5 Steps to Running Meetings so Effectively, Your Team Will Thank You!
Watch out for the M&Ms (meetings and managers), they can be very effective at wasting time!
Meetings are so infamous for their pitfalls that professionals all over the globe can relate when you speak of meetings that didn’t need to happen, went off track, or were unproductive due to lack of guidance. The pain even breaks into pop-culture, check out this “Smells like this could have been an email” candle that is sold out at time of writing, and has reviews averaging 4.9/5. And in the book “Remote - Office Not Required” Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, founders of basecamp touted the reduction in time spent with M&Ms as an advantage of remote, managed by results, teams.
This is why I decided to write up this quick article on a way that I’ve been running meetings at **Groundbreaker.** Not only have they become vastly more productive, but my team has expressed gratitude and appreciation for the structure. If your organization is struggling with keeping meetings focused and effective, or struggling with the long-term execution of the decisions made in those meetings, try with the 5 steps I outlined below. Unless you already have a better process, I am confident you will be hooked!
1- Prepare a meeting plan and share with the team ahead of time.
This may go without saying for some, but time and again a meeting can be derailed due to lack of preparation. The meeting plan should be a written document. This document includes an agenda, meeting guidelines and a full brief in notes of what is to be covered in the meeting (an idea borrowed from how meetings are conducted at Amazon.)
Write down the phases your meeting will go through, and who (person, team, group of people) is leading the phase. Estimate how much time should be spent during each section and be the referee throughout the meeting. Have a stopwatch with you to keep track of the phases.
You will need your own set of guidelines. But here are the guidelines used in the last meeting I ran.
-Read this entire document before starting (10 to 15 mins)
-Discuss what is tagged with #discuss
-Build a list of tasks at the bottom of this document and decide who will tackle each
-Phones are prohibited for the period of the meeting (I wish this went without saying)