The straight answer is basically that for some people, at some level, the MEETING did not achieve what you had hoped it would achieve. Plain and simple. For more on this, see ‘Are attendee perceptions of value a fair assessment of meeting effectiveness?’.
We have deliberately capitalised the word MEETING, because it is VERY important for you to understand that the feedback is not measuring you, it is measuring your meeting.
You may feel this is the same thing, but that is very much not the case.
Whether someone receives value from a meeting depends on a number of factors: The objective, the process, your facilitation (most of which you can control), the environment, their attitude, their health, their situation, their capabilities, other participant’s behaviours, guest presentations, whether they were listening, what they heard, outcomes of other people’s actions, what else is going on in the company … (most of which you cannot control).
For this reason you cannot be ‘judged’ by the feedback you receive (and you should not judge yourself).
However, the feedback does equip you to understand the extent to which the meeting achieved what you intended from it, and to develop other strategies if that is not enough. It also enables you to see patterns in this, and to adjust/redesign meetings (and what happens around them) to overcome some of this and to be more effective.
If you are in a position where you are using your people’s data to provide coaching and support to help them improve meeting effectiveness, this understanding of what the feedback means is especially important.
To understand more about this, we would recommend you taking time to explore the links below:
- What are meetings really for?
- A healthy attitude to feedback
- Management charter for using inspirometer feedback data
- The power of a servant heart
- [About moving from seeing meetings as an activity to meetings as a process. But how do we enrich people’s working lives in that – do we do any of this in Phase 2, or is it all left to phase 3???
There is something about handling feedback, confession, self-worth, serving others, relationship]
Track your progress to ensure the efficacy of this strategy.