“I’m not exaggerating! It was just another useless meeting that ‘could have been an email’ and just wouldn’t end.”, grumbled my client who runs operations for a healthcare tech firm. No results were produced and he wondered why this cycle kept repeating.
If you’ve felt like this at one point during your career, there’s hope for more effective meetings. You’re not alone and the solutions in this article will help you greatly.
It is mindblowing what levels of madness we can create over time when ineffective habits and rules become common culture and an accepted status quo. Most people I speak to dread endless and unproductive meetings. When they consider what they truly spend their time on and how the time is used, they find a lot of room for improvement.
This reminds me of:
#thismeethingSHOULDHAVEbeenanemail
My client’s leadership team noticed that teams did not collaborate well and performance expectations were missed. When we looked into it, we realized that one component contributing to the sliding performance was how ineffective meetings were run.
The Wider Impact of Effective Meetings:
Strengthen Communication
Effective meetings are the cornerstone of great leadership. As a leader, you need to create an environment where everyone has an opportunity to speak and be heard. Effective team meetings are marked by their ability to help to strengthen communication amongst a team, align expectations, provide clarity on expectations, and achieve specific objectives.
Effective team meetings ensure that everyone is on the same page, tasks are delegated appropriately, and timelines are established. A leader who can facilitate organized and professional meetings is one who is able to inspire their team and foster a collaborative and productive work environment. Scroll down to the meeting tips to see what you can do to practically apply this.
Boost Productivity
In highly effective team meetings, goals are established and expectations are laid out, creating a sense of accountability and urgency among team members. If you run working meetings, you provide a space for collaboration and innovation, where everyone is encouraged to share their thoughts and ideas to achieve common goals right then and there.
As a leader or meeting facilitator on your team, you make meetings run efficiently by being clear about what kind of meeting you have created (is this a workshop-style meeting or a meeting to update, align, split responsibilities, and walk away with clear actions?).
When that expectation is set, you will need to facilitate the meeting and allocate the time adequately to each agenda point so you can achieve the desired outcome within your allotted time. This requires clarity and being intentional about your meetings. Simply scheduling a meeting to have everyone in the room “talk about” a topic will kill your productivity. To stop the bleeding, you need to be specific and intentional.
Facilitate Creative Thinking And Innovation
When meetings are well moderated by their leaders, participants feel more comfortable sharing their ideas, providing feedback, and collaborating with others. This leads to more diverse perspectives, enhanced problem-solving, higher employee engagement, and a greater potential for innovation. By ensuring that meetings are focused, participatory, and productive, you can foster an environment that encourages creative thinking and ultimately drives success for your team or organization.
Provide a safe space to share ideas, take calculated risks, make mistakes, and share opinions without getting shut down or ridiculed. Model this behavior before your team by respectfully listening (actively) to contributions.
Continuous Improvement Through Feedback
Effective meetings can help to identify problems before they become critical issues and enable leaders to take swift action to address them, resulting in improved performance and continuous improvement. Without this, you may struggle to get a handle on what is happening within your organization, and the team may be left feeling confused and frustrated with a lack of direction and a lack of opportunity to contribute in a meaningful way to challenges they can see during their day-to-day activities.
Some leaders have stated that they make it a priority to involve their teams in sharing key challenges and identifying potential solutions because as leaders, they can be far removed from operational challenges. The most successful leaders do not just create passive “open door policies” that put the burden on the employees to share challenges but actively create feedback meetings where they seek open, constructive, and direct feedback to solve challenges early on before they become widely known issues that have a more costly impact.
Establish Alignment
Ineffective meetings are marked by a lack of accomplishment, but more notably, they also have in common that clarity is absent and as a result, alignment is not established. Meetings offer a great opportunity to align priorities and goals and set expectations that restore clarity. With clarity comes focus. The importance of creating clarity and alignment cannot be overstated. It has ripple effects on productivity, engagement, and employee satisfaction, not to mention results.
So, to create alignment you must have clarity first and communicate expectations and check for understanding of such with your team. Listen to the questions your team has and if needed, reiterate or rephrase to create a common understanding.
Promote Inclusion
When you invite meeting participants to share their insights, you enable diverse viewpoints that can lead to potential solutions. This also applies to a one-on-one meeting scenario.
