How to Lead Better Meetings and a Tool to Help

Have you ever led or been a part of meetings that are completely unfocused, scattered, and lacking direction or a goal? I recently answered a similar question from a fan on my Life’s Messy, Live Happy Show all about how to deal with this, and I hope it helps get your meetings back on track and creating solutions.

Q: During meetings with clients or potential clients, I find that they can be a touch scattered. Sometimes I struggle to lead the meetings in a more productive and informative direction. What tips or tricks could you offer that might help create more direction and clarity for the board of directors or industry professionals I serve? -  Derrick, Victoria, British Columbia

First of all, I love the personal accountability that comes through in this question. Instead of complaining about the clients, they ask, “What can I do to lead amazing meetings?” They've already conquered what I would give as my first advice: Stop judging, start helping. Most of the time, our clients don't come with everything organized and figured out, otherwise they wouldn't need us. They don’t need us to judge, they need us to provide solutions.

Leaders don’t manage people, they manage energy

One thing I learned pretty quickly in my career is that leaders don't manage people. They manage energy. And that's great news because most of us in today's world  - whether we are consulting internally or externally - are working on teams where we have influence, but not direct power, over the situation. So I had to get really good at managing the energy of the meetings, even though I couldn’t manage the people in the meeting.

So here's my best advice. Managing energy takes a plan and a tool. If you are heading into a meeting, you've got to do some prep work. I'm a huge advocate of plans and tools because I understand human behavior and how the ego works. I love using tools that can make our work conscious and visible. We've got to get out from behind the filter of the ego and put it out there visually on the wall for all to see so that we have an anchoring point. Doing this changes the energy in the room because it unites us and keeps us focused on the goal at hand.

Think inside the box

One of my favorite tools for brainstorming is something I called Thinking Inside the Box. Thinking Inside the Box is very different than thinking outside the box or traditional brainstorming techniques, which don’t have constraints and can make meetings more scattered. With traditional brainstorming techniques, it can be easy for meetings to get out of control as participants come up with bigger and bigger ideas without any sense of what's capable in the next few months or the next year. This is where you might start to panic because you’re wondering, “How could we execute on these things?”

Thinking Inside the Box starts with writing a very clear goal that you've created at the top of a flip chart.  Then you make a box, with the goal at the top, and on the sides of the box are your constraints, what your reality has provided for you. These restraints could be a timeframe, limited resources, brand restrictions, policies, market changes, etc. Once you’ve laid out the circumstances (aka, your reality) in achieving the goal, now you ask people to think inside the box. What ideas do you have to solve the problem, given our constraints? Because your circumstances aren't the reasons you can't succeed, they are the reality in which you must succeed.

So I hope that in your next meeting you will use this tool to have a plan for what you want to be delivered by the end of the meeting and drive your agenda around an actual deliverable, based in reality. I think you'll find the meetings are less scattered and more enjoyable and satisfying for everybody involved.

Download the Thinking Inside the Box tool for your next meeting!

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