Pay attention!

A while ago I read a post by Seth Godin on how to be a great audience. I thought it was a great post and provided some very good tips on what to do and how to listen and be (as the post says) a great audience. The context was a presentation to a group of eighth graders and how he could see who would be the good audience and who would not. The students who leaned forward, engaged and asked questions and drew out a better presentation.

Over the following months I have seen this over and over again in meetings. It's amazing the number of people who don't pay attention in a meeting. They drift off to their blackberry (assuming that the network is still working) while someone else is making a point. People bring laptops to meetings and proceed to answer email, read news (and if it's not an RSS feed of my blog that's just rude) or otherwise ignore why they are there in the first place.

Now I will admit that many meetings that get called seem to be meetings for the sake of meetings rather than meetings with a mission. This can be addressed separately. Be direct in meetings and don't be shy about making sure that there is a focused purpose and when that purpose has been achieved... don't feel that the meeting needs to go on just because it has been scheduled for an hour and fifteen minutes of discussion handled it. Give people the gift of time.

So, in your next meeting, make an effort to pay attention. Listen, lean in, ask questions, be a good audience and for goodness sakes PAY ATTENTION!!