5 Tips To Make Your Meetings Better Today
Throwing an effective, productive meeting is one of those tasks that looks easy on paper. Most can often visualize the perfect execution down to the letter. But when the time comes to pull it off, something feels…off. Where did we go wrong? Why didn’t we get our desired outcomes? Why did someone end up grandstanding the whole time? Or how did our team settle into the same old arguments we always land on?
Putting together an air-tight meeting was hard enough in The Great Before (anything that went down pre-COVID), but now as we are staring down month 6 of the pandemic, hosting effective work sessions virtually are especially challenging. But worry not: your friendly virtual facilitator is here to make your life easier. I have found, that what really creates a good output, is all based on what you put in to the meeting before it even starts. Below are my top 5 tips to make your meetings more productive, more efficient, and just all around better, whether you’re meeting over Zoom or IRL…
Set a purpose.
Why are you putting this meeting on the calendar? What is the need for it? What are the objectives and the desired outcomes? The amazing Priya Parker heavily focuses on purpose for her clients. In her excellent book The Art of Gathering, she encourages you to think about your event’s purpose, and then dig a little deeper. I’m hosting a dinner party. Why? To get our friends together. Go deeper; why? To have a scintillating conversation. Bingo! I’m currently working with a non-profit group that is made up of all women who raise funds and then awards two sizeable grants to other charities in their community. I’m helping them host their Annual Celebration, a party that’s normally held in a ballroom or large party space, with cocktails and conversation and fun as they award the grants they worked so hard to raise. A pretty high bar for a virtual event to have to meet! In my first session with the event chair, we got past the practical purpose pretty quickly “We’re throwing this event to award grant money.” We dug deeper, thinking about what she wanted people to walk away from the event feeling and saying, and what words she’d want the participants to use to describe it. Underneath the practical purpose, she wanted this to be a celebration of the power of women in her community. That’s powerful stuff. And that gives us something exciting and inspiring to springboard off of when planning out the rest of the event. Maybe your work meeting doesn’t need such a rah-rah deep purpose, but you should still be digging deep and understanding why you need it. Otherwise, it could just be an email.
Ponder people.
Who is essential to the deeper purpose? It’s often easy to fall into the trap to invite too many people to a session for fear of excluding anyone. But often, you can be a better and more generous host by being exclusive with your invites. If you keep the boundaries of your session firm, you can make a better final product. The executive of the team I used to work with scheduled our entire team to gather once a week early into the fiscal year. He started each meeting by emphatically declaring how vital our mental health was to our overall well being, with the intention of creating a safe space for us to vent and express our anxieties or fears. But the thing is...none of us felt like talking about the things that were potentially impeding our work with our boss! Don’t get me wrong; he was a great boss, and the impulse to host these meetings showed a great amount of care and empathy he felt for his team. But it didn’t feel right to complain or discuss what may have been holding us back at the time. Where we did find we felt most comfortable talking those things out was on calls with our colleagues on the team; our equals, not our supervisors. Eventually, those group meetings got canceled because no one really talked during them. Perhaps, the way to have been the most generous host for those sessions would have been for our executive to excuse himself so we could let loose.
Set the table
Think about the last meal you ate out in a restaurant before quarantine started. What was the table like? What tools did they give you for your meal? If you went to a BBQ spot, maybe they have you no utensils at all, just a roll of paper towels. Or if it was fine dining, there were likely luxurious napkins and tablecloths, multiple pieces of glassware, and maybe even several forks, knives and, spoons. The setting of the meal dictates the etiquette expected from you: fine dining, work your way from the outside in on the multiple utensils. For the BBQ joint, put your elbows on the table, and don’t be afraid of you get sauce on your face. But if there isn’t anything distinctive about the setting, you probably default to the table manners you learned in your respective cultures. Etiquette is dictated by culture, and relying on assumed etiquette may actually put your meeting guests at a disadvantage. How do you overcome that? Temporary ground rules for your meeting level the playing field and set the table for you and your guests to have the most impactful session possible. At the start of 2020, I worked with an organization to update their corporate values and purpose statements. The group assembled consisted of a mix of people who worked in sales (the primary revenue generator for the organization) and all the other departments that were considered “sales enablement”: IT, finance, HR, etc. We set some ground rules like:
This is a safe space to be transparent
Whatever is said in the room, stays in the room
Everyone gets the chance the speak
As we began to brainstorm values, those from sales came up with very salesy values: competitive, results-driven, winning. These are great values for a company, and the group would have gone with them, had it not been for members of sales enablement teams raising their hands and saying “That’s not how my team works.” By setting those ground rules, we were able to bypass the corporate etiquette of that organization that defaults to the opinions of sales. By creating a set of temporary rules, we got more holistic values that represented the entire corporation. And as the host, you need to enforce those rules. Don’t let someone run away with the conversation if you need everyone to speak. Let people be transparent, but not hurtful. By setting ground rules and enforcing them, you’re setting the table for your meeting. BBQ or fine dining? That’s up to you!
