Video 20: How to run Highly Effective Meetings

20. How to run highly effective meetings
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Most meetings are a waste of your time and energy. This video shows you how you can significantly improve the meetings that you run. And how you can intervene in other’s meetings to improve those too.
In this video you will learn how to significantly improve the outputs and results that you achieve in your meetings.
You will be able to have far more productive, interesting, and useful meetings, and be able to appropriately intervene in other people’s meetings to make them more productive too.
Over the years, and as the result of attending thousands of meetings, I have developed a set of common principles that when followed will help you to immediately improve the meetings you have.
In this video I will share these principles with you.
If you are the leader, moderator or facilitator of a meeting, then you are in control of nearly all of the following principles.
If you are a participant in someone else’s meeting then you can influence how these principles are applied in those meetings. This includes both what you can influence before the meeting happens, and actually during the meeting too.
So let’s look at each of those principles in more detail.
The first principle is about the topics and issues that you actually discuss during the meeting. Ensure that all of the topics and issues that you discuss at each meeting are of the same size and level of importance.
Be careful not to mix up the day-to-day issues, with the operational or tactical issues, and with the bigger strategic topics. Check in advance that this is not the case with meetings that you are invited to. And if it is, then speak to the moderator/facilitator about fixing it.
If the meeting is a mix of different size topics, people will get frustrated, you won’t have enough time for the big topics, progress and decisions will not get made, and you will keep revisiting the same topics every meeting. And people who have issues and problems that need solving immediately, they will get frustrated if all the time is used up talking about topics that are not as urgent.
Have meetings that discuss issues of the same size. Have short daily meetings to discuss day-to-day issues. Have longer meetings on a weekly basis to exclusively discuss operational or tactical issues, and leave the bigger strategic topics to once a month in a meeting that lasts for two to three hours. Long enough for you to make real progress on those topics.
The second principle concerns the amount of time that you give to each type of meeting. Day-today issues should take less than ten minutes total for the meeting. And you could run these quick meetings standing up, to encourage everyone to be brief with what they say.
The format for these daily meetings could be as simple as each person answering the following questions: The most important thing I am working on today is…And then if they need any help on this from the other team members. One minute for each person should be enough. And then you are all on the same page. And know if and how you can help each other that day.
Operational/tactical issues should be discussed on a weekly basis for no longer than ninety minutes.
And the strategic topics should be discussed for at least two to three hours once a month. Again check the timings of the meetings you are invited to. It is a waste of time to be discussing big important issues in less than two hours. You simply won’t make progress on them and you will need another meeting on them again.
The third principle is to do with the Number of people attending the meeting. Aim to have no more than ten people at any meeting and ideally seven or less. More than ten and it’s almost guaranteed that you will not make progress. There is simply not enough time or attention to allow each person to make a meaningful contribution. Every time another person is added the quality of the output will go down. If you are invited to a meeting where you know there are too many people, then speak to the organizer, ask why, and consider not attending yourself.
The fourth principle concerns the Location or Venue for the meeting. Ideally, all participants should be in the same room. Of course, in some cases this will not be possible, so video-conferencing is the next best option. A standard conference call is the least best option as we cannot see each other (and what other things we may be doing other than paying full attention to the call!). If you can get everyone together in the same room, or most of them at least, then do that first rather than defaulting to a conference call.