Thursday, March 22, 2012

Your Quiet Power in Meetings, part 2

Meetings are sometimes the bane of an introvert!  You can exert control though by doing some advance preparation.

As you know, formal meetings often have agendas, written or not.  Some meeting facilitators (is this your boss or colleague?) are either too scattered or oblivious or inconsiderate to share the agenda in advance.  

It is usually important for you, an introvert, though to discover beforehand what you can about what will be discussed to prepare yourself.  Why?  Because you are quiet, you need to be seen somehow, and you tend to be less spontaneous than an extrovert.  (An introverted exec told me simply, "I feel invisible in meetings.")  We introverts need processing time.  Being slammed with a topic and asked to talk about it with no advance warning can mean that we're not prepared with our best input and ideas.

Your strategy then is to try and get your hands on an agenda. Here's what I do.  Ask for one.  If there is none, then spend a few minutes considering what might be on docket. This is often not difficult if you know the parties involved and are keeping up with office events.  If you're really stuck, then quietly ask around if others know what will be discussed and why. I call this "scouting" for information.

With either an agenda or a best guess, your next step is to take time to think about what you might say in the meeting. In a future post, I'll share more about what you an introvert can do to plan what you'll say.  

Readers, what zany or subversive tactics have you employed to get your hands on an agenda before your meeting?  Post a comment here with your best experiences.


Adapted from The Introvert's Guide to Professional Success,  Chapter 18:  Do Your Research.  All Rights Reserved.

Thursday, March 8, 2012

Your quiet power in meetings, part 1

You know that you have a lot to offer even if you're quiet. But it's often hard for quiet types to leap into a dialogue when we're competing for floor time with more spontaneous extroverts. Introverts need time to ponder before entering into discussions and, if we're shy even though not introverted, it may simply be challenging to jump in. 

The first thing an introvert or shy person can do is to realize that good consensus decision-making requires your input. I once made the mistake in a start-up team meeting of thinking that my colleague who seemed most confident - his name was Chris - actually knew what he was talking about.  Ha!  He did not. Chris was a great guy - handsome too - but he definitely had more confidence than knowledge.

Lesson?  I let my team down by clamming up. Our results were inferior and that's nothing to brag about. Had I spoken up, my team might have done much better in the first meeting.  Lesson learned: clamming up lets the team down, not just me.

So take your quiet power.  Your input matters.  You bring a thoughtfulness to teams that may otherwise be lacking.  In a future series of posts, I'll talk about some more strategies - beyond mindset - you an introvert can employ to navigate - without being like the extroverts around you.

DY84ZME2DDGE

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Technorati

Readers, please forgive this administrative post. This is my claim code to be verified: DY84ZME2DDGE