You’ve gathered all the right people for your meeting. You put together a solid agenda and you’ve distributed all the appropriate pre-meeting materials. You’ve led a good discussion, generated reasonable participation across the group, and even managed to keep everyone on the agenda timeline. Now you have exactly five minutes to organize the next steps.
This is when things start to fall apart. Quickly. Somebody has one more thing they want to get into the discussion. Folks are packing up for their next meeting which is starting across campus at the top of the hour. You’re trying to gain agreement on next steps, but nobody seems to want to focus on that. Some may even tell you to send them the next steps after the meeting. Great. So now you have homework from your own meeting.
It doesn’t need to happen this way. The next time you are planning a decision making meeting, get your agenda down to one item. Next Steps.
That’s right. The actions you’ll take as a result of the meeting are the whole point of having the meeting in the first place, right? Why do we always end up spending the least, if any, time on that topic?
In order to take on this radical approach, you need to change a little more than the agenda. You need to change the expectations you have of the participants, as well as their expectations of each other. Here’s what I mean.
First you need to be clear about what you’ll be deciding. Whether you’re talking about a customer proposal, a product strategy decision, or a training initiative, be specific about the decision that will be addressed in the meeting. Make it understood how that decision will be made, whether you’ll use a consensus, consultative, or a directive decision making style. Most importantly, prepare the group for the fact that following that decision, which will be confirmed in the first 10 minutes of the meeting, that the group will be moving into implementation mode – next steps.
Since the bulk of many meetings are spent discussing a topic for a common understanding of the facts rather than acting upon it, you’ll need to make a big change here. The meeting time is not the time for participants to be briefed on the topic. In today’s meeting heavy business environments, this is often the case. Participants just don’t have time to stay up to speed on all the topics in all the meetings they attend. Insist on a change in behavior here. Establish the expectation that participants should do the required pre-work so they arrive prepared to contribute to the decision making process. If clarification is needed on any of the subject matter, that needs to happen before the meeting.
Encourage participants to discuss elements of the topic offline before the meeting. Encourage individual conversations to work out points of view. Areas of debate should be surfaced and vetted before you get into the conference room. Let all the lobbying for competing viewpoints happen before the meeting. Don’t let it happen during the meeting. And never let it happen after the meeting, when it can undermine the inputs of the other participants. Identify any critical participants you may have overlooked at this stage of the process and pull them in.
As the leader, there are two essential duties you must complete in order to prepare your meeting participants for success. First, make sure everyone has the information they need to understand the topic, develop an informed perspective, and make a meaningful contribution to the decision. Make it clear that the meeting time will not be used to bring them up to speed, and that they need to speak up if they don’t have the information they need to do their part. Second, give plenty of lead time for scheduling the meeting. Remember, you’re asking participants to do more work in preparation than they would if they showed up cold for the meeting. Give them the time to do that work. Encourage them to block time on their calendars to do the pre-work you need them to do. You’ll find that when your team rises to your new expectations, you’ll actually need fewer meetings because your team will be making decisions and implementing them more efficiently.
In the meeting, do your hard debate about how you will implement your decision. Answer the “how” question with your team. You will have already answered the what, which, and why questions. Don’t revisit those questions.
Give this a try. Start with an easy topic. Experience with your team what efficient group decision making and implementation can feel like. You’ll find that people want to come to your meetings and avoid the others.
And you’ll develop the reputation as the leader who gets things done with teamwork, collaboration, and a commitment to delivering results. That is the leader you wanted to be, isn’t it?
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