Habits that will make your meetings more efficient
Meetings can fill up your whole day if you let it, especially for leaders. This can be unproductive, inefficient, and unnecessary.
Learning habits and structures to support your meetings are what will help you stand out as a leader in your organization. You will help your team to get more accomplished in less time, you can decrease the number of meetings, and you will be sought after by your peers to teach them your techniques.
Clients have told me that when they started implementing these intentional practices in meetings, their teams noticed how much more efficient the meetings were within one week!
Before you even schedule your next meeting, consider: does this need to be a meeting or can it be an email? I love Adam Grant's four recommended reasons to have a meeting: To learn, to decide, to do, or to bond.
If your meeting passes the test, use the below recommendations to make it more efficient and watch your leadership skills grow.
1. Before the meeting
Have a clear objective
The objective is what do we want to walk away with by the end of our time together. Include this in the meeting invite so people can prepare, as needed, before the meeting. Include a meeting agenda in the invite if you have more than one topic to discuss.
Invite only necessary people
In order to understand who is necessary, ask yourself - who are the decision-makers and stakeholders in this topic? Does each person invited have a role or purpose in the conversation? Do they know what their role is in the conversation or decision?
Consider minimum required time
Don't just set the meeting for 60 minutes because that's what Outlook defaults to for meetings. How much time do you realistically think you need to talk through the agenda? Don't be afraid to schedule for 15 or 45 minutes, even if those are rarely used time blocks. Oftentimes we will make the meeting last as long as we have it scheduled for, whether we needed those extra fifteen minutes or not.
2. During the Meeting
Set the stage for success
Start the meeting by reiterating the objective of the meeting, what you need to walk away with by the end of the time together, and an overview of the agenda if there is one.
Stick to the agenda
Lead the meeting by clearly introducing each new topic and ensuring everyone is on the same page before moving to a new topic. Summarize each topic along the way, then ask if anyone has questions before moving forward. Examples: "First, we're going to look at our sales projections for Q1." Then: "Now that we've reviewed Q1 projections, does anyone have any questions before we look at Q2 projections?"
Save off-topic ideas for later
Introduce the idea of the 'parking lot' to your teammates to help you all stay on track without shutting down new ideas. The parking lot is a list you start during a meeting of ideas that come up that are out of scope of the meeting's objective or agenda. So when someone brings something up during the meeting that isn't relevant, you can jump in to say "let's parking lot this for later" and make a note of it. Then you can circle back at the end of the meeting (if there is time) or schedule a different meeting or email to address this topic specifically.
3. At the end of the meeting
Revisit the parking lot
Review the list of ideas from the parking lot (above) if there's time remaining. If there's not time to discuss these, make a next step to address this in another meeting or email.
Summarize next steps
Save a few minutes at the end of the meeting to summarize the takeaways, learnings, and next steps. Make sure each next step has (at least) one person assigned to it and a clear deadline or checkpoint for completion.
Schedule your own follow ups
I like to immediately add my follow ups to my calendar or task management platform before I go to my next meeting or get up from my chair after a meeting. This makes sure I never drop the ball or wake up in the middle of the night worried about forgetting something.
Efficient meetings start with efficient habits. Take the free Leadership Blind Spot Audit to see which of your habits might be slowing your team down. Take the audit here.
Brittany Canaski is a highly-rated Leadership Coach, Trainer, and Founder of Hello Velocity where she builds confident leaders and high-performing teams. When she's not building her business, you can find her planning her next travel adventure with her husband, watching Formula 1 racing, or volunteering in her local community of Charlotte, NC.
