designing life

Lead the meeting by guessing the topic

I often involve in the meeting where as the participants are not native speaker in English.  Well, I am myself not the native speaker of English.  But at least I could express myself in English in the meeting.  Whenever I went to a client that does not speak English, they tend to discuss something by themselves in their language.  I noticed that most of the time the discussion become long.  I have the feeling that they did not quite understand where the problem is and try to discuss among themselves.  They could try to involve me to straight out the problem… but noooo… they did not raise a single question most of the time.  Maybe they did not want to ask…. as it could be a sign of ignorance from their side. Being polite, I did not what to interrupt and the meeting could be longer without clear direction.

Being in that situation could be stressful whereas you do not know what is happening.  Finally I was deciding that in every meeting with clients, I was prepared with the points to discuss and tried to lead the meeting.  Right after they opened the meeting, I tried to take the floor and discuss the points.  When they tried to discuss between themselves, I was just giving them about 5 minutes.  Afterwards, I was trying to interrupt by “guessing” that I knew the discussion and give some ideas.  If my guess is wrong, they would try to translate the discussion between themselves to me.  Now, I know what was going on and I could propose solution to close the points.  If my guess is right, then, they would listen to me and tried to close the point.

I hope this simple tip could help you when you are in the meeting where as most of your participants speak their own language.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 9th, 2008 at 6:13 pm and is filed under featured, project monitoring. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.