Most of your work should occur outside of the meeting. The key to a short and effective meeting is to do a lot of preparation before the meeting and documenting the meeting minutes and decisions after the meeting.
Chaos often occurs in meetings when the purpose of the meeting is unclear. Clearly identifying the purpose of every attendee helps to remove ambiguity as well.
Often people’s undesirable personality traits tend to appear in meetings because of their own personal concerns and issues. If you are consistent in how you document meeting minutes, take attendance, assign and report on tasks, the meeting participants will not be able to take it personally when their potentially counter-productive behavior is neutralized by your meeting management techniques. They will be positively reinforced for productive and collaborative behavior and negatively reinforced for less productive behavior.
To help you with this, I have provided you my Meeting Minutes and Agenda template download for free. This primary tool will help you and the meeting participants stay focused is the meeting agenda.
In this template you will have the following basic layout:
- Meeting agenda
- Meeting Minutes from previous meetings (if applicable)
- Updated issue logs
- Updated action items
This template will be useful for managing one-time meetings or a series of meetings.
This post will cover the preparation work that I recommend for meetings. I will post future posts about the facilitation of the meeting and the post-meeting documentation and follow-up.
PREPARATION
Identify the Meeting Objective:
First, determine the meeting objective. Why are you having the meeting? Will the objectives be reached within one meeting or will a series of meetings be needed to reach the objective? Please note, this may change after you meet with your stakeholders and decide to modify the objective. Outlining the objective will just help everyone know why they have been invited and to prepare for the meeting.
Get the Right People in the Meeting:
Invite the right people to the meeting. You would think this is an easy step. It is actually one of the more difficult steps.
It may take more than one meeting to get the right stakeholders in the meeting. After your first meeting, you may realize you didn’t have the right meeting participants. This is why determining the right people to invite to the meeting is the next important step as you prepare for your meeting.
There are a lot of psychological and political considerations as you plan for your meeting. Did you invite the right people? Will someone be offended if they were left out of the meeting? Will you need to find away to gently not invite someone by explaining formally or informally why the person was not included? Do you just invite unnecessary people to keep the peace?
Often, more people than necessary are invited to meetings because of these psychological and political considerations. This is where a lot of the differing agendas become more visible in the meetings. It is also why it is difficult to keep a meeting focused with so many people in a meeting.
It may take more than one meeting to get the right stakeholders in the meeting. After your first meeting, you may find that you needed to include different people due to the subject matter. You may need a more high level person or need a person who is more familiar with detailed subject matter that was not identified when the meeting was first setup. Often, one meeting will blossom to many more.
Be patient with this. This is a natural occurrence. As you delve into the meeting agenda and objectives, the initial invitees will be able to determine if they were the right people to be there. If they are not, they often will recommend or suggest additional people or remove themselves as a contributor. If you are clear when communicating your meeting objective, the meeting participants will gladly and accurately provide you their feedback on who really should be in the meeting to further or complete the meeting objective.
A helpful way to ensure the right meeting participants are invited is to email a very detailed summary of the meeting objective and to ask the people you are inviting if they are the right people to attend. Also ask if they are not, to please let you know and to suggest someone in their stead. Also ask if they think someone else should be invited to the meeting. Repeat this process to any new names provided to you until you feel you have a complete list of initial meeting invitees. Trust me, making sure that right people are in the meeting will help ensure the meeting objective is accomplished without having to have unnecessary follow-up meetings. If there are follow-up meetings required, the objective will hopefully be focused on reporting on the completion status of the action plan identified during the first meeting.
Define the Roles for the Meeting:
Once you have determined and finalized the list of invitees, it will be important to define roles for the meeting. There are some thought leaders who have an exhaustive list of meeting roles that can be identified. I have found that it is often difficult to assign all of these various roles to meeting participants. I have found that if you have the following four roles identified, you should have enough to have a very effective and productive meeting:
1. The Meeting Facilitator: The meeting facilitator leads the meeting discussion. They set the tone and determine the momentum of the meeting. The main role of the Meeting Facilitator is to keep the group focused on meeting objective. The Meeting Facilitator should remain neutral and provide a safe forum for all meeting participants to participate and share their authentic viewpoints and input. The Meeting Facilitator will be responsible for keeping track of the time of the meeting. If the meeting is starting to veer away from the overall objective, the Meeting Facilitator will tactfully bring the conversation back to focus. The Meeting Facilitator may need to identify formal issues and action items that cannot be resolved or completed during the meeting. These issues and action items should be assigned to meeting participants with a due dates for completion. The assigned parties will be responsible for communicating their findings to the rest of the team, typically by email.
If the Meeting Facilitator is also a contributor, they it is helpful to preface any contributing statement during the meeting with a qualifying statement indicating they are currently speaking as a contributor and not a facilitator.
2. The Meeting Note Taker: The meeting note taker will take notes on what is discussed in the meeting. The note taker should identify who said what in their meeting notes. The note taker will separately record to do’s (action items) and issues identified in the meeting. The meeting facilitator will make sure the action items and issues are assigned to an owner with a targeted due date for completion.
Post-meeting, the Meeting Note Taker will email the meeting minutes, action items list, and issues list to the meeting participants. Even after this initial post-meeting phase, the Meeting Note Taker will be responsible for continuing to collect and consolidate the work and research done to complete assigned issues and action items. For example, after receiving an email about a completed action item or resolved issue by the assigned party, the Meeting Note Taker will take this information and append it to the original Issues and Action Items list they compiled. The Meeting Note Taker and Meeting Facilitator will work closely together to make sure all updates are known to the Meeting Facilitator. The Meeting Facilitator will determine if additional follow-up meetings are needed or if the meeting objectives can be completed without any additional meetings.
Please note, often the facilitator is the note taker. It is easier if this is not the case, but it is feasible to be both. I have often played both roles in a meeting.
3. Meeting Contributors: Meeting Contributors are subject matter experts from different areas that will provide knowledge and information that will help the meeting participants make informed and strategically sound decisions.
4. Meeting Stakeholders: Meeting Stakeholders may not have anything to contribute but they or the department/area they represent may be impacted by decisions made during the meeting. The Stakeholders want to be informed of any decisions that would impact their represented department/area.
In an ideal world, these meeting roles would be clear and identified before the meeting and communicated to the meeting participants at the start of the meeting. If you are a meeting participant of a meeting with no roles defined, you can still help the meeting by becoming an unofficial meeting facilitator. You can help set the tone and momentum of the meeting.
Summary
It may seem like a lot of work to do even before the meeting starts. I have been able to get very large meetings covering a wide array of topics and projects, even international conference calls, to be completed in 15-20 minutes. These meetings are able to cover a lot of content and map out clear action plans. The results of these well-planned meetings produces very successful results. The meetings are drama-free, productive, and fun. I hope that these tools help you in your upcoming meetings!