Transforming Meeting Practices
This post contains edited excerpts from COMPOSURE: The Art of Executive Presence, available now wherever books are sold. Order your copy today!
We’ve all been there. A last-minute meeting is called and you gather with your colleagues, hoping to make progress on an important project. Only, when the meeting begins, you notice that there’s no agenda and the team’s priorities aren’t aligned. The meeting is doomed from the start.
You went into it already overwhelmed, yet you somehow leave the meeting with three more things on your already way-too-long to-do list. You feel like you were on autopilot in the meeting, jotting things down without objecting, but when you get back to your desk, you feel terrible. This was not a productive exercise.
Then, to make matters worse, your boss strolls past your desk and asks you about the outcome of the meeting. Suddenly, you feel a bit panicked, because a lot of topics were covered and the whole thing was disorganized. You can’t articulate the key actions or takeaways in a way that would be impactful for your boss.
The meeting was destined to fail, and, ultimately, it did more to confuse your team than to clarify key issues. Doodle’s 2019 State of Meetings report estimated that the cost of poorly organized meetings in 2019 would reach half a trillion dollars in the US and UK combined.
This study finally put a number to what we all already knew to be true: Over forty percent of respondents reported that poorly organized meetings take up valuable time, leaving them unable to complete the rest of their work. Furthermore, they reported that a lack of clear actions from meetings creates unnecessary confusion and resulting inefficiency.
When we call our colleagues together, we create an opportunity to produce results that have a lasting impact on the business. Because the time we spend in meetings is at the expense of time working on other priorities in the business it is essential that meetings are both effective and efficient.
How do you maximize the impact and effectiveness of your meetings? There are six simple but often overlooked questions to ask yourself:
1. Who should I invite?
Research shows that the most productive meetings have fewer than 8 people. Every attendee over 7 reduces the group’s ability to make good and executable decisions by 10%.
When creating the attendee list, ensure that you limit your invitation to decision makers and people who will make important contributions to the meeting topics. Assign someone in the meeting with the task of distributing a meeting summary to those you did not invite who need to be informed.
2. What is the Agenda?
The agenda is a great way to reflect and organize key topics you wish to cover, establishing a format for the key beats in the meeting. We recommend that your agenda opens the meeting with a review of open actions from the last meeting and closes the meeting with a verbal summary of the key decisions made. If appropriate, solicit input for topics to engage participants prior to the meeting and to ensure you surface key concerns to include in the agenda.
3. Who is the “Time Keeper?”
To ensure that you have enough time to cover all topics on the agenda it’s helpful to have one person assigned to be the “time keeper.” While you, the meeting organizer, could do this task, we recommend you request that an attendee play this role so you can focus on the meeting content. Make sure you select someone who will be comfortable stepping in if things go off track. When meetings end on time, you show respect for the value of your attendee’s time.
4. Will I establish a “Parking Lot?”
Sometimes meetings can be “hijacked” by a participant who wishes to raise an issue that is not on the agenda, causing participants to get off topic. In this case, creating a “parking lot” list on a white board or flipchart is a good way to ensure important topics not on the agenda are captured for follow up in a separate discussion or meeting.
5. How will I capture action items?
As the meeting discussion ensues, actions are raised. An Action Point Register is a great place to capture them. We recommend a simple Excel sheet with these column headings:
Action item #
Action item description
Owner
Due date
The Action Point Register can be shared with all participants following the meeting. At the next meeting you can open with a review of the register so that you maintain accountability and ensure actions are recorded as “on track” or “off track.” For an action that is “off track” we recommend you capture additional actions in the register that will get it back on track.
6. How should I close the meeting?
At the end of each meeting we recommend that you verbally summarize the key takeaways from the meeting. The summary should be endorsed by all in attendance, and stated in a way that highlights the impact to the business.
For example, “In today’s meeting, we decided that we will expand the scope of the project to include X, Y, and Z in response to external customer research findings. We defined the new scope change and revised the project plan to maintain on-time delivery of the project, while maintaining our quality goals and staying within our original budget.”
The summary is a headline that can be used to update people who did not attend the meeting to create a sense of transparency with non-attendees. Now, when you or any of your attendees do run into your manager in the hallway after the meeting, you will have a great way to quickly share the key actions and highlight their impact on the business.
Lee Epting is co-author of COMPOSURE: The Art of Executive Presence and has held executive positions in the world’s largest technology companies.
