12 Tips for Productive Meetings
Lynn Harris
Most managers and leaders spend too much time running or attending meetings. One option is to have fewer meetings. Another is to ensure that the meetings you do have are productive and worthwhile.
Bad meetings are a huge waste of time. Here’s why:
They have no clearly agreed and understood purpose e.g. is the meeting for information exchange, idea generation, decision making?
The agenda is vague and rarely conveys enough information for people to decide if and why they need to be there.
They are too long and boring, which is why people text and e-mail during the meeting.
No one makes time for the necessary preparation.
An abysmally small number of achievements and decisions are made in the allotted time.
There is a lack of clarity on key actions emerging from the meeting with an absence of what, who and by when.
They are a perfect showcase for poor interpersonal skills e.g. The person who talks too much, or gets defensive, or doesn’t listen, or insists on demonstrating how much they know.
They lack good facilitation, drift off subject and run over time.
PowerPoint presentations are overused and badly presented.
Challenge your assumption that you need a meeting and at least give some thought to how you might achieve all or part of what you need without getting people together. Eight people meeting for three hours is a 24-hour meeting. That’s 24 hours away from actual productive work where you get stuff done.
Productive Meetings (virtual and in-person)
If you decide you do need to get together, make your meetings worthwhile and more enjoyable by following these simple guidelines – they are not rocket science, but in my experience, they make a real difference if followed:
1. Agree the purpose of your meeting. If it’s just information exchange you probably don’t need to meet. You should be doing real outcome focused work together e.g. solving problems, making decisions, creating new ideas.
2. Prepare. The quality of your preparation is in direct proportion to the quality of your meeting e.g. send agenda and pre-reads in advance so that participants have enough time to read them. If meeting participants arrive unprepared do not waste time bringing them up to speed – they may need to excuse themselves from agenda items which they are not prepared for.
3. Create a clear agenda and circulate in advance e.g.
4. Invite as few people as possible. Be clear about who should attend, their purpose for being there and if they need to stay for the whole meeting.
5. If you have guest speakers, ensure you and they understand the purpose, process and desired outcomes of their session.
6. At the start of the meeting, agree the agenda and add ‘any other business’ with agreed times for extra agenda items.
7. Appoint someone to keep you on track and record action items.
8. Be clear what you want from the other meeting participants. At the start of each agenda item, the person responsible clearly states: “The purpose of this agenda item is...the reason it’s important is…and what I’d from all of you is...”
9. Ensure each agenda item ends with clear actions, who is accountable and when it needs to be done. Record these action items and decide the method to update progress e.g. Check action items at the beginning of each meeting.
10. Don’t use PowerPoint unless you are sure it adds value to any meeting presentation. Remember, people cannot read and listen at the same time. Do you want them to read a slide or listen to you? (For more guidance on how to use PowerPoint effectively read Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds)
11. If you have long meetings (and by long, I mean anything over 55 minutes) take regular breaks. Even better, keep your meetings short.
12. Develop the skills of concise proposals, clear reasoning, listening, asking good questions and finding common ground. If anyone lacks these skills, invest in a team coach to help you - it will save time, reduce frustration, improve working relationships and result in better outcomes. It only takes one unskillful person to wreck a meeting.
You don’t have to follow all of these guidelines, but the more you do employ the more productive and enjoyable your meetings are likely to be. You might like to start by using these 12 tips as a tool to assess the effectiveness of your last meeting – how many of the guidelines did you actually follow? Then agree which ones would make the most positive difference to your meetings and start to practice them.
Lynn Harris is a founding Partner with Leadership Mindset Partners www.leadershipmindsetpartners.com