Be on time for meetings and stick to the timeline of presentations
Posted on June 17, 2024 by Martin Hahn, One of Thousands of Career Coaches on Noomii.
This article emphasizes the importance of coming on time to a meeting and sticking to your timeline of your seminar.
In business, we all have heard, “You need to be early for a meeting, or at least be on time.” When I was a young man new to business protocols, I learned from my supervisor a nuance regarding this old adage, and it has served me well over the years.
He and I had traveled to talk to a potential investor at his office. We were about 20 minutes early, and I expected we would take the elevator up to the 8th floor to wait in the investor’s foyer. As I was about to open the ground-level door to the building, my supervisor stopped me and said, “Let’s walk around for a little while. We need to be on time, not early.” I was surprised and said to him, “I thought it was good to be early.” He explained he had learned if you arrive more than a few minutes early you take the chance of sitting in the foyer with a view of your host’s office through a glass partition. And the problem with that is, if you can see her, she can see you. Perhaps she hasn’t yet cleaned up her office, and maybe she needs to finish a phone call prior to greeting you; or maybe she’d like to tidy-up her office before inviting you in. But once she sees you, she probably will feel an obligation to come out of her office to greet you, while wishing you wouldn’t have been early so she could have finished tidying up her desk or completed a phone call. It risks the chance of creating an awkward moment for both parties.
To sum up, arriving just a few minutes early is always a good and ‘safe’ thing to do. But if you choose to arrive very early, do so only if you are certain you won’t be seated in a place where you can see the host or administrative assistant, and she can see you. The way I’ve dealt with this potential awkwardness in recent years when I am about to greet someone is to have my administrative assistant meet my invitees in the lobby and show them to a separate room or office where they can be summoned by my administrative assistant when she knows I am ready to greet my guests. It has worked nicely for me, and I’m sure it will work nicely for you, regardless of whether you are the host or the guest.
Stick to the timeline of presentations
If you are chairing a meeting, hand out a timeline that showed the various topics you would be discussing and how long each would take. Explain that your history had shown you had a tendency to get carried away with your lectures, thereby going beyond the time allotted for each segment of your presentation. Asked for assistance to help keep you on time. You may select another person out of our group to be timekeeper. But in addition to that, hand out the day’s newspaper and ask the timekeeper to wad up several pages into baseball-sized shapes. Then explain to the group that the job of the timekeeper was to keep an eye on the watch and throw the wads at me when I began to go past the allotted time.
Thirty-one minutes later, I ran over Segment #1’s time allotment by one minute, so the timekeeper stood up and began pelting me with a half-dozen ‘baseballs.’ That got everyone’s attention, and all of us became animated. That led to a lot of kidding with me instructor and a lot of laughter. If anyone had nodded off, that had ended immediately.
I will surely quickly wrapped up Segment #1 and launched into Segment #2. I noticed the atmosphere in the room had picked up, there was excited energy, the attendees were paying better attention, and many became engaged and asked questions for the first time. It became apparent to me that as a seminar leader I was doing what I was hired to do, namely creating a learning environment.
The process of pelting me with the newspaper balls when I ran over the time allotment occurred three more times during the day. All of the segments were accompanied with lots of kidding and laughter, but when the seminar ended, the participants all felt that they had actually learned something valuable and enjoyed the fun. Compliments to the seminar leader abounded.
