Effective Leadership: How to Conduct Better Meetings

Meetings are an often-dreaded, but highly useful tool for most businesses. Email, messages and informal conversations are helpful, but they can’t completely replace a sit-down (or phone/video) meeting. Whatever type of business you are in, a well-conducted meeting can do a lot to improve your productivity, team work (and hopefully the bottom line!)

Picture this: You get an email that says you need to be at a meeting to discuss your company’s new product. The meeting time and place are given, but no other details. You arrive at the meeting five minutes early. Fifteen minutes later, the person who called the meeting rushes in with a stack of jumbled sheets and starts to sort them. No agenda is handed out. The video equipment is not working properly and nothing can be seen on the wall screen. A talkative co-worker hijacks the meeting with unrelated chatter. Generalities abound, and you are asked to take on a task, but it’s not really clear what the budget or time frame is. The meeting lasts two hours, and everyone looks a bit comatosed when they leave, grumbling about their already huge work loads.

Nightmare, yes?

Have you been in meetings like this? It doesn’t have to be this way. I’ve been in meetings that were the polar opposite, and where everyone left feeling energized and enthusiastic about the future. Running a meeting well involves some skill, but it’s not difficult if you keep in mind some basic suggestions.

The agenda — your best tool…

What should you include on the agenda? I’d suggest:

• The time (start and end) and date, of course, plus the location.
• The meeting topic(s), and overall goal(s).

Also, send out a draft agenda before the meeting and ask for suggestions. And, once it’s finalized, print enough for everyone invited to the meeting, plus a couple of extras.

Use it during the meeting. It’s also a good idea to have a plan as to how much time to allot to each topic in the meeting. And keep the meeting as short as possible to achieve the desired goals. If the meeting is going to be longer than an hour, plan for a break midway, or split it up into two meetings.

Come prepared…

Here’s a quick checklist to help you seamless start and run your meeting:

• If you or a colleague are bringing materials to share, make sure you have enough for everyone present.
• Using audio-visual aids? Make sure you, or someone else at the meeting, knows how to work the equipment.
• Get there early to set it up and make sure everything’s working properly.
• Make a list ahead of time of all you need to bring (and everything that should be waiting for you in the room), so that you don’t waste valuable time tracking down a missing item.
• Also, make sure someone (other than the moderator) can take notes and share them with the group via email once the meeting has finished.

Set a positive tone…

Start the meeting with a funny story, or with good news about your company or work group. Let your colleagues know that everyone’s input is valued, and that you are looking forward to working together to achieve the meeting goals.

It’s often good to have everyone’s voice heard at the start. So, if it fits your agenda and topics, go around the table or room and ask everyone to give a brief (30-second) summary of what they’ve been working on, or what their personal goal for the meeting is, etc. We did this at our weekly meeting at a non-profit I worked for, and it was a great way to start.

Keep it moving on the rails!

Stick to the agenda, or in other words, don’t allow people to hijack the discussion. It’s sometimes easy to get off topic, but the role of the meeting moderator is to make sure that the meeting covers the agenda, and accomplishes the stated goals.

Keep track of the time, and if you realize that you are 20 minutes into something that was supposed to be a 10 minute discussion, point this out to the group, and let them know that you need to move on to the next topic. Or, in some situations, if a discussion needs to be completed in order to accomplish the next goal, seek input from your colleagues.

Ask if they think it’s more important to finish this discussion, and perhaps put off another topic for next time.

Make an action plan…

It’s good to plan to come out of a meeting with specific assigned action items. As you work through the meeting, when tasks come up, ask for volunteers, and establish the time frame for completion. Make sure the person taking notes includes this on the meeting’s minutes. (It’s also not a bad idea to create a table or summary sheet that lists the planned tasks with staff names and date to be completed.) As the moderator, make sure that the work load is spread evenly among colleagues… don’t let that gung-ho newbie volunteer for everything!

Summarize the outcome…

At the end of the meeting, quickly run back through the meeting outcomes — what is planned, and who is taking on what tasks. Make sure to thank everyone for their time and input.

To schedule or not to schedule?

If your meeting is part of a regularly scheduled series of meetings (like a weekly sales meeting), make sure to remind everyone of the next date/time. Otherwise, check in with your colleagues about the time frame for meeting again. Two weeks? Two months? Agree on that and, if it’s easy, plan for the same day/time every two weeks (or months).

However, if scheduling is going to take more than a couple of minutes to discuss (and possibly a lot longer due to complicated schedules), let everyone know that you’ll use an online scheduling tool instead. Don’t sabotage the good work that was done at the meeting by making everyone sit around for an extra 5+ minutes painfully trying to find a common time to meet again!

I’ve sat though countless meetings in my roles in organizations, both for-profit and non-profit. I’ve also run a lot of meetings, and have received praise for doing so. A well-run meeting can help improve productivity and ideally also strengthen the bonds between people. Hopefully some of these suggestions from my experience will be useful for you!

Val Blaha is a music instructor, multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter based in McMinnville, Oregon. She performs solo and with her duo Luminous Heart.

Val has been teaching since 2001, and loves helping people follow their dreams of learning to play an instrument.

Discover more about Val at valblaha.com.