721: How to Lead Engaging Meetings, with Jess Britt

Coaching for Leaders

Dave Stachowiak

Education, Business, Management, Self-improvement, Careers

4.8 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 22 February 2025

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Jess Britt
Jess Britt is an experienced executive and nonprofit board chair. Today as a coach and consultant, she uses a facilitative leadership approach to empower leaders and teams to build collaborative, high-performing, data-driven workplace cultures. She’s an alum of our Academy and for the past two years, has taken a leadership role inside our community as a Coaching for Leaders fellow, providing coaching and facilitation to our members.

While some leaders love to hate meetings, a well-designed meeting can open huge opportunities to connect, engage, and build culture on a team. In this conversation, Jess and I zero in on simple tactics that will help you engage attendees and lead meetings that people actually enjoy. We explore how objectives, facilitation tactics, and adult learning principles can help and invite you to start with one.
Key Points

Identifying both shared and non-shared objectives helps you design meetings, informs how you show up, makes meetings less frustrating, and helps you pivot.
Invite discussion and engagement at the start with a warm-up question. If possible, connect the question to an objective of the meeting.
Check-out questions are a quick indicator of what worked and what didn’t. Use emojis, voting, or a quick question to assess, and follow-up if something didn’t land.
Adults learn best by drawing on past experiences and taking action. Bring in role plays, think-pair-share, and gallery walks to help engage people.
Simple debrief questions will up insights. Consider prompts like: “What came out of this?” “What did you hear?” and “I heard you discussing an idea. Tell us more.”

Reach out to Jess at [email protected] and tell her one thing you tried from this conversation and what happened. She’ll respond by sharing her full guide of meeting facilitation ideas we weren’t able to entirely cover in this episode.
Resources Mentioned

Jess Britt’s website
Coaching for Leaders Academy

Related Episodes

How to Lead Meetings That Get Results, with Mamie Kanfer Stewart (episode 358)
Moving Towards Meetings of Significance, with Seth Godin (episode 632)
Bringing Your Strengths to a Big Job, with General CQ Brown, Jr. (episode 691)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	While some of us love to hate meetings, a well-designed meeting can open huge opportunities
0:05.7	to connect, engage, and build culture on a team. In this Saturday cast, how to lead
0:13.5	meetings that people actually enjoy. This is Coaching for Leaders, episode 721.
0:20.9	Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.
0:29.4	Greetings to you from Orange County, California.
0:32.6	This is Coaching for Leaders, and I'm your host, Dave Stahoviac.
0:37.4	Leaders are born, they're made. And this weekly
0:40.7	show helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations. This is one of our Saturday
0:47.6	casts. A few times a year, I air an episode here that's a chat with one of our fellows or members.
0:56.3	These Saturday casts are sponsored and brought to you by the Coaching for Leaders Academy. If you're at an inflection point
1:01.2	in your leadership, you may benefit from considering our academy and working personally
1:06.4	with me and a small cohort of supportive colleagues. To get an invitation when we next open applications,
1:13.7	just go over to Coachingfor Leaders.com slash academy.
1:18.4	A conversation today with Jess Britt,
1:21.7	one that I've been looking forward to for a while
1:24.3	on how we can all do a better job at leading engaging meetings. I have learned a
1:30.6	bunch from Jess over the years that I've known her, and she has such a passion for this topic of
1:36.3	helping leaders and teams to communicate so well. I'm so pleased to introduce Jess to you.
1:43.0	Jess is an experienced executive and nonprofit board chair.
1:46.6	Today, as a coach and consultant, she uses a facilitative leadership approach to empower
1:51.6	leaders and teams to build collaborative, high-performing, data-driven workplace cultures.
1:56.9	She's an alum of our academy, and for the past two years has taken on a leadership role inside our community as a coaching for leaders fellow, providing coaching and facilitation to some of our members.
	...

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