Leading Effective Meetings

Unproductive meetings waste your team’s time and energy. Here are five ways to make your meetings more effective.

Meetings can be powerful communication tools or a dreadful waste of time. To make cross-functional team meetings productive, specify the meeting purpose, have the right people in the room, but maybe not all the people, manage by exception, identify sources of conflict, and be clear with the accountabilities and next steps.

Specify the meeting’s purpose

The meeting’s purpose can be to update or share information, make a decision, resolve an issue, solve a problem, or celebrate success. Let people know what the meeting is about beforehand and specify if there is any preparation required on their part before the meeting.

Have the right people in the room

Meeting attendees should be driven by the purpose of the meeting. If you’re sharing information, ensure that the people who need that information are invited. If you’re making a decision, have all the decision makers and people providing input into the decision in the room. People have a bias to invite everyone. Be thoughtful about who you invite and let the meeting’s purpose dictate who needs to be there.

Manage by exception

Managing by exception means only covering topics that are outside of expectations. If you have 10 work streams and eight are on track, you should only discuss the two that are off track. It saves time and focuses effort on the most important issues. I worked on one leadership team where we had a 10-hour update meeting. 10 hours. The reason it was so long was we went through every project and every deliverable that everybody was working on even though most of them were on track. Eventually we moved to a manage by exception process. That 10-hour meeting went down to 90 minutes.

Identify sources of conflict

Make sure you identify sources of conflict when you lead a meeting. While you should be listening to the content, look for body language that indicates conflict. Listen to what’s being said or not said. Many times, disagreement comes in the form of silence. When you see this happen, either invite the person to share their thoughts directly in the meeting or approach them after the meeting and ask what’s on their mind.

Be clear with accountabilities

Define accountabilities and next steps coming out of the meeting. Make sure everyone has an open task list and that the owners are clearly identified. Set agreed upon timelines for resolution of those open issues. Document these accountabilities in a follow-up email to the team. Be sure, if you need to, to add these items to your project plan and review them at the next meeting.

Meetings are the most common communication vehicle out there for sharing information. If you lead them poorly, they’re just a big waste of time. If you lead them well, your team is going to be that much more efficient and effective in its communications.

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