High Impact Teams have Intentional Meetings. You should too!

How many times have you sat in a #meeting and thought to yourself. “We could have handled this by email!” I know I have.

Meeting Overload happens in companies of every shape and size and it sucks. No…literally it sucks time out of your day and often there is no clear resolution to the issues you met to discuss.

This can be especially troublesome for #portfoliocompanies because in some cases this might be the first rodeo for some of the #Executives on the Team. Simply put, demands they will face from their investors can be a bit overwhelming and can lead to meetings that veer off course rather than focusing on getting the foundations built that they need to meet the business objectives they have committed to.

To improve this aspect of how you and your team operates, you need to understand what separates successful ELT's from those who are, well, less successful.

High Impact Teams operate differently when it comes to Meetings. They realize that time is precious and in limited supply so they prepare much differently than some of the peers in their respective industries. They do much more pre-meeting preparation because they refuse to waste anyone's time, especially theirs. In other words they meet intentionally with the goal of solving problems or planning the next step in their journey.

If you have read anything by me in the past you know that I am fond of business quotes and cliche's. Here comes one for you:

"People don't plan to fail. They fail to plan"

While a meeting is a somewhat simplistic example, I think this idea still applies.

With that in mind, here are three things you can do to make your Leadership meetings more strategic and in turn, begin to accomplish the things your board and investment partners are requiring you to do.

1. Have an Agenda: You would be surprised how much time is wasted in meetings because the meeting is free flow in nature and undefined. I think we all try to have topics to discuss, but without guardrails it is easy to get off track.
2. Require Preparation and Paperwork: It is not unfair to ask people to come prepared to talk about their part of the initiative or how the topic impacts them, their teams, and the work they are charged with.?
3. Have a Check-In with the rest of the Team: Almost always initiatives cross departmental lines meaning Finance does not operate in a vacuum, neither does HR. Everyone on the team should expect?to fully understand where their team members are involved, what is required of them to execute effectively, and how the cross functional aspects of any effort will be managed.

These might seem like really basic ideas but, I am betting if you are candid, you have seen multiple meetings go off the rails simply because these three simple ideas were not guiding the meeting.

Next time we will talk about #highimpact Teams connect and build trust between themselves.