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BUSINESS
MEETINGS ARE YOUR BUSINESS COMMUNICATION PIPE By Lisa Conway
Whatever you do, don’t drop the clinics meeting rhythm, and here’s why. The clinic’s meeting rhythm is your communication pipe, everything is downloaded from a meeting. A great meeting rhythm is like having a 5 connection. And just like a 5G connection, it is so much better than any other connection you had before. A deficit of structured meetings is like using a pigeon to receive your communication, not at all reliable, and it just isn’t going to cut it in today’s clinics. If you want to attract and keep great team members, it really matters how you communicate with them. Meetings are your best chance of surviving the turbulent climate we find ourselves in today. A reliable workplace and workforce is founded on great communication. It is a foundational piece; it’s how you move forward and achieve what you want for the business and for your team members. When you don’t have a solid meeting rhythm, it’s like someone has put their foot on the pipe, therefor communication can’t flow like it should. If you are finding your team members misunderstand you, or get confused easily, you can almost always trace it back to ineffective team meetings. Explaining things over and over is not a good use of your time and could easily be avoided if you work on your meeting rhythm. For every hour of time you spend in a meeting, 74
Beauty Biz Year 14 Issue 5
the value in the clinic is three times. Over the years I’ve had many people come and go through my coaching program, and one of the things I make them promise when they’re ready to flap their wings and fly solo, is that they keep up the meeting rhythm. Unfortunately, some don’t. The two most common reasons are, they were short a team member, or they were “all good” and things were going well. “We had nothing to fix so they didn’t feel that they needed to keep spending that time in a meeting, when it could have been spent servicing a client”. BaBow!! My response is always the same; “so now that you have your business in a position that has great communication, and you feel safe, you’ve decided to give away the very thing that got you there? The meetings are why you got there, great communication! How’s that working for you?” Communication is the foundation of all good relationship, how we communicate with our kids, our partners, our parents and definitely the people we work with. All relationships require great communication and the only way that this happens is if you provide a space for dialog. The best way is to get into a rhythm is to find a chunk of time to discuss what challenges
you face, give and receive feedback, praise one another, and spend quality time with the people that are a part of making your business dream coming true. To not offer them optimum communication, in other words the best opportunity to have a voice and to be heard, is a recipe for disaster. It fascinates me that it’s often the first thing that goes when time is tight. My best advice around meeting rhythms is that you need a combination of both one-to-one, and group meetings and you need to hold them both weekly, yes, every single week! The private one to one meeting allows your team members to have a voice, to have their say privately. Providing a safe space to explain how they feel without judgement, you will find that they will discuss things that perhaps they wouldn’t have the confidence to say in front of their peers, very important in the process of building trust. Then there’s the group. The group is of equal importance because it fosters community, you’ll become aware of different opinions and behaviour styles, different concerns and ideas, and more heads are always better when it comes to solving a problem. The other wonderful thing about group meetings is you can deliver a message once to 6 people that might take you 30 minutes, compared to delivering it six times individually, it would take three hours so
