In companies, meetings are often considered to be the nemesis of employees. Who associate it with various negative feelings (waste of time, frustration, discontent, boredom, conflicts). The most common recommendations to make meetings more efficient and enjoyable are to shorten them and prepare them better. However, this is not enough!

EMPATHY TO DECIPHER YOUR EMPLOYEES

If meeting preparation and time management are essential, your role as a manager is to use your human qualities so that the meeting is a source of exchanges, advances and innovations, future projects between you and your employees.
Indeed, the meeting is often the catalyst for many frustrations. The best way to defuse discontent, resentment and conflict is to develop your empathy!
Empathy, which is the intuitive ability to put yourself in the shoes of others and perceive what they feel, will allow you to decipher frustrations. But also the power dynamics within your team. Who is opposed to whom? IWho is angry? Who pretends to work? What are the main fears and resistance of your employees? Empathy will allow you to answer all these questions and thus improve working relationships within your team.

HOW TO DEVELOP EMPATHY?

Developing empathy, yes! But how to do it? This is probably the question you are asking yourself at this stage.
To improve your overall empathy and be able to use it in your meetings, implement the following techniques:

Stay away from your phone and emails during meetings: show your employees that you consider them enough to make yourself totally available to them.
Learn to stay quiet: Give your employees a voice without interrupting them.
Be attentive and observant: know how to identify the key elements of non-verbal communication such as postures, gestures, facial expressions, intonation, etc.
Ask your employees questions regularly: about their workload, about their current projects, about recent difficulties, about their relationships with colleagues or customers.
Stay calm and open to your employees’ perspectives, even if they clash with your own analyses and proposals.

DON’T FORGET YOUR OWN EMOTIONS

Analyzing and understanding your employees’ emotions alone won’t improve the quality of your meetings. Indeed, a good leader must also be able to work on his own emotions. And above all, know how to manage them and use them wisely during meetings.
If you let your negative emotions (anger, frustration, annoyance, stress) spill over during meetings, you can be sure that they will cause a mirror effect within your team, which will in turn feel them.
So make sure to convey enthusiasm, determination and kindness during meetings, to create an atmosphere of dialogue and consultation within your team, which will have a positive impact on your next meetings.

BE A HUMAN AND EFFECTIVE LEADER, USE EMPATHY

In the end, understanding and managing emotions is just as important to the smooth running of a meeting as preparing for it beforehand or managing time. The key to a successful meeting? Dare to empathize!
To find Annie McKee’s article, click here: https://www.hbrfrance.fr/chroniques-experts/2019/02/24550-lempathie-est-la-cle-dune-bonne-reunion/.