L: Learning

There’s an old saying goes ‘give a man a fish and feed him for a day, teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime’ though I prefer the Frankie Boyle gag ‘give a man a fish and feed him for a day, give a man a fishing rod and he’ll sell it and buy a fish…’.

This is all about learning of course, we all learn every day whether we like it or not, but one of the things that is hard to learn is how you are perceived by others, what are the things you do that are good, bad or indifferent. That’s hard, self-reflection is a tough ask, how you think you are vs how others think you are is often not the same…

But Meeting Canary is here to help (well just a little bit anyway), in each meeting you attend where the Canary is present, we produce a report on how the meeting went – was it well focussed, were energy levels high, were people respectful of each other etc etc? But these calculations are also made at a personal level – and every Meeting Canary meeting you attend it is possible for you (and only you) to see how your own KPI’s fared; to see what the means. Let’s take a look at a few of my own:

Over the years I have found that meetings earlier in the week are more productive – setting out the expectations of the team and myself for the rest of the week is best done on Mondays, mid-week meetings are more project focussed, and I have always tried to keep Thursday and Friday as free as possible for that all important thinking time.

Now I have redacted the names here for data protection purposes but you can see from the size of the blue blobs who has spoken the most in meetings (me – I’m green, but too large!), you can also see who I have spoken the most to – and there is one blob who I haven’t spoken to very much – even though they have made lots of contributions. Well there’s a lesson right there, include them Mark!

Meeting Canary has scores across the 10s of 1000s of meetings that have used the product so far. You can see here that my overall scoring compares well to my company but also exceeds the average. Maybe it’s because I know how it’s calculated, or, less conspiratorially, maybe it’s because I try and keep my scores improving because I’m actually learning!

It’s this latter piece that is so important to Meeting Canary so maybe it’s: ‘give a man a meeting and he’ll meet, but give a man a canary in his meetings and he’ll have better meetings’!

Obviously the same applies to women but the metaphor was contorted enough as it is 😉