Excellent Meetings Every Time
If it’s going to suck, send an email instead.
Ever been in a meeting that felt like a waste of your time? So has everyone else. Ever been in a meeting that really was a waste of your time? So has everyone else.
You will never get that time back.
Building a better meeting
Last week I noticed a poster on the wall of a client’s meeting room. The marvelous author is unlisted and that’s a shame because the content almost brought a tear of joy to my eye. Here is my refinement of the bullets on the playfully titled “How to Meeting” poster I saw there:
- Send an agenda with the meeting invite
- Be on time and read the agenda before attending
- End 5 minutes early
- Stay on topic
- No laptops unless they contribute directly to that meeting
- No smart phones
- Only invite people that need to be there
- If using remote software, turn on your camera
- Be ready to celebrate being wrong
- Enjoy the collaboration and be real
If you stop reading now and bring your version of each of the above 10 ingredients into your meeting creation and participation I’m confident your meetings will be consistently better than the worst meeting experiences you’ve had. For those that are curious, I’ll share my thoughts on each of these tips.
Send an agenda with the meeting invite
What is an agenda? Anything that foreshadows what we expect to accomplish and the order in which we believe it should happen. A few short bullet items are enough. A paragraph or more in general SUCKS.
Nobody wants to read a long agenda that pre-ordains every detail of the meeting.
Where is the room for excitement and flexibility and adventure and collaboration? Leave some room for that.
Just an outline please. You might be wrong so don’t invest too much in telling people about the future which is your meeting; they won’t read it anyways.
Be on time and read the agenda before attending
I worked with a guy, let’s call him Jack because that’s his real name. He was once in the Navy and he told me they taught him this: “if you are on time you are late.”
There is no such thing as fashionably late in a professional setting unless the fashion is to disregard other people’s time. If so, being fashionable SUCKS. Better to start a meeting with everyone feeling respected.
Reading the agenda beforehand? If it’s short, why not? If it’s long? Yeah, that might be too much — but at least look at it.
End 5 minutes early
Why not? Meetings that complete their objectives early are awesome! Meetings that d-r-a-g on after their scheduled time are generally not so awesome. Respect. Respect everyone’s time by keeping an eye on the clock; give a 10 minute warning before the scheduled end and do your part to start wrapping up.
And sometimes wrapping up means recognizing that the meeting objectives will not be met this time and we should shift the discussion into deciding what to do next. Sometimes agreeing to schedule a follow-up discussion with some or all attendees is the smartest thing to do.
Remember that giving people time to get to their next planned event shows respect. Sometimes people have back-to-back events on their calendars and your meeting might make them late to the next event even if it ends on time.
Stay on topic
Do not assume everyone read, remembers, or understands the proposed agenda that was sent out. If you are the meeting organizer, increase your chances of successfully keeping the meeting on topic by reviewing the agenda out loud at the start of the meeting. See the earlier point about keeping the agenda short if you think starting the meeting this way will take too long.
Everyone can help
All participants should be expected to do their part in keeping the meeting on topic track. When the topic or the proposed focus transition sequence stops making sense, shift focus to finding consensus of a better path or revised topic. And then follow this new better agenda.
Remember change is okay; staying the course is the wrong thing to do when it stops making sense.
No laptops unless they contribute directly to that meeting
Projecting something from your computer for all the attendees to see and consider? Guess your computer is directly contributing to the meeting purpose.
Doing some kind of team game where everyone needs to click on things with their computer (this happens — e.g., real-time computer collaboration apps) during the meeting? Guess you need your computer on then — and focused on that one thing.
Joining a meeting remote? Well, guess you need a computer — and you are on the honor system to avoid distracting your attention into matters outside the meeting topic.
But what about multitasking?
There is no Marvel superhero called “The Super Multitasker” and in the real world dividing our attention means giving less of it than our max potential offers. At some level everyone knows this and does not appreciate investing 100% of themselves into a conversation with someone that is investing less than 100% of themselves. It draws energy out of the conversation and out of the room.
