You just ran a great two-day conference with lots of people from your organization in attendance. You spent thousands of dollars on speakers, audio/visual, a boss DJ, and an awesome caterer. The agenda felt great, the speakers knocked it out of the park, and the atmosphere was electric. You lay your head down on the pillow to decompress after everyone departs, and dream about the massive impact this event is going to have on your team and their results.
So why within a few weeks of the event don't results seem to be changing and you're right back to where you were before the event?
Why does one team go to a conference and come back home on fire while another team who went to the same exact event come back home and languish?
I'm a believer in a concept called "The Window of Influence". The main concept here is that you have an ever-shrinking window of time after any meeting or conference to follow up with your team and help them to implement some of the things they learned or ideas they heard at the event. The larger the scale of the event and the emotional feelings created during the event, the longer the window... but rarely does that window exceed 72 hours post-conference, no matter how impressive your event was. Life gets busy again and people fall back into their same routines.
The sign of a great meeting isn't what happens AT the meeting, it's what happens AFTER the meeting.
Some pre-meeting preparation can help make your events more impactful. I encourage people to have 3 things out and ready before I start any meeting:
1) A place to take notes
2) Your To-Do List
3) Calendar or Planner
The goal is that attendees are jotting down notes during the messages, but then at the end of the meeting (or on conference breaks) they are encouraged to take any ideas or concepts from their notes that stood out and convert them into to-do list items, and then plug those things directly into their calendar so that they have a plan for when specifically it will get done.
Even events as small as a conference call or office staff meeting can be more effective using this strategy.
If you understand the Window of Influence, you'll realize that as a leader a good portion of your meeting strategy really starts the minute people leave the event. The meeting is the alley-oop toss. Your post-meeting follow-up to drive implementation is the slam dunk.
Here are some great post-meeting questions I like to ask:
-What were your 3 biggest takeaways from the event?
-Which speakers would you like to connect more with?
-What is the ONE idea, if you implemented it right away, would have the ability to change everything else in your business in a positive way? (this is a concept I learned from the book The One Thing by Gary Keller).
-What can you implement from the meeting over the next day/week/month?
When your post-meeting strategy is as clear going into the meeting as your planning for the meeting itself was, you'll use the Window of Influence to your advantage and your meetings will help you create exciting activity and results.