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When you hear people talk about meetings what do you normally hear?  Maybe, “a waste of time” or “nothing productive ever comes out of our meetings.”  I’m not ripping on the complainers because actually they have a point.  Often times there’s no focus during a meeting.  There is a lot of rambling about trivial issues and the important issues aren’t even addressed.  So, with all this negative energy surrounding meetings, I thought it would be helpful to discuss what it takes to run an effective meeting.  That is a meeting that people actually want to attend. 

From my experience there are three key steps to running an effective meeting and oddly enough none of the steps occur during the meeting itself.  That might seem a little strange, but I promise that if you take care of the three steps before the meeting, the meeting will take care of itself. 

First you must care enough to prepare, in detail, before the meeting.  Second, you must care enough about the members of your team to help them effectively prepare for the meeting.  Third, you must care enough about others and their success that you follow up on their progress after the meeting to help them achieve their objective. 

The common thread in all three of these steps is that you care.  You actually care about yourself and your time.  You care about the members of your team, their success and time.  And you care about the subject matter being discussed.  If you’re missing any of those three, it makes sense to reconsider whether a meeting is even necessary. 

Preparing for a Meeting
So let’s first look at what you need to do to properly prepare for a meeting.  When doing your preparation, try to identify the results that you want to accomplish from the meeting.  Important – that is not the same as the agenda.  An agenda simply lists what you intend to discuss during the meeting.  Going back to one of the main complaints of ineffective meetings, that issues get discussed but then nothing gets decided on, you instead need to come up with an ideal outcome for each item on the agenda.  That way when the topic is brought up during the meeting, you’re ready to discuss what needs to be done which moves you towards your desired result. 

Preparing Your Team Members
What can you do to make sure that your team members are prepared?  What I do is simply send everyone a proposed agenda for the meeting well in advance of the meeting so that they can do research and form an opinion or ideas of their own before the meeting even begins.  Then, once you’ve prepared and you’ve helped your team members prepare, you don’t have to worry about the meeting.  The meeting will take care of itself.  All you need to do at the meeting is to be clear about what needs to get done, who’s going to do it and when it will be completed.  So, once you’ve established the who, the what and the when, the last step that you need to do is follow up. 

Follow Up
How often, after a meeting, do you go back to your workspace and forget that a meeting even occurred?  If you’re like most people the answer is pretty often.  That’s why it’s so important to immediately send out an email after the meeting recapping who agreed to do what by when.  Then continue to follow up on a daily, weekly or monthly basis to track their progress and to offer help. 

So remember, the common elements in any successful meeting are that you effectively prepare, you coach your team members to come prepared and you follow up on the progress being made.  I strongly encourage you to respect the time of the people that you’ve been entrusted with and take their development seriously by running effective meetings.

Be Free! 

David Meyers
COO