Transcript: 6 Tips for Meaningful Meetings

Hello and welcome.   I’m glad to have you with me. Our topic today is a question you may have found yourself asking: are all these meetings really necessary?  Or have you said, “All of these meetings are absolutely killing me!”?

Managers have to go to meetings all the time and, frankly, it’s not just managers. It’s everybody, all of us, we constantly seem like we are living in this never ending stream of meetings that may or may not have any use whatsoever.

Let me ask you a few questions so you can be thinking about this.  What do your meetings actually look like? Do you find that your meetings actually start on time? Or do you, like I often do, have a meeting that someone else scheduled, I’m there on time, and guess what; we’re not starting on time.  I even made sure I was there on time, and actually a few minutes early.

I have noted in company after company, meetings that are supposed to be held at a specific time never happen. It’s amazing how many times people don’t get there on time.  I’m not talking only about outside meetings.  I’m talking about internal team meetings where there’s really no excuse for people not to be on time.   Yet they don’t start on time, and if you watch the clock, you’ll see that the meetings are five, ten minutes late.   And do they end on time?  Well, often times not.  It amazes me how many of these meetings go on and on and on and nothing really gets accomplished.

Let me ask you another question. When you go into meetings, would you say that 50% of your meetings have a written agenda?  How about 75% of the meetings? 80%? Or is it more like what I’ve seen, with less than 5% of meetings having any written agenda?  So, in other words, we’re just going to figure it out once we get in the meeting what we need to do.

This makes no sense, but it happens over and over every day.  To me, this is plainly and simply a lack of leadership on the person who called the meeting.

In addition, you go into meeting after meeting where lateness is so expected that there’s no locking the door to the meeting room.   It’s like an open door and we’ll wait ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, or whatever it turns out to be.  All of this is wasted time and productivity, but yet we do it over and over again.

Most people draw the conclusion that meetings aren’t essential.  But yet, sometimes meetings really are necessary. There are times when you really need to get the team together and solve a problem.  Or you need to share information that you’ve gathered.  Meetings can be very essential and productive when they’re used the right way.

But the problem I have had over the years, I fully admit, is my bias that I hate unnecessary meetings.   There’s nothing that I hate worse than having a regularly-scheduled meeting where there’s nothing to talk about.  It’s just so easy to do, and I think we do it a lot of times because we want to protect a particular time slot on the calendar.  Yet, when we don’t have anything to talk about, we should cancel the meeting so other people can reschedule and take advantage of that time.

But because it is a standing meeting, often times we’ll go ahead with the meeting.  Once we get there we say, ‘Well, we don’t really have much to talk about today.  Let’s review where we were last time.’

In reality, what we’re saying is that we’re all disorganized and it is probably a good thing that we put it on our calendar or else we probably wouldn’t get together.

This is the kind of thing that can drive highly motivated employees nuts.  So if you’re the manager, you’re the leader of your team and your group, I think you have to be more disciplined when it comes to holding meetings and holding people accountable in those meetings.

Today, I want to talk about how you can create more mojo as a manager and how you can begin to have productive and good meetings.  Maybe you haven’t been introduced to a good meeting, and I think that that seems to be the problem with most people.  They’ve never seen meetings that were handled in a productive way.  So I’m going to give you a few tips that you can use to make your next meeting productive.

Here are a couple of my tips.

1. The first thing that you should do with any meeting is that you, as the organizer, must create an agenda. The agenda should be oriented around objectives. In other words, what are you going to accomplish in the meeting?  Don’t surprise people with what you are going to talk about. You need to prepare them so they’ll come to the meeting prepared to address the questions and solve the objective.
   1. Email that agenda ahead of time so everyone can look at it, but if you don’t have the opportunity to get it mailed ahead of time, at least have it copied so that everybody will know exactly what they’re going to talk about.
   2. Now, your agenda should also have specific time limits associated with each of the topics. This way, you’ll keep your meeting moving forward faster so that everybody can be productive.
   3. Here’s another great tip for a very productive meeting. Assign somebody in that meeting as the note taker for everybody.  Have somebody who’s making sure they’re taking meticulous notes and can distribute those notes after the meeting.  It’s really helpful when you can go back and look at a meeting and all the discussion that went on and things that may be forgotten aren’t.  When you can read it, it makes that meeting more productive and allows you to keep moving forward.  Over a period of time, the ability to have written documentation can help you understand and identify areas where you’ve got opportunity to improve.
      1. But if you have a note taker, prepare them. Tell them what you want them to do.   Ask them to keep up with key points. Make sure they are clear that what’s most important for them, as the note taker, is to keep track of the action items.  Ask them to clearly identify each action item and who committed to complete that item.  When the summary of the meeting is distributed, everybody has the action item they’re supposed to be taking care of and it’s in writing.   I promise you, it’s infinitely more likely that they’re going to get it done because team members don’t want to go to the next meeting and say they didn’t do it.  It allows you to hold people accountable.  When note taking is not done, how can you hold them accountable?  They can always claim, “I honestly don’t remember that. I’m sorry; I’ll do better next time.”   All that does is create frustration for the leader.  So assign a note taker, track action items, assign them to parties and then make sure that’s emailed afterwards.
   4. Here’s another idea that I really love with regard to meetings and I think it’s a great team building technique if you want to try it yourself. Let other team members than you, as the boss, lead the meeting on occasion. They should conduct the meeting.  The reason for this is multi-benefited to you.
      1. Here’s the first thing it’s going to do. Number one, it gives them the confidence that they can lead in front of their team members. That’s a cool thing.
      2. Number two, it shows the team that you’re willing to involve everybody, so don’t just let the same team member lead when you don’t. Rotate it.  Let other people have an opportunity, and make sure they prepare the agenda and assign the note taker before the meeting so you can keep up with what’s going on. You’ll be amazed with how much more productive you are, as the leader, if you let one of your team members conduct the meeting.  When you are also sitting in the meeting, you can offer opinions without having to worry about missing something or staying on the agenda.
   5. And when you have an agenda, the note taker is just one aspect. There is one other assignment that needs to be done, and that is to have a time keeper that keeps everybody on the agenda.  If you need to limit the time of discussion by someone, than do it and let the time keeper make sure they are limiting. This will keep the conversation going back and forth with everybody contributing.  It will let everybody understand this is a team effort, and it’s not just the boss calling a meeting and telling everybody what they’re going to do.  I’ve found over the years that’s what most meetings wind up being.  The boss calls the meeting, doesn’t have an agenda, doesn’t have a note taker, doesn’t have a time keeper and so the meeting just becomes ‘The boss’s agenda of what they want team members to do.’    There are better ways to do that.  You could go one-on-one to each person, rather than wasting the whole team’s time by holding a meeting.
   6. The last tip I have is the one I find most people struggle with the most, and that’s being to meetings on time. I really believe that more of us should have a two minute window for late arrivers.   If you’re not in the room by two minutes after the start time, the door is locked and late arrivers are out of the meeting.  I promise you that just doing that one time to somebody will make them be there five minutes earlier the next time.   When they’re not in the meeting, you can handle that by a one-on-one with that individual.   Maybe they will have a good excuse. But frankly, I’ve found that most of the time, people are disorganized and not paying attention. We need to hold people accountable to time or else time is meaningless.

If you’ll use these few tips, I think you’ll begin to turn meetings into productive, essential occasions that are beneficial to everybody, instead of being free-wheeling chunks of time when nobody accomplishes a thing — except waste time. I hope they will help you.

Have a great day. I look forward to chatting with you next time.

In the meantime, make sure you have meaningful meetings with your team!