Inclusion means accepting and valuing all members of the team and hearing and acknowledging their viewpoints. By facilitating an inclusive environment, productive meetings not only promote collaboration but also foster a sense of belonging and a shared purpose. This, in turn, strengthens team dynamics, making it easier to work together towards common goals.
Opportunities For Personal Growth
Leaders can use gatherings to identify areas where they need to improve, whether it’s their communication skills or their ability to delegate tasks. Learning to lead productive meetings also helps emerging leaders develop their leadership skills, building their confidence in communicating their ideas and goals with others. This is a great platform to hone your influencing skills, too.
6 Quick Tips For Effective Formal Meetings:
1. Have a Clear Agenda
Team meetings are a key component of any organization. However, if they are not structured effectively, they are a waste of time. That is why having clear meeting agendas is critical. The purpose of the agenda is to set a clear expectation of what you want to accomplish together, and which topics you want to discuss.
Your agenda also allocates adequate time to each agenda item and helps you to moderate the meeting. With a well-defined agenda, it is easier to keep the conversation on track and avoid getting sidetracked. Additionally, it ensures that everyone is prepared for the meeting and can come ready with ideas and questions.
2. Determine Who Should Attend
Having too many attendees can kill productivity, while not having the right contributors as attendees can result in important decisions being made without key stakeholders, or even hinder decision-making or progress.
To further maximize attendance, it’s important to send out a meeting agenda prior to the meeting. Your agenda should outline the meeting’s purpose, expected outcomes, and the role attendees play in achieving the meeting objective or their expected contributions to specific agenda points.
3. Allocate Time
Of course, you will need to set a time on the calendar, but that’s not what I am referring to here. I have seen firsthand that regardless of how far in advance you plan, meetings aren’t attended because of advance planning but because of the perceived value behind them.
One way to make meetings valuable or effective is by allocating time to each agenda item based on the priority the topic has in the organizational context. For example, does the topic remove a roadblock on your project or is the agenda item simply an update? Allocate time proportionate to the significance of the item, not according to how long people prefer to talk about it or by simply allocating equal time slots and not accounting for agenda items that may stir discussions.
4. Learn to Facilitate
One of the biggest challenges faced in team meetings is sticking to the meeting objective. Effective meetings have skilled facilitators who take charge of the meeting and ensure the team is staying on track.
It is easy for the conversation to veer off into unrelated topics, resulting in precious time being wasted. Another side-effect is that unproductive meetings reduce trust in your ability to lead and in the value of attending your meeting.
I’ve stated above that it can be helpful to set time limits for each agenda item, but that alone won’t help you when you have allocated time for discussion and the debate gets heated or some members dominate the conversation. This is where you have to learn facilitation techniques to keep the balance and steer the team toward the common objective.
5. Determine Action Items
Close the loop at the end of your meeting by tying loose ends via specific action items or next steps and specific owners who are taking responsibility for these actions. It’s essential to set a plan for how you’ll follow up on these items, too. Without proper follow-up, the discussion during the meeting might end in oblivion, without any significant results. At the end of your meeting, state the time frame for follow-up on the action items or assign due dates to individual actions.
6. Encourage Feedback
To continue to improve your meetings, ensure high engagement and allow yourself to grow, openly ask for feedback. Your team’s input is valuable and can help improve the productivity of future meetings.
One way to encourage feedback is to ask specific questions such as, “What could have made today’s meeting more productive?”, “What could I have done differently to facilitate the meeting?” or even “Is there anything you have seen in other organizations you have worked for that could help us?”
Truly listening and implementing your team’s feedback shows that you value their input and are committed to working together to achieve success. This will also contribute to greater ownership and engagement because we tend to involve ourselves more when our voices are heard and we sense belonging.
Recap
After considering the impact of team meetings, their impact on your success as a leader, and tips to keep them effective, it’s clear that structured, well-planned meetings can have a significant impact on your ability to drive results.
While some gatherings may be more informal than others, every meeting should have an objective and an agenda to set expectations, guide the conversation and ensure that attendees stay focused. Remember to foster a culture of trust and respect within the organization that encourages open discussion during meetings. Doing so allows everyone on the team to express their views freely and leave feeling heard.
To truly maximize your potential, you need to learn the critical skill of facilitation to run effective meetings. Effective meetings have the power to create alignment, boost productivity, drive engagement, solve challenges, and achieve meaningful results for the organization by using meeting time in a way that is considered valuable.
(LC033)