Set an Agenda
Have you ever been to an event with multiple phases, but the host was “chill”? There’s no clear direction of where to go for cocktail hour or no arranged seating, so it’s kind of a scramble to find a place where you can talk to people you know? Rather than feeling relaxed, you may feel scattered or even frustrated and cranky. I find that work meetings can suffer the same fate without an agenda. I think we all fear that putting a detailed agenda up may make us seem uptight and controlling to our colleagues, but trust me: the opposite is true. Just like you are a better and more generous host by only allowing certain people into the meeting, and by setting specific ground rules, the same is true for what you discuss. Without agendas, meetings can fall into a tailspin of tangents and rabbit holes, the purpose of the meeting can get lost, and the roles of who is steering the ship get muddied. In my experience, the best agendas are the most detailed. Make time for introductions, reviewing objectives, and breaks every 60-90 minutes. And don’t get chill on me! Set time limits for each agenda item and stick to them as best you can. In an old job, I had a weekly meeting that chronically ran over. It was getting to the point that members of the team saw the meeting as a roadblock to productivity, rather than a boost. We started setting and enforcing time limits, and lo and behold: we began to finish on time! In my experience, prioritizing full breaks, and working on the deeper purpose are things to prioritize for time; look to make time cuts to any other agenda items that don’t serve the deeper purpose if you’re short on time.
Don’t Forget to Pregame
I have a good friend whose birthday is close to Halloween. For the past 7 years or so, she’s hosted a murder mystery party to celebrate. In the weeks leading up to her party, she sends her guests clues: details on the characters they will be playing, rules of the party, even hints about how to catch the killer and win the night. I’ve now started looking forward to what she dreams up each fall and eagerly await to learn more as soon as the invite arrives. I think many meeting and event organizers make the mistake of assuming that their event starts as soon as their guests or participants enter into the virtual or physical space where you’re hosting. Really, they’re experiencing the start of your event the moment your invite arrives in their inbox. So how can you get them ready, get them excited, and get them in the right headspace sooner rather than later? When I work with teams on corporate ideology, I like to start out by inviting the group members 1:1 with the leader of the initiative at the organization (the executive or project leader) who reaches out to the individual with an email highlighting the specific reasons we want to partner with them. A week or so before our first work session, I send all the participants an article from the Harvard Business Review that clearly and thoughtfully outlines the terminology we will be developing and defines each piece of corporate ideology. I’ve found that having everyone working with the same definitions of our core, deeper purpose of our work together gets them excited and invested in the meeting before it even starts. Combine that with the honor of them being selected, and those sessions are some of the most exciting, high energy meetings I’ve lead for organizations! Think about how you can elicit that same feeling for your own meeting. If you’ll be in an all-day planning session, why not send participants some gift cards to treat themselves to breakfast and lunch that day? If you’re brainstorming, send participants an article on creative thinking. It doesn’t have to be complicated or elaborate; even a well-worded email detailing why you want each individual to be present in your meeting will help to get them excited and invested.
Take these 5 steps before your next big meeting, and prepare to be amazed at the results. Still feel like you need help prepping or running the big show? Let’s connect and talk about some ways I can help your organization get sh*t done!
