Meeting Length:
Personal preference:
No meeting should ever take 1 hour.
I always try to schedule the meetings for 30 minutes. The shortened time line encourages brevity and
specificity when communicating.
I’ve reviewed my calendar for the last 3 months and I’m in
an average of 5.5 hours of meetings per day.
That is a crazy waste of time. If those could have been 30 minute meetings
only, the savings would add up quickly.
Facilitator Tool Kit:
Agenda – You need
a plan. Say it together, “I need a plan”. How you can effectively guide the direction and
tenor of any effort without a plan is beyond me. This tool is effective against all the
villains because it prevents soliloquies, interrogations and other time sucks.
Agendas can be very simple.
Topic – Time constraints – Action Items – Responsible - Date. Consistency in format is not necessary
provided it can be easily understood for non attendees. Arguably a consistent format of the meetings
notes trumps the necessity for a stringent agenda template.
Contrary to what some marketers may tell you… branding of
meeting agendas does not affect company valuation.
Meeting Notes – Each
meeting should have a scribe which captures the major decisions discussed. It is your responsibility to set the expectation
that everyone invited to the meeting will review the meeting notes and know
them. The notes should be captured in a repository
of some sort that allows for easy searching, organization and retrieval.
Facilitator Powers
– cape and tights are optional. Masks should
definitely be used.
You wouldn’t be set free without revealing your powers.
Interruption – this is my favorite method of pulling stories,
anecdotes, ramblings, rehashing, mini-presentations, weekend plans, conference
room quarterbacks back to the topic at hand.
Referee – there are times when the negotiating can be very heated. The facilitator has the right to call foul if
one of the parties is moving from factual and objective to personal and
subjective. Immediately state the foul
and bring the discussion back on topic.
Time Keeper – since the agenda contains the timelines for the topics,
this minute (pun intended) but massive power allows for flowing through the
agenda.
Common facilitator questions:
1. A manager keeps coming to my meeting and
derailing, how do I handle this?
a. If
the manager is not invited then you should approach them separately and
indicate that the goals of the meeting are x,y,z. You’d be happy to add the manager to a future
agenda if they would like to discuss a specific topic related to the goals of
group.
2. My culture is meeting heavy, how can this
be altered?
a. Be
a catalyst of change, none of the teams that I’ve ever used these techniques
above have ever complained about having extra time to accomplish their work. Word will eventually get around that you run
an effective meeting and hopefully it will transfer over to other facilitators.
3. This will never work.
a. I
agree, it probably won’t work for you.
Please feel free to read my upcoming “Positive Contagious Leadership”
post early next week.
4. How do you address phone meetings?
a. Excellent
question. As the world is tightly
coupled through technology while removing personal interaction it is becoming increasingly
difficult to be communicate on a meaningful level. The same tenets apply to conference calls. It is imperative for the facilitator to
ensure everyone is engaged on all the topics.
No-one likes to repeat themselves.
i.
Vijay: “Carlos, what do you think about this approach?”
ii.
Vijay: “Hello, Carlos?”,
iii.
Carlos: “Oh hey, yeah, ummmm what was the
question again?”
b. This
is frustrating. Stop surfing the web
when on a conference call!
Wrap Up:
The above tools are to help ensure
you have effective and valuable discussions with your colleagues. There will be situations when not all approaches
outlined will be effective or relevant.
It is your responsibility as the facilitator to use them.
