Running effective meetings is a business skill that is often overlooked or considered less important than others. However, running great meetings can make the difference between achieving a planned objective or failing to do so, inspiring commitment or just following the rules, or building high morale or avoiding meetings.
I’m passionate about meetings because it’s where business gets done. It’s a microcosm of social interaction and human behavior rolled into one. It’s all about people and harnessing their potential as collective groups.
Here are four simple tips for how to immediately improve your meetings. With a little thought and planning ahead, you can learn to make meetings something people look forward to and where great work gets done. Let’s get started.
1. FOCUSED AGENDA
You’ve heard it over and over. Having an agenda helps to organize the focus of a meeting. Although that can be true, I’ve seen just as many meetings be derailed by bad agendas. When creating meeting agendas, always consider that they have the following:
- Clear meeting purpose and objective.
- Time allocated for Next Steps.
- Time allocated for Check-in and Check-out.
- Clear, focused topics, each with a clear objective.
- Most important topics first.
By following these guidelines, your agenda can organize your meeting into a productive work session wherein people are engaged and feel heard.
Perhaps the most common mistake people make with agendas is trying to fill them with too many topics. This guarantees that the agenda will not be fulfilled leaving participants underwhelmed and feeling behind. Agendas packed with too many topics can lead to feeling pressure and rushing through items without clear commitments or follow through. We do this because our desire to believe we are “getting more done” overrides our sense of timing. We put down items and say, “This topic will only take ten minutes”, when in fact, the topic may actually extend into an hour long or more conversation. Sound familiar? This leads us to a second way to immediately improve your meetings, time management.
2. TIME MANAGEMENT
The judgement of how long agenda items will take in a meeting is the most common cause of meetings going awry. To combat this problem, use the following rule of thumb.
- For each topic, estimate one minute per person.
If your meeting has ten people, then the minimum time required to hear each person’s response to a topic is 10 minutes. Some people will talk 3 minutes or more, and others will only talk a few seconds. However, the average is around a minute. And here we are not talking about the agenda topics only. Those are the big topic themes. For example, if a meeting topic is the “Review of Our 2019 Performance”, we may ask the meeting participants to discuss this by focusing on “What worked?” and “What did not work?” Each question posed here will require a minimum of 10 minutes. So for discussing “What worked” and “What didn’t work” you can estimate at least 20 minutes. And this is without a specific result. You may then ask the group to discuss the top three key learnings. This will take another 10 minutes. Use this rule of thumb to help you realistically consider how long it will take to successfully discuss a topic and obtain a desired outcome. Bottom line is that discussions usually take more time than you think. The “One Minute Per Person” rule of thumb will help you be much more accurate in determining how much time will actually be needed.
3. USE SPECIFIC QUESTIONS TO DRIVE DISCUSSIONS AND OUTCOMES
Too often, people sit down to a meeting and begin talking about a particular subject without any clear guidelines for how to structure the conversation. This can lead to losing focus and using up valuable time. Instead, try using specific questions to drive discussions. For example, if the meeting topics is about “headcount re-allocation”, instead of saying, “Let’s talk about headcount re-allocation. What does everyone think?”, you can ask, “What are the top three priorities for our department?”, then ask, “Who has the best collection of skills to work on these priorities?”, “Who can be available to work on these priorities?” By asking meeting participants specific questions, you focus their attention on the reality you need to be discussed.
4. THREE MEETING MODES
One of the best ways you can improve your meetings immediately is to view all conversations as falling into one of only three meeting modes. When you think about it, all conversations in any meeting you can have will fall into one of these three modes:
1. Inform - You are informing people of something they need to know. And in this case, it’s important to make sure that people understand. Good meeting facilitation will check with participants to see that they understand the information being provided before moving on.
2. Discuss/Debate - You are discussing or debating a topic. In this meeting mode, what’s most important is that people have an opportunity to voice their opinions, positions and interests. Good facilitation will make sure that each person has been given space to be heard.
3. Decide – You have finished a discussion or debate and now it’s time to make a decision. Most important is to have a clear understanding amongst participants for how the decision will be made. Will it be the leader’s decision or will it be decision by consensus for example? Once everyone understands how the decision will be made, the options can be clearly stated and a decision made.
As you begin each agenda topic, make it explicit to the group what meeting mode you are going to be in, and don’t let the mode change until everyone is ready to change to another mode.
Conclusion
Start with a solid agenda and don’t pack it full of too many topics. Less is more. Assign someone to manage the time of discussions and of the meeting as a whole. Use the rule of one person, one minute. Ask great questions. Your questions can create a reality that others engage in. Ask yourself, what reality do you want to create? Manage all of the discussions in your meeting according to the three meeting modes. This will help you stay on track, avoid going off on tangents and keep the meeting focused on the task at hand.
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