We've Got to Start Meeting Like This! (Facilitation Friday #38)

10 fundamentals to quickly improve your meeting results and satisfaction.

It’s no surprise that Death by Meeting by Patrick Lencioni has long been a popular business book given how often some people experience poorly designed and/or facilitated gatherings.

A standing desired outcome for effective meeting design and facilitation is both simple and challenging: maximize individuals’ contributