‘So What?’

let’s do a little thought experiment together i’d like you to think about every time your team has a meeting or any subset of your team has a meeting and this can be completely internal or it can be external with prospects clients members of projects that your team is working on and I want you to imagine that at the end of every single one of those meetings everybody who goes off in their own individual direction says “Man I don’t know what the point of that was.” Now let’s look at just the subset of meetings where it’s not a conversation it’s more like a presentation and a member of your team is presenting to an audience and at the end of that presentation the audience walks away saying “Man so what what was I supposed to get out of that?” I want to suggest that this is happening to some degree at least some times with your team and every time some version of that happens time is being wasted not just the time of the audience but the time that your team spent in the presentation in the meeting in the conversation and the time spent preparing for those meetings and conversations and presentations every single moment of every single person’s time has been burned because there wasn’t a fulfilled intention behind that meeting that presentation that conversation now conversely there’s an opportunity here there’s a possibility that every single moment invested by every single person in every single conversation presentation meeting is maximized because at the end of those events everyone goes off in their own individual direction knowing exactly what just happened in that interaction and knowing exactly what they need to do with the information that they got from that meeting or that presentation or that conversation the truth for you and your organization is somewhere in the middle of these two extremes it certainly can’t be true that absolutely every moment of every person in every conversation is being wasted and it almost certainly isn’t true that every moment of every person in every conversation is being maximized so the truth is somewhere in the middle and you probably have a sense of where in the middle the truth is for your organization if you recognize that more time is being wasted by problematic communication skills maybe opportunities are getting lost because your folks can’t communicate the so what behind hiring you in your organization if your clients can’t understand sometimes why your perspective is so valuable if your team can’t consistently lead a meeting so that at the end of it everyone in that room understands the decisions that got made and why they got made then perhaps there’s an opportunity here to invest in the skills of your team to get them better at communicating with each other with your prospects with your clients to land more work and do better work that is the value of high quality communication and presentation skill building