Typically, people don’t love meetings. You might be one of them. You might dread meetings like a visit to the dentist or your annual physical.
You know you’re supposed to do it, but you just want to get it done and over with as fast as possible.
Is that really how you want to view meetings? After all, in the United States alone there is a weekly total of approximately 55 million meetings, equating to a minimum of 11 million meetings daily and over 1 billion meetings annually.
Eleven million daily opportunities to either move the ball forward and draw teams together or continue to create lackluster results.
What if you could begin transform your dreaded meetings immediately? We’ll give you two simple tweaks to start transforming your meetings.
Transformative staff meeting tweak #1: clarify your outcome from the start
When you schedule a meeting, be sure to consider, clarify, and write down the specific outcome of the meeting. Having a written outcome will provide a single, unified purpose for the meeting.
This tweak is aimed at fixing the common problem in meetings of everyone talking in circles with no clear direction. You’ll dramatically reduced time wasted in meetings.…
You’ll have a goal that you’re working towards and a goalpost to constantly assess your progress against throughout the meeting.
Do you need a solution? A better process? Or to reach a consensus? Whatever it is, whittle your focus down to a specific outcome.
For example, if you’re having a staff meeting about the launch of a new project, you could identify a specific outcome of a meeting as the creation of a new project timeline that outlines all of the necessary tasks, assigns responsibilities to team members, and sets specific deadlines for the completion of each task.
Make sure that after you identify the outcome you share that with all who are participating in the meeting. You want to ensure that everyone knows where you’re going so that they can do their best to stay on track.…
As the meeting progresses, you can constantly ask yourself, “How is this working toward the outcome we have identified?” If you can’t answer that question clearly, you need to call the participants back to that outcome.
This is very similar to leadership coaching conversations. In every coaching conversation, we begin by identifying an outcome with the coachee.
Coaches can ask questions like, “What’s the outcome you’d like to achieve in this session?” or “What do you want to get out of this conversation?” or “What topic or issue would you like to focus on today?”
As the conversation progresses, coaches may ask questions like, “How are we doing in making progress toward that goal?” or “Is this helping you gain clarity in the issue you addressed?”
If you’d like to experience just how transformative this style of conversation can be, set up a free 15-minute consultationwith us!
Approach your meetings from this same angle, recognizing that you’re using up time and money by gathering those people in that room. If your discussion isn’t actively moving the ball forward and making progress toward your outcome, redirect the conversation.
This might seem incredibly simple, but it can be incredibly powerful in transforming your staff meetings and reducing wasted time. If you think about it, you probably are regularly in meetings where you don’t know what the outcome is.
Transformative staff meeting tweak #2: clarify action steps before the meeting adjourns
This one may seem painfully obvious. Why wouldn’t you identify action steps? But how often have you been in meetings where you walk out and think to yourself, “Wait, what are we doing?”
Identifying action steps before a meeting adjourns is crucial for ensuring that progress is made and tasks are completed efficiently.
When action steps are not identified and assigned, important tasks can fall through the cracks and projects can stall.
At best, people have to waste time figuring it out on their own later. At worst, you risk that they never put the time into thinking through action steps or do the same work as someone else.
This means you must set aside time for identifying action results in your meeting. Do you want to actually accomplish something as a result of your meeting? Then set actions steps! It really is that simple.
For example, let’s say that your team is planning an large customer appreciation event and has a meeting to discuss the details.
To identify action steps before the meeting adjourns, you could create an agenda that includes items such as venue selection, budget planning, and marketing strategies.
During the meeting, you should allocate time for each of these items and have team members volunteer or be assigned the various tasks like researching potential venues, proposing a marketing plan to reach customers, working up a detailed budget for catering and marketing, etc.
Everyone must leave with clear next steps from the meeting in order to move forward.
At the end of the meeting, the facilitator should make sure to review who is responsible for each action step and what the timeline for completion is. This way, everyone is held accountable for their part.
Ideally, you should be using task management software like Trello, Asana, Monday, Wrike, Basecamp, etc. During the meeting you can assign tasks and deadlines to ensure that everything gets accomplished.
Once everyone is clear on who is responsible for what and when it needs to be done, the meeting can be adjourned.
These two simple tweaks: clarifying an outcome from the start and clearly identifying action steps, can have a drastic and transformational impact on the effectiveness of your meetings.
If you’re not intentionally using these tweaks in your meetings, why don’t you try this week? We’d love to find out how it works out for you! Let us know on Instagram or Twitter.