5 unbeatable tips to impress your manager

So there’s a salary negotiation on the cards and you want to impress your manager. Every manager is well-acquainted with painfully dull meeting rooms, and luckily for you, they rarely expect anything different. So what boosts your chances more than a savvy approach to organising meetings and workshops?

With these 5 simple tips, you are bound to impress your boss at the next meeting.

Number 1: Eat right

You’ll be glad to hear the that days of tuna mayo sandwiches are well and truly over. With companies like the Berlin startup foodora.de, it is now possible to order fresh from your favourite restaurant right to your boardroom. The best part: each team member can order exactly what they want from the menu. Bon appétit to that!

Number 2: Unusual location

There’s nothing worse than staring at the same white walls. Repetitive mundane surroundings will only yield predictable results. So let’s apply some new professional mottos to your meeting planning. For example: “why don’t we hold the this year’s panel discussion in a boxing ring?” Or: “let’s book a cutting-edge indoor farm for our next sustainability conference”. Every week we will post inspiring ideas here on this blog, ideal for injecting some creativity into your meetings. Everything will be backed up with visual examples on our colourful Pinterest board.

Number 3: Meeting illustrator

When was the last time you saw genuinely good Powerpoint presentation? When it comes to brainstorming, Powerpoint can actually hinder creative approaches with its generic visual structure. With this in mind, the new meeting trend of 2015 is the meeting illustrator. The concept lets a talented illustrator sit-in on your meeting and translate the agenda into an easy-to-understand visual language. Not just fascinating to watch, but it ensures that (for the first time) your team will actually read the minutes! Here you’ll find a good overview of meeting illustrators in Germany, France and The Netherlands.

Number 4: Instant feedback

For large workshops, presentations or training events the situation is often the same: one person stands at the front while everyone else listens (or not). That doesn’t have to be the case. With exciting apps like PowerVote, a speaker can answer questions, conduct short surveys and even transfer the presentation to the smartphones of audience members. This engages the audience in a meaningful way and stops the event feeling like a lecture. Fascinating case studies on this topic can be found here.

Number 5: A new kind of meeting

As we’ve shown, workshops don’t have to be organised in a boring conference room. Our startup survey confirmed this, revealing that more than 50% of young companies we asked regularly leave the office for discussions. Suggest taking your boss for a walking meeting in the sun: a change of scene is often refreshing.

Out of the box venues:

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