128: Four Practices for Leading an Effective Meeting

Coaching for Leaders

Dave Stachowiak

Business, Management, Careers

4.8 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 17 February 2014

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

If you do these four things with consistency at the meetings you lead, you’ll get vastly better results from the investment you are making in meeting time.

Worst offenses

Trying to come up with a topic to talk about
Let’s share what’s going on (without any context for how/why)
Information sharing only
No agenda
Too many agenda items
People on devices
Too many meetings total

Good news! Many of us have almost complete control over how we run meetings as leaders

1. Determine if the meeting needs to be held at all

Is it for brainstorming, training that needs to be done in person, or making a decision? Yes, have the meeting.
Is it for sharing of information? No, find a better way to get the information to people.
Consider the real cost of staff time

2. Have written or understood guidelines on communication, technology, decision-making, and overall culture of your meetings

What do we do when we get off task?
How will we capture what is decided and/or next actions?
What rules will we have around the use of technology during meetings?
Is PowerPoint needed?

3. Set and send agenda in advance with the topic for discussion and end goal of the meeting, along with start and end times

If the meeting discussion drifts, call attention to it and decide on addressing or tabling
Begin and end on time (considering starting a bit after the hour or ending a bit early)

4. Have everyone walk out of the room with clear action items

Follow-up with documentation shortly thereafter
Meeting notes – mindmapping (starting point) and outlining (finishing point). I use MindNode and OmniOutliner, respectively.

What’s a best practice you’ve discovered for leading effective meetings?

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Transcript

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0:00.0	When was the last time you sat in a meeting that wasted your time?
0:05.2	If you're like most people probably fairly recently,
0:09.4	on today's show four practices to help you lead effective meetings.
0:15.8	This is coaching for leaders, episode 128.
0:19.9	Produced by Innovate Learning,
0:22.4	Maximizing Human Potential.
0:24.3	Greetings to you from Orange County, California.
0:31.3	This is coaching for leaders, and I'm your host Dave Stahoviac. This is a weekly
0:37.4	coaching show to help us all be better leaders through improved communication, human relations, and personal productivity.
0:47.0	Tackling the people side of leadership of organizations and business and non-profits,
0:52.0	I'm so glad to have you back with me this week
0:55.9	where I am joining you fairly sleep deprived from having a newborn child at home
1:01.8	but we are doing great and you know it's so much better
1:06.9	the second time through as a parent some things are harder but some things are
1:11.2	easier to you learn through the first child
1:13.9	some things not to do and we are have our sleep schedules much more staggered than we
1:18.5	used to so I'm up at 2 a.m. on and Bonnie gets to bed late, but we're surviving and doing great and our little
1:26.7	daughter is just so much fun and such a sweetheart. And that's why some of you are getting emails from me at very strange hours of the day, but I'm so glad to be here with you and to continue our ongoing conversation of how we all can be more effective in our communication
1:45.0	skills, how we relate with others, and being productive because that's such an
1:49.0	important part of leadership and one of the topics that comes up very consistently with leaders that I work with is running and leading effective meetings and I find that this conversation happens a lot. And that's why I was really
2:06.9	surprised when one of our listeners, John, had emailed me a few weeks ago and said, hey, do you have a show or do you have resources around
2:14.9	leading an effective meeting? And I realized in that moment that as many shows as I have
	...

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