Defining the "Best-Case-Scenario Win" for Every Important Meeting

Every leader has meetings that are pivotal to their success and forward progress. Other meetings are confrontational. While others are opportunistic.

One important lesson I’ve learned is to accurately “Define the Best-Case-Scenario Win” outcome for every meeting I am in.

For example, I was working with a leader recently who needed to have a highly confrontational meeting with a boss. I shared this principle with him, and then helped him define the “Best-Case-Scenario win” accurately.

For example, in my friend’s case, if he had gone into the meeting thinking in the back of his mind that the win was that his boss would have scales fall off his eyes, fire his colleague and promote him, that would have been disastrous and he would have been crushed.

Instead, I helped him see that his “Best-Case-Scenario win” was that his boss would listen to him in the right frame of mind and that hopefully relationship and understanding of how he felt about the situation would be deepened.

“What is the best case scenario outcome of this meeting?”

When you can accurately answer that, you’re more likely to leave a meeting fulfilled rather than let down.