The Conference Coach™

I’ve made the leap into Twitter and I think having “followers” makes the experience worthwhile if you are going to “tweet.”  To do that, I’ve searched for people that mention conference calls in their tweets and I’m finding quite a few people complaining about their experience.  It seems the calls are too long, too boring, and not engaging.

Conference calls should be one of the most collaborative and engaging communications experiences in business.  It seems like some of our conference call leaders need a little help living up to that goal, so here’s my recipe for a good conference call.

• Keep your calls to no more than 1 hour.  Most people don’t have the attention span for calls that last for hours and hours.
• Develop an agenda.  Let your participants know what your agenda is and stick to it.
• If a side issue develops, then agree to take that issue off line and not make it part of the conference call.
• Engage your participants by directing questions to specific people.  As an example, “John, how is the competition affecting your territory?”  “Bill, could you expand on that?”
• Give up the podium to others.  Ask someone else to lead a portion of the call and prepare the material in advance.
• Manage distractions.  Gracefully learn how to move on from the individual that wants to dominate the conversation.  Make sure people learn how to mute their lines if there is background noise.
• Recap the action items at the end of the call.  If there is going to be a next call in the series, preview what you will cover on the next call.

To me, the best conference calls are ones where most of the people have an opportunity to contribute.  They’re the ones that don’t last forever and stay focused.  They’re the ones that use the medium to collaborate, train, strategies and engage.  Hopefully this helps conference call leaders step up their game.  By the way, I still need some followers on Twitter.  Maybe the next time I go looking, people will be happier about their conference calls.