Why English teachers lead better meetings than most managers
Short answer: they’ve been trained to not be boring, and you haven’t.
To be more precise, they’ve been trained on how to keep people’s attention for a longer amount of time than usual by using specific activities, because that’s what their profession requires.
If the students buzz off, they don’t learn nor remember anything.
From a teacher’s perspective, that’s failure.
The same applies to meetings: when participants engage more with their mobile phones than with you, you are failing.
So what can you learn from good English teachers when it comes to engaging with your meeting participants?
Enters the CELTA — Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults.
A few years ago, I was working at an English training center for adults.
I attended one of the most engaging meeting I’d ever had — lead by one of our CELTA certified teacher.
He kept everyone on their toes during the whole meeting.
After the meeting, I took him aside and asked him what his “secret” to leading engaging meetings was.
He said “Meetings should be fun. That’s what the CELTA teaches you: how to make a class fun. You guys played games all along, and I spoke very little. That’s why you liked it.”
Counter-intuitive, isn’t it?
Prior to that, I never thought of business meetings as the right venue to “have fun”.
In fact, I thought “having fun” and “having a business meeting” were just incompatible.
Turns out I was wrong.
We had fun in that meeting, but we also understood and remembered the key important points he made.
So, do you have to take the CELTA training to know how to do that?
Probably not — it is a 4–5 weeks full time training, and most of you probably don’t have the time to take it.
Instead, let me spare you the time (and pain).
Here are the key actionable lessons I learned from CELTA certified teachers that you can adapt to your business settings — so that people start enjoying your meetings a little bit more!
1. Prepare your meeting like teachers prepare for their class
All good CELTA teachers will tell you that they start with 2 simple questions:
- What’s the learning outcome?
2. What lesson plan will achieve that outcome?
When I mentor other people to become better leaders, I often ask them to explain to me what the outcome of their meeting is.
Often times, they show me the meeting agenda…
The outcome of a meeting is not to go through an agenda.
The agenda is just like the index of a book: it says what you will talk about, and in which order.
The outcome is more like what you want a reader to remember and feel at the end of the book.
That’s what you should start with: what do you want participants to remember (information) and feel (emotions) at the end of your meeting?
Only then do you come up with the agenda, and the details of what section should be like — i.e. the equivalent of a lesson plan.
But before they come up with a lesson plan, teachers need to know what the constraints of the class will be.
And that’s what you need to do next.
2. Identify the meeting constraints
Teachers need to know:
- How long they have to teach a class
- How many students will be in that class
- What is the English level of the students (even? Uneven? Beginner? Intermediate? etc.)
You should do the same (replace “English level” by “level of experience”).
Even if you are the one who decides how long the meeting will be, strive to make the meeting as short as you can.
Focus on the delivery of your “meeting outcome” more than on filling up time, since people usually enjoy leaving a meeting earlier than expected rather than later.
One extra step you will have to do (that teachers don’t need to do) is to decide who should be in the meeting.
Of course, you can only do that if you’ve decided what the meeting outcome was in the first place…
You are clear on your outcome.
You know how long you have, how many participants will attend and what their experience level is like.
You now need to decide what each step of your meeting will be like.
3. Based on the outcome and the constraints, design a lesson (meeting) plan
As a general rule, an engaging meeting will often look like this:
- Start with a warm-up activity (5 min — keep it short and punchy)
- Review anything you need from the previous meeting with an activity (this is optional and could be your warm-up)
- Share the agenda if there’s more than one point you need to make (1 min — CELTA teachers don’t usually give the class agenda to students, this is where the business practice differs a bit from the teaching practice)
- Deliver your meeting outcome (bulk of the time allocated to the meeting)
- Close by either eliciting the key points you need participants to remember and remind who is accountable for doing what until next meeting (5 min)
This gives you a skeleton to “fill in”.
Filling part (4) is probably the most challenging, because you have to deliver your meeting outcome in a way that is engaging.
Enter meeting activities.
4. Fill in your meeting plan with engaging activities
This is where people usually get confused.
It is also where most of the meeting time is just wasted.
While activities aren’t suitable for all the things you need to communicate (if you just need to inform the team about something, you probably don’t need an activity), they are not used enough to make people feel like “this was worth my time”.
To make it worth your people’s time, start using every meeting as an opportunity to:
- Train your people on something (this should be done with activities)
- Make your people bond together even more (this should be done with activities)
- Motivate your people (this should be when you actually speak and tell a story)
Say you have 40 minutes for the meat of your meeting.
Depending on the group size, you could split that into 2 simple activities of 15 minutes each, sparing 5 minutes to debrief for each.
Or you could go for a 20 minutes activity followed by a 20 minutes Q&A session.
There are many possibilities, but the point is this: don’t spend the bulk of your meeting just talking and going through slides.
Make people participate by designing engaging activities that help them learn something new or get them to bond better together!
That’s all folks, those 4 simple steps will make the quality of your meetings go through the roof!
As with many things, it’s easier said than done.
Just reading this article won’t do you any good.
Instead, pick your notepad and start preparing your next meeting.
Here are the 4 steps again:
1. Prepare your meeting like teachers prepare for their class
2. Identify the meeting constraints
3. Based on the outcome and the constraints, design a lesson (meeting) plan
4. Fill in your meeting plan with engaging activities
There is much more I could share about the actual techniques of running activities, how to run an effective brainstorming session, or even how to handle difficult participants during a meeting.
If you’re interested in becoming better at meeting management, just reach out to me or leave a comment.
I’d be more than happy to help by sharing experience or giving constructive feedback.
For now, have a happy meeting!
