5 Steps to Better Meetings
No matter where you are in your entrepreneurial journey, if you occupy a leadership position on your team, chances are, you attend more meetings than you’d like to.
If you’re struggling in this area, here are 5 tips to maximizing your meeting time as a business leader.
Break down your meetings into two categories: visionary/problem-solving and recurring.
Recurring meetings will suck up the most time, so if you’re in a position of leadership, delegate the organization of recurring meetings to subordinates whenever possible. The organizer is responsible for sending out agendas prior to meetings, starting and ending on time, guiding the meeting through the agenda AND ensuring that action items are decided and documented.
Which brings us to…the agendas. Working with your operations manager or executive assistant to craft agenda templates for each type of recurring meeting will save you time in prep and during the meeting. If the agendas you have aren’t working, revisit them.
Invite conversation in all your meetings, but especially visionary ones. The danger here is when ideas become political and fear enters the conversation. This can happen when we attribute an idea to a person and then proceed, as a group, to work through it and criticize it. To quote Jeff Schiefelbein, “Instead of hearing that the ‘proposed solution’ is full of holes, we hear that it is Joe’s idea that is problematic.“ That can be a big issue. If you want productive, problem-solving meetings, be more objective in your language.
Check your ego at the door, and even more importantly, remind yourself that the people that you are dealing with are PEOPLE. If you are coming into a meeting stressed or maybe annoyed at a team member, take a moment to recognize their personhood. Ask how they are doing and genuinely care about them. This is how we are called to interact. Besides, quality relationships, motivation, and trust between team members are all crucial to productivity. Affirm more than you criticize, and when you critique, do so with encouragement.
“A person is an entity of a sort to which the only proper and adequate way to relate is love.”
-John Paul II, Love and Responsibility
