Negative stress can “short circuit” your brain, causing poor performance in subsequent meetings. These simple actions can help to start meetings performing at your best.
By For Thrive Global
photo: Caroline Selfors/ Unsplash
Back in the days of office life, meetings were in conference rooms. Perhaps you were meeting with a client in their office, maybe you got up and walked over to another colleague’s desk, or even had coffee or lunch together. For many of us, business travel was a significant portion of our time (I personally spent over 70 days in a hotel in 2019). To maximize time I would schedule “Airport terminal walk” calls with colleagues timed perfectly for the walk from security to the gate.
In all of these Pre-Pandemic scenarios, there were unintentional breaks or “resets” built into the day. Once the meetings were adjourned, individuals were forced to take a few moments before going to the next meeting. Stand-up and walk to their next appointment, go back to their desk from the conference room, take the elevator back to the lobby, or stroll through the terminal at the airport. More often than not, during these resets we would chat with a colleague. We didn’t realize how important those “water cooler” social interactions really were. We didn’t consciously know that these built-in buffers were giving our brains ample time to charge, decompress, digest, and give thought to what had transpired during the previous meeting.
In today’s world 100% of our meetings are virtual. No more water cooler stop to chat with a friend, no coffee run to Starbucks to get that caffeine jolt. Not even a forced stand-up to move or stretch. Instead we stay seated and jump directly into the next Zoom meeting for the majority of our day. My team and I average over six Zoom meetings per day.
If you think of work meetings like an athletic competition, every meeting is a game. Of course not every meeting is the Super Bowl, but every game matters. What kind of athlete would play six games in a row without taking a break?
A few months into full remote working, and weeks of 6+ virtual meetings a day (many back-to-back), I had a major realization… I had just ended a call that was a bit contentious, and our team was frustrated with how this specific project was progressing. The call ended, and I immediately jumped onto my next Zoom meeting. However, this new meeting was with a completely different group of people, and not a single one of them had anything to do with the previous meeting. It was a Friday afternoon, and the team on the call was in a particularly jovial mood – until I joined. I unintentionally brought my frustration from the last meeting right into this one, almost completely deflating the virtual room. This was my wake-up call.
I went for an hour long walk and realized that this was not the first time I brought energy from a previous meeting into the next event. There were three examples I discovered:
- If the meeting I just left was contentious or frustrating – I might have brought that contentious spirit to my next meeting.
- If the meeting did not have the desired outcome that the team or I wanted – I might have started the next meeting deflated and unenthused.
- If it was a really important meeting with a deeply complex topic, I might have been fatigued – that fatigue carried into my next meeting with less sharp decision making skills.
