If you work in a moderate or large size company, conference calls will be part of your daily life. Learning how to manage these will be key to your success.
Before ever sending out a meeting invite, ensure you have thought through the objective of the meeting. This should be reflected in your meeting title and in the body of the invite so that invitees understand the objective. You should only invite those who are necessary to achieve the objective. Typically, this is decision makers or those required by process, policy, or procedure.
Always strive to have the smallest audience as possible to reach the objective. Having a large audience and especially unnecessary people on the call will increase the likelihood of it going sideways.
When kicking off the meeting, always open the call up with a friendly, up beat and positive greeting, such as Good Morning Everyone! Or Good Morning/Afternoon Everyone! (for those calls that border the morning on one coast and afternoon on another). If the call is on video, always smile and use some basic hand gestures in conjunction with your words. This has a powerful effect if done right. Also if on video, try not to move your body too much (aside from the hand gestures) so that you do not come off distracted or nervous.
Be aware of your tone and move it up and down throughout the call so it is not static. The move to up and down tone should correspond with the words you are speaking and the point you want to deliver.
After the greeting, speak to the meeting objective (why are we all here today) and then outline high level what the agenda is. In conjunction, have a screen share going so that the audience can follow along visually. Before getting into the actual agenda, some will pause to ask if there are any questions. To know if this is a good thing, you will need to know your audience. If you don’t know your audience, don’t stop at this point for questions, just jump into the agenda.
Go ahead and jump into your agenda from here. Remember, people have short attention spans these days, so you may need to remind them of the objective throughout the call in order to keep it on track. Also, bandwagon mentality/group think is unfortunately very popular in Corporate America. So if one person goes sideways, it is likely others will as well.
To keep it on track, you need to lead it effectively. You know the objective best, so as the saying goes, lead the horse to water. Always have a script and a strategy to get to your desired outcome. If you walk in without that, your audience will know. Having an ally in the audience to have your back and support your agenda works well and helps play into your favor especially in regards to the bandwagon mentality.
If anyone gets off track, quickly jump in to divert them in the direction you need. Sitting back and letting the audience run the call never works out well, you have to be firm, but also professional and polite. Unaware or distracted people in the era of working from home is common. This sometimes this leads to them not remembering to put themselves on mute. In such case, either mute their line (if your conference tech provides such feature) or ask them to mute their line. There is no time for distractions, your goal is to get in and out as quickly as possible, while achieving your meeting objective.
Sometimes reaching your objective or getting through your agenda will require more firmness. This is often the case in larger companies where operationally, it is a mess. Again, you will need to exert the firmness in a professional and polite way. Ultimately, if done properly, your audience will follow your lead as at the end of the day, people do appreciate leadership and excellent execution.
When you’ve reached your objective, start executing your exit plan. This may entail verbally recapping what the call was about, what the decision or directive was, and any next steps. Then, you can open it up for any questions or comments.
Always end the way you started by delivering a friendly, up beat and positive goodbye. If it is a Friday, always tell the audience to have a great weekend. As some people don’t remember everything and can be distracted, leaving them with a pleasant ending will go a long way.
Post meeting, polish up your notes and consider sending out meeting minutes or ideally, post them in a central solution that everyone has access to. Then, start executing upon your next steps from the meeting. If needed, follow-up with your attendees on the outcome of the next steps and/or document it in the central solution.
Periodically ask for feedback from your attendees. This will help you learn and fine tune your skills to stay ahead of the game.
What other tips do you have to win conference calls in Corporate America? Leave a comment below.