Building a Meeting Plan: How to Make Meetings Worth Everyone's Time
Time-wasting meetings are a sore spot for any professional, but why do we continue attending them or, worse, host them? Each of us has an opportunity to put an end to wasteful meetings.
But how?
Eighty percent of what makes a meeting successful happens before the gathering. Productive meetings are a product of proper planning. It is obvious and simple, yet hosts rarely invest enough time to prepare.
How to make your meeting plan worth everyone’s time?
I facilitate over 50 high-stake meetings every year, and these are the same nine questions I use to help make my meetings the most productive meeting my clients attend all year. (You can access a free template here)
What is the context of this meeting? People need to know how this meeting serves higher organizational objectives. Too often, hosts assume that it is evident to participants, so they fail to connect the dots. If this is meeting three in a series of six, then remind the attendants of the process and tell them where they are in it. This one step goes a long way towards reducing resistance from your audience.
What is the meeting’s objective? Every person who walks into your meeting is asking themselves, “Why am I here?” It’s a fair question, so be sure that you clearly articulate the answer. How you articulate the answer matters. Even for a two-day workshop, I never have more than three objectives. If you can’t narrow it down to three precise objectives or less, then you should be asking yourself if you should be scheduling a meeting at all. There is no better way to lose credibility with your colleagues than to schedule meetings without clear objectives. Something to consider when setting your meeting objectives is what kind of meeting you are hosting.
Use the three general meeting types to guide your thinking:
Inform—The aim of this meeting is to inform the participants about something, perhaps a change or a status update. Most bad meetings fall into this category. Too often, what is said in a meeting could have been communicated in an email, memo, presentation, or desk-top video. An excellent guideline to decide if you need to host a meeting is to ask yourself, “Is this only work we can do together?” If the answer is no, invest your time crafting a thoughtful and well-written email or memo.
Decide - The second type of meeting is for making choices. The reason you are calling the meeting is to decide as a group. This meeting requires significant pre-work so that the parties involved know the decision to be made and feel fully prepared to make it. The meeting structure should include: what decision(s) will be made, timed discussion, a decision, recording the decision, and the next steps. This may sound formal to you, but how many meetings have you attended where it wasn’t clear what decision was being made and if the group made it or not?
Create - The third type of meeting is to collaborate in creating new options. This meeting gets a bad rap because of lazy brainstorming sessions where the words “there are no bad ideas” are thrown around by amateur facilitators. Creative meetings need constraints, processes, and structured play. Your specific objective needs to be stated in a “How might we...” challenge statement for the group to solve.
What are the desired outcomes? Many people will confuse objectives and outcomes. The objectives are what you want to achieve in the meeting. The outcomes are what you plan to produce from the meeting. One objective might be to decide which vendor to hire as a marketing partner. The outcomes might be a chosen marketing partner, clear contractual parameters for partnership, a list of immediate next steps, and owners. The outcomes are tangible products from the meetings, whereas the objectives are the actions you will take in the meeting to produce the outcomes.
How can participants prepare for the meeting? A universal fear for professionals is to appear incompetent. Tell them how to prepare for the meeting, and they will love you for it. What documents should they read in advance? What videos should they watch? What work should they do? What should they think about it? Who should they talk to? What questions will be asked or problems will you solve in the meeting?
What is the agenda? I bet when you think of an agenda, its a bullet point list of the topics to be discussed in a meeting that you hand out at the beginning of the meeting. That’s a start, and I want you to take a few additional steps to increase clarity 10x.
Capture the meeting topics to be discussed, then write the super-objective of each topic (inform, decide, create) and then write down how much time you are allocating to the topic. This is where the magic happens because allocating time requires you to mentally walk through the meeting and judge whether you have enough time to cover all the topics in your list.
Make room by moving the information content to pre-read or pre-video. My rule is never to break my meeting into less than 60-90 minute chunks. Experience has taught me that it takes at least 20 minutes for people in a discussion to warm up enough to get to the heart of matters and say what’s really on their minds. That may sound like a significant investment to you, and in my experience, it’s worth it. Professionals are starved for any depth of thinking in their fast-paced and full-plate careers.
What are the rules? Each meeting has rules, either stated or unstated. It’s best to state the rules upfront to increase productivity in your meetings. Many of the strategy meetings I facilitate tend to be full of leaders who graduated from doing the work many years ago, so I have them agree to the rule “everybody writes.” Doing so lets the leaders know my expectations of them for participating, and it gives permission to anyone in the room to say “everybody writes” to someone not carrying their fair share of the load. Decide what rules will best serve your meeting and make sure everyone agrees to them before you begin.
What activities will you use? If you want higher engagement from your participants, then the answer to this question is never a PowerPoint presentation (yes, Prezi, with all its sizzle, is just as bad). Nothing communicates low expectations like firing up the projector and talking at people. You need to invite your participants to engage immediately.
Many people groan at the idea of a warm-up exercise, but it works on them, too. It doesn’t have to be cheesy or long, but search the internet for warm-up exercises to get people talking and writing right away. Doing so will lower the internal bar for participation later in the meeting. Small groups, walking around, post-it notes, and voting are all ways to get people moving and thinking. Be creative and make your participants work during the meeting. Trust me; they will thank you for it.
How will you follow up after the meeting? Send an email and access to the work product from the meeting. I also like to add pictures from the meeting, articles or books referenced, and any first draft artifacts and ask for feedback. People want validation that they produced something in your meeting. Saying thank you and giving them access to the materials collected or created goes a long way to making them feel like their time was invested wisely.
When will this group reconvene? Are there next steps coming out of this meeting? Does this team need to meet again in the future? Pose this question to the group if you’re unsure and send the next meeting invite immediately. I like to send the invite during the meeting and then go back and provide the objective, outcomes, and what to expect. It’s a way to provide more context for this meeting and how it is achieving the overall organizational goals and objectives.
Final Thought
Hosting highly productive meetings isn’t sexy work. It’s following a basic meeting plan template that addresses fundamental questions for why to host the meeting in the first place.
Your default mode should be not to host a meeting unless you can answer all nine questions.
Raising the bar on the meetings you host will increase productivity in and outside the conference room and make you a superstar among your colleagues.
To help you get started, I am sharing my very own one-page meaningful meeting plan template, including the nine most powerful questions. I facilitate over 50 high-stake meetings every year, and these are the same nine questions I use to help make my meetings the most productive meeting my clients attend all year.
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Host a highly productive meeting using the Meaningful Meeting Plan Template
Grab your copy of our free meeting plan template, titled “Meaningful Meeting Plan Template”. It’s full of tips to help you structure your meetings to maximize everyone’s time. Get your free copy today.