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I'm going to teach you how to run a phone conference that does not suck.
The techniques I describe are simple to implement and will teach you how to lead a conference call that people enjoying attending.
These tips make conference calls feel cordial, professional, and worthwhile.
Your colleagues will actually look forward to being on your calls and will be eager and enthusiastic to team up with you.
You will be more enthusiastic and get more done, and work will actually be more meaningful and rewarding.
The Keys to Leading Great Conference Calls
In my regular non-YouTube job, I'm a college professor and a researcher. In that capacity, I have led more than 500 phone conferences. It's a little scary for me to think about it in that way, but I have.
I think the people who participate in my phone conferences generally enjoy themselves and think the meetings are productive. I'm going to teach you five simple tricks that I use to run these phone conferences to make sure they're useful, productive, cordial, professional, and they do not suck.
Tip #1: Have an agenda, and send it out in advance.
Nobody likes to have to show up for a meeting where they don't know what it's about, where they don't know whether they're going to be expected to speak, where they're not sure when it starts, what the call-in number is, what the password is. All that information should be on the agenda. People will love you for it, so make a simple agenda.
My agendas are normally just the name of the meeting, the project group, the phone number, the password or meeting number, and then an agenda of topics. A very simple outline. If certain people are assigned to speak for those topics, I tell them who they are so they know that they're expected to make a contribution to the meeting. That's it.
It's always a single page. It’s a very simple document, goes out in the email, normally 24 hours before the meeting with an announcement reminder of the meeting itself. Then once the meeting starts, work through the agenda in a systematic way so people feel like the meeting is organized. People will love you for this.
Tip #2: Control the timing of the meeting.
This means a couple of things – starting close to on time and stopping on time. In my experience, you can never start a phone conference exactly on time. If the conference is scheduled for the top of the hour, normally it starts at 10:05. If it's scheduled for 9:30, it starts at 9:35. So what I do is I take those first five minutes to take the roll.
This is another one of our secrets to running a good telephone conference. Have you, or one of your colleagues who might be the secretary or the project manager for the meeting, take the roll so you know who's in the meeting. Then you will know whom you can address during the meeting and for the minutes of the meeting and who was in attendance.
So in those first five minutes, take the roll and make small talk, see how the weather is around the country, do all that other conference calls stuff. At five minutes past the published start time of the meeting, get the meeting started out of respect for the people who came to the meeting on time.
But everyone needs a little time to get to these meetings. We've all been in that position where we're a few minutes late, searching for the phone number, searching for the meeting number, trying to find the agenda that we sent via email and so on.
Never go over time. People will hate you if you go overtime. Sometimes my meetings go over, but when they get to the published end time, I release people. I say, "We're at the top of the hour. This is when we will schedule to be done. If you have to go, thanks so much. We'll talk to you next time. If you have a few more minutes to stay, we're going to talk a little bit longer." That way I give people explicit permission to go if they have to and they don't have to feel bad, and a lot of people will click off at that point.
Tip #3: Control access to the floor.
The floor is the right to speak, the opportunity to have your turn at talk. A phone conference lacks many of the signals that we have in face-to-face conversation that tell us whether it's our turn to talk – whether we can have access to the floor. You can't raise your hand. You can't do all the other stuff that you might do in a physical meeting. There's technological ways to raise your hand in some of these conference calls software packages but in my experience, they don't work very well.
The leader has to control access to the floor. That means saying something like, "Bob, you go first, and then Bill." If people talk simultaneously, which they sometimes do by accident, you have to say, "One person at a time. Bob, let's hear from you first, and then Bill."
Control access to the floor. It's one of your most important responsibilities in a crowded phone conference to make sure there's no simultaneous talking and people have an opportunity to speak.
It is also your responsibility to explicitly call on and encourage the participation of the less powerful, less prestigious members of the team. This can often be the youngest members of the team. Sometimes in male dominated cultures, it could be the women on the team.
It's your job as the meeting leader to make sure everyone gets an opportunity to speak so that the team can benefit from everyone's expertise.
Tip #4: Give generous praise and thanks to participants.
As the meeting wraps up, express explicit thanks to the people in the meeting and be liberal in your praise and gratitude. When people take time out to be in a conference call, they could be doing something else. They're very busy, so I thank people for their time. I thank people for their contribution. I praise them liberally.
It costs me nothing to express praise and gratitude. People like to hear it. That encourages them to be good members of the team and so I like to do it a lot. It makes me feel good to thank them, and I genuinely am grateful.
Tip #5: Explicitly announce adjournment.
When the meeting is over, announce the adjournment explicitly. Sometimes if we finish the agenda before the hour is up, I'll say, "That's all we've got for today. We'll see you next month on the 28th." So I like to announce the date of the next meeting. It's normally in the agenda, but I'd like to announce it.
Then I say, "Thanks everybody. We are adjourned." I think this is really a good tip to explicitly end the meeting. Otherwise, people are not quite sure, "Are we going to keep talking? Is there more to say?" They don't know whether they can click off the meeting.
Summary
Let me recap those tips:
Have an agenda and mail it in advance. Follow it.
Control meeting timing. Start no more than five minutes after the published start time. During those first five minutes, take the roll and make small talk. End the meeting early if you're finished with the agenda.
Control access to the floor. Call on the people to speak. Discourage simultaneous talking. Use your power to encourage the participation of the less prestigious, less powerful, less talkative members of the team in order to get full participation.
At the end of the meeting, express thanks and gratitude liberally for their time and for their contributions to the project and the call
Then announce the adjournment explicitly.
With these tips, you can run very effective phone conferences that do not suck. People will want to be on your calls. They'll know that they start on time and end on time, that they have a chance to talk, and that their contributions will be appreciated.