5 Tips before you go for a meeting

Tip #1

Always have a notepad , pen and few blank papers in your office drawer. When called to attend a meeting carry these items with you . Even though this meeting might be absoulutely unimportant, a waste of time, or totally unrelated to your work , you must still carry these things into the meeting to show that you are sincere and you are interested.

Tip #2

When inside a boring meeting room which is full of people, who are blabbering things which even they dont understand, you must try and scribble continuously on your notebook. You could draw some cartoons or make your grocery list in this mean time. Make sure you look up to the speaker once in a while to look interested and concerned. You must keep nodding your head vertically . Once in a while you can nod horizantly too.

Tip #3

When inside a meeting once in a while you should say , "oh sorry I missed that point", the speaker will be more than happy to repeat his statement. This would give you a major advantage over other passive and non interested listeners. Others will think that you are the most keen listener in the room. If your manager is one of the attendees he will be tremendously impressed.

Tip #4

Once in a while try to catch up with the last statement and repeat it in your own words full of jargons and technobabbles. Make sure that it appears as if you are consolidating what the speaker just said so that it makes more sense. This would give you 2 more brownie points. For one , it will make the speaker look stupid who lacks basic communication skills. Secondly it would make you look technically superior to all other attendees. An example for this would be.
Lets assume the speaker (Tom) just said.

"We must have less number of defects"

Try to say the same in your own words.

"So I think what Tom really means here is, Since we are following the iterative model of XP with other agile methodologies in this project ,the ratio of defect versus code developed in this project should not be more compared to the previous project which was entirly based on waterfall model of SDLC."

It requries some amount of practice to do this. I suggest you do your homework and practice it for few hours everyday. You could do while you are in traffic signal while going to work or in your office washroom.

Tip #5

Last but not the least. Try to practice "Catch & Release". When inside a meeting try to catch important jargons and accronyms . You can release these words later in any other totally unrelated meeting where you get chance to speak. Dont bother to search for meaning of these words in dictionary or web. They will probably never be there.