#HR #RRHH Making love and making personal #branding #leadership

Meetings can be telling experiences. If you're an employee, you want to look good in front of your boss. If you're selling something, you want to make a good impression on your prospect. If you're the meeting leader, you want to set a good example for your team. In all of these scenarios, you want to add as much value to the meeting as possible, and look as smart as you can in front of the other participants.

Doing so can be tough, even if you're well-read and invested in the topic of the meeting. That's because meeting participation requires as much poise as intelligence, and one redundant question or moment of distraction could make it look like you weren't paying attention.

To improve your reputation and keep the meeting as effective as possible, ask a variant of one or more of these seven questions:

As an avid basketball fan, I can easily envision the final seconds of the game and the need for a player to have the fortitude to take the final shot. There are parallels between taking the last shot and having to deliver a critical presentation to a room of executive leaders. You have to be ready — physically and mentally.

You might not be playing for a crowded arena, but your work audience (i.e., coworkers, managers, and executive leaders) are on the lookout for your communication skills, intellect, and perseverance under pressure. As in sports, your talent is only one ingredient of a successful outcome. Your preparation, precision, and delivery are crucial factors.

According to a study on executive presence, your "appearance, communication, and gravitas" accounts for 26% of what is needed for a promotion. There are finite opportunities for you to convey all of this, so important meetings are the perfect time to get noticed.

Here are five keys to making your best impression in front of the most influential people sitting in the room with you.

Americans sit through some 11 million meetings every day — with the unproductive ones costing companies $US37 billion a year.

Since the author has already looked at the most egregious meeting mistakes, they decided to explore how the most successful executives run effective meetings.

It's easy to let even a simple meeting get out of hand. Maintaining control is important; the room can sense when you are flustered, you easily forget your train of thought and control over the outcome.

I used some of the following techniques to maintain control over the meeting and bring the team back to a successful conclusion:

Slow It Down

It is common to increase your speech when you are nervous. To truly connect with your audience, you must slow down instead and control the speed of the discussion.

The problem with asking for a raise is that there are only a few ways it could go right, and so many ways it could go wrong.

The best outcome would be getting more money than you imagined, but you’d also be happy with getting exactly what you wanted, and if not that, to at least see a bump, even if it’s smaller than what you hoped for.

But in the pick-a-path book of life, it seems many more paths lead to being denied, with the worst paths leading to alienating your superiors, later being passed over for a promotion, and worst of all, having to take a counteroffer from a firm for which you don’t really want to work and burning a bridge in the process.