Counselor - The Observer

Have your ever thought you went into a meeting, spent hours of your precious time, and then came out of the meeting more confused than before? If you have, welcome to today’s world!

 
This feeling is common in many of the companies and especially startups. Working in the IT field, I feel this is more a common occurrence. You sit through a meeting where either your boss or the sales team or top management personnel in general take you through those hours and finally you are like ‘what happened inside?’. If you are person who is depth based in terms of the work you do and all you are concerned is your area of work, then you might need some serious Post Meeting - Counseling. I have been fortunate to not to need Post Meeting - Counseling for the most of my career.

 
Ok, this is not about stress management but more about awareness to avoid being stressed out.

Ideally, if the meetings are moderated by a unbiased moderator, then there shall be no such impacts. Moderated meetings are common in large corporations and Multi-National Companies (MNC) but for growing companies, may be they can not afford such stringent process measures for meetings. This Post Meeting - Counseling is not about post meeting measures but it starts with the meeting and continues even after the meeting is over.

 
For such companies, I have some suggestions:

• If you are a small team called for a meeting by other departments and/or top management, make sure you nominate a person who is a very good listener. We shall call him ‘Post Meeting Counselor - PMC’
• It could either be the head of the team or some person at the mid-level experience. It is preferable that this person knows the opposite parties to a reasonable extent.
• Apart from participating in the meeting, this person’s job is to observe the communications, comments and thoughts engaged therein.
• This person needs to observe the above from a neutral standpoint.
• Post meeting, this person can take a small follow up meeting to give his observations and answer particular questions from other members who attended the meeting.
• At this point, this PMC voluntarily takes instances when a particular member did not read the statements made and responded in the wrong direction.
  • For example, more often than not, the top management would be talking about directions from a higher perspective and its not easy for member in the junior rank to understand and react accordingly.
  • Moreover, its easy that statements or thoughts from the management or other departments might send wrong signals to members who are very focused on their work and only their work. These statements can be misconstrued and subsequently that could create a lot of confusion.

The role of the PMC should be viewed as ‘The Observer’ with the sole aim to better understand both parties involved in the meeting, and to educate his own members towards the common goal that needs to be achieved.

The target for every discussion should be that of the common goal (in this case, the company’s benefit) and not any individual’s views. Having said that, the only way to look at any discussion is from an observer’s (in this case, the PMC) viewpoint.