The Importance of Effective Meetings: Unlocking Your Team’s Potential

You will most likely spend more than one-half of your time attending, conducting, preparing for, and following up on meetings—be they formal face-to-face, virtual, one-on-one or in groups, or informal (e.g., at lunch, in the hallway). Almost one-third of all meetings will be considered unnecessary by those attending them.

Much of your and others’ time is wasted attending meetings that are not focused, are of no value, and have the wrong players in attendance. In reviewing regularly scheduled meetings, ascertain if they are genuinely adding value to organizational performance. If not, discontinue them. A meeting is a microcosm of your management team’s or organization’s culture. Improving how you and your people meet will help build a collaborative culture, increase productivity and efficiency, and reduce unnecessary time wastage.

Meeting Approach. I recommend that all meetings have an agenda and that an agenda be provided to the participants prior to the meeting. Effective agendas state the purpose of the meeting and the desired outcome of the meeting, e.g., By the end of this meeting, we will have… The agenda should also indicate the process (e.g., brainstorm, clarify, check for agreement, etc.) for each agenda item, who is leading that part of the agenda, and the time allotted to that portion of the agenda.

If decisions are made at the meeting, you should indicate on the agenda how decisions will be made, e.g., you will make the decision, decide by consensus, etc. If you plan to use virtual meetings, e.g., Zoom, Skype, or Join.me , clearly understand how remote meetings work and what approach is best for your team or organization.

Prior to holding the meeting, conduct a stakeholder analysis. This involves identifying and understanding the individuals or groups who will be affected by the meeting’s decisions or outcomes. This will ensure you have the right people at the meeting. You don’t want to call another meeting because you did not have all the needed participants or the wrong people at the meeting. I’ve attended many meetings and wondered why I was there. If you can’t decide what the agenda’s desired outcome should be, you shouldn’t hold the meeting.

If you are the leader and conducting the meeting, be wary if your interest is more than 80 percent of the decision or if you share most of the data or information. You could easily lead the discussion to your forgone or preplanned solution. Doing so, you may miss out on valuable insights and potential problems or opportunities other attendees offer. It is amazingly easy for you to stifle collaboration. Others may quickly support your views because you are the leader rather than provide differing points of view. In such a case, I highly recommend assigning another person to be the facilitator, who can focus on the meeting’s process, not the content. Using a trained facilitator could be very helpful if you are conducting an offsite planning or decision-making session.

Finally, I recommend you establish ground rules for your meetings. These could include respecting each other’s time, actively participating, and no sidebars or phones. Display these rules in the room to remind everyone of their commitment to a productive meeting. Then, schedule the last 5 to 10 minutes of your meeting to conduct a “plus”/“delta.” That is, participants note what worked well in the meeting and what can be improved. Note: I used delta rather than negative (or what didn’t work), which is different from looking for ways to improve.

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