In-Person Meetings...

This week I had the honor to attend PCMA 's Convening Leadership 2023 conference and moderate a panel with Chris Nassetta , Ben Erwin , and Matthew J. Slaughter . We discussed the value of individuals meeting together, in-person.

Post-pandemic, organizations understand that their colleagues want to meet in-person and they understand that meetings need to have purpose and meaning. However, meetings can be an enormous waste of time or an effective way to solve problems. They can either infuriate your team or empower them.

So, how do you run an effective meeting?

When calling a meeting, leaders and managers must ask the following questions:

Does everyone need to be at the meeting for every conversation?

Of course not. But nobody should be at the table just to listen. If you have a problem that you're grappling with and it's not getting fixed, obviously, what you've been doing is not effective. In my experience, the most useful thing you can do at that stage is to bring other points of view to the table, or, as they say, flip the table entirely.

How do we provoke effective thoughtfulness and move the ball forward?

People often attend meetings because they want their Outlook calendar to look full, and they want to maintain access to decision-makers. So how do you engage attendees? One way is to assign a pre-meeting "thought requirement," along with an agenda. Cluing people in to the planned conversation ensures a meeting that starts quickly and ends further down the track.

How important is feedback, and how can we collaborate without criticism?

As ideas are circulated and debate begins, ask questions to learn and challenge, not to criticize. There is a difference between feedback to challenge and feedback to criticize. Challenging feedback says, "I want to help you succeed. I want you to be more effective." Criticism says, "I want you to feel bad."

What's the bottom line??

Meetings are not always an effective use of your time. If you have an update for your team, save everyone the agony of another calendar invite and instead send a simple and clear e-mail with the information they need. Or, like I've done with my team, explore communications tools like Slack to streamline how you engage with your co-workers.???

The essential goal of a meeting is to gather the right set of collaborators with diverse perspectives who are prepared, invited, and encouraged to share their insights to solve a clearly defined problem. With these four questions in mind, a manager can, in turn, lead and meet that goal.