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“I hate meetings, don’t you?”
He said this as we were about to go into our meeting.
I didn’t (entirely) take it personally. We were exploring a possible partnership together. We hadn’t met often.
I’m nearly positive he was referring to the meetings he had with other people.
But the comment started things on an awkward tone. He was clearly watching the clock. I was watching him watch the clock.
I like meetings. I very rarely don’t look forward to a meeting.
The reason is simple: I plan for valuable meetings.
If I lead a meeting, I set it up so that it generates value. If I’m invited to someone else’s meeting, I won’t meet again if there isn’t value.
It’s that simple.
Now, I understand that not everyone can choose their meetings.
However, if you lead meetings, you do have the luxury of making sure that all your meetings are good meetings. For leaders, our most important work takes place in meetings.
All leadership is a relationship. We interact with people, so we need to meet.
Meetings are where the magic happens—not in our heads.
Here are tips for leading consistently high-value meetings.
1. Define a single purpose or outcome
When you know what the meeting should accomplish you’ll find it easier to achieve.
This is as true for meeting with individuals as it is with groups. Have a purpose. If you aren’t sure why someone is meeting with you—ask.
Some meetings are standing or regularly scheduled meetings. Have a very clear purpose for the meetings in general.
Specifically, what is a weekly team meeting supposed to accomplish over the course of a year?
Specifically, what is this week’s meeting supposed to accomplish?
Reports are not accomplishments.
Answering questions or making decisions are.
2. Create and control your agenda
Don’t wander through meetings. Chart your course in advance. Design your agenda to accomplish the purpose or outcomes above. An effective agenda:
• Provides ample time for deliberation or discussion on topics related to the purpose.
• Gets to “the purpose” first. Don’t leave your important work for the end of the meeting when everyone is tired and out of time.
• Is announced in advance, so people know how to prepare.
• Is simple.
• Is focused. Some conversations need to be allowed space to develop. But it is too often the case that we let the meetings get hijacked or drift.
3. Ensure the right people and the right information are in the room
The right people: Meetings are only valuable when the right people are present. Make sure you have the right decisions makers or the people with the necessary information. Don’t meet if a meeting can’t be productive.
It’s easier to get the “right people” to show up when everyone recognizes that your meetings are high-value meetings.
The right information: Meetings are only valuable when you have the right information for decision making.
If you know what the purpose is, and you know who will be present, you should know what information will be needed.
The only time not having the right information might be acceptable is if the meeting pushes a conversation or decision-making process so far forward that new, important questions have emerged.
Then the meeting has served its purpose by identifying what information is needed for next time.
4. Capture decisions and commitment
Many meetings jettison any value they created by not recording decisions or individual commitments and accountabilities. In most cases, you don’t need highly formalized minutes. You just need to:
• Capture and record decisions as they are made.
• Capture commitment: Who agrees to do what? By when?
• Quickly review and confirm: This should happen at the end of the meeting.
• Make sure everyone gets a copy.
If you do keep minutes, it is most useful to pull all of this out of the record and put into a box at the top. That way people don’t have to read through everything (which they usually won’t do anyway) to remember what they are supposed to do.
5. Follow up
If you capture decisions and commitments as I’ve described above, it is very easy to go into your next meeting and check on progress.
If you find that progress reports routinely tend to meander—it is often because the person reporting isn’t sure what information they need to give. So, they either under or over report. Or selectively report.
Using systems (even the simple one I described above) helps keep people focused on the relevant information. Using simple dashboards, where key metrics (often just one or two) are displayed, can take an hour of reporting and reduce it to a 5-minute review.
If your indicators of success are tightly connected to your goals—they double as accountability tools.
If your indicators of success are not tightly connected to your goals, they are the wrong indicators.
If you don’t know how to define or track success, then you’ve just discovered an important topic for your next meeting.
6. Nurture a culture of trust manifested by discussion, debate and dialogue
If you rarely or never hear debate or discussion in your meetings, there is a problem. If you are the leader, you probably created the problem.
There are many reasons why this could be, but it tends to boil down to the following:
There is insufficient trust: People don’t feel safe disagreeing with you or with each other.
The process lacks credibility: People don’t believe value will come from the process.
There isn’t room or time: Issues that require discussion are introduced, but there isn’t time to get into them. If this happens regularly, the process loses credibility.
The right people aren’t present: Some meetings don’t generate sufficient dialogue just because the right people aren’t there. This can range from they weren’t invited to they couldn’t/didn’t want to come, or the right people don’t exist in your organization.
Bonus item:
7. A larger strategic purpose
It’s difficult to have a focused, high-value meeting in the context of ambiguity or leadership-by-crisis.
An organization that has a clear and well-defined goal and an understood strategy has provided an organizing framework: “This is what we are about this year.”
Then your meetings should be designed around bringing that purpose to fruition.
Your next steps to lead high-value meetings: You probably have a meeting coming up that you need to prepare for.
Prepare for your meetings by thinking through each of these points. If you find yourself stuck, or unable to respond well to one of these points, it’s an important discovery.
By working through that issue, you’ll find that your meetings will become far more engaging and valuable.
In many cases, they’ll take less time too!
Photo source: istock
 | Christian Muntean is a seasoned expert in fostering business growth and profitability. With a Master's degree in Organizational Leadership and certifications as a Master Coach, Certified Exit Planning Advisor (CEPA), and International Mergers & Acquisitions Expert (IM&A), he guides entrepreneurial leaders through growth, succession planning, and exit strategies. He is an accomplished author of three books, including Train to Lead. Christian resides in Anchorage, Alaska, with his family. Learn More » |
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