Actively dedicating 100% of our attention and engagement to the meeting shows everyone in the room you respect their time so much that you will not risk burdening them with re-explaining details that you might miss while momentarily off-meeting focus: E.g., dealing with an email, a chat window, a memo, something other than the meeting discussion.
Maybe if everyone at the meeting focuses just on the meeting it can go quicker and accomplish more?
No smart phones
Are you focused on the meeting topic and actively engaged and listening and contributing? Or are you looking at your phone?
Phone on vibrate?
Glancing at a number because it might be an important call? Yeah, that can happen and if you choose to do that remember it means there is something more important to you than that meeting and those people in that moment. Glance with full awareness of this reality. That’s the unspoken message received by everyone else in the room.
Only invite people that need to be there
People that are not engaged, don’t see a need for their full engagement, or otherwise are not contributing to the topic and objectives of a meeting can and will lower the energy and collaboration focus of any meeting. Recognize the reality and address it head on. Prune the invite list so the focus and energy have a chance to achieve their max potential.
Everyone there will benefit from these tough choices.
If using remote software, turn on your camera
Okay, let’s be clear: remote meetings always lack the full complement of person to person interaction that being physically in the same room at the same time injects into the event. There is a reason some people still travel for business and why we travel to places on vacation rather than look at Wikipedia photos of destinations like it’s the same thing. Sometimes you have to be there to get the full experience.
When you are not in the room; turn on your camera so people can see your face. Ask that the camera in the room be on so you can see faces too. Faces tell A LOT about engagement and reaction; most of it is subliminal stuff we cannot even put into words. And this stuff matters if you want as many clues as possible on how well a meeting is going towards its objectives and how close you are to the right moment for a pivot. Respect yourself and others enough to acknowledge the reality of this and collectively leverage the trust building opportunities showing your face brings.
Be ready to celebrate being wrong
Do you make mistakes or are you a liar? Okay, now that we have established that you never lie let’s celebrate that we are all fallible and imperfect. Why celebrate this? Because it’s recognition of this that contributes to a meeting’s trust foundation.
When participants trust they can safely be wrong in a meeting and shift ideas during a meeting they are freed to truly engage and consider alternative viewpoints. When we are not afraid of being wrong we are freed to experiment in what we will consider. And experimentation is key to creative processes and the collaboration that all organizations and tapped-in professionals seek. And even in trusting environments nobody likes being the only wrong one. So, take the lead and celebrate a change of mind; celebrate being wrong. Set the tone that it’s okay to experiment a way forward.
Enjoy the collaboration and be real
Have fun! It shows if you do. Why not? If your workplace frowns on this then maybe your workplace sucks or you have assumed something that is not true. Inject some levity into work to make the experience more productive, not more distracting. The right rapport, the right disarming tone; it draws more of the complete person into the room and into the topic. People are amazing when all of the person shows up.
When the right people are in the meeting and the right mix of mirth and stolid professionalism are allowed to blend respectfully a terrific level of expedited insight can flow out. When a complete person is allowed into a meeting the meeting gets the real person.
And being real frees up cognitive resources that are otherwise wasted on playing a role imagined as appropriate for the setting.
So it’s as simple as that?
Perhaps no one can master every detail of planning and executing the best possible meetings. There are just too many variables. But we can all get better at recognizing key ingredients of meetings that work well and then work at bringing them with us when we schedule or attend a meeting.
And no discussion about meetings is complete without sharing a link to possibly the funniest visualization of a teleconference (for the kids this is a meeting with just a phone; yeah weird right). Check it out at YouTube under the title “A Conference Call in Real Life” if you want a chuckle.
Ohh yeah, and if you don’t try to create engaging useful meetings then just send emails. They will be just an ineffective with less effort.
Okay, meeting adjourned. Thanks for your time. Drop a comment with any ideas or reactions you would like to share. We can all learn from each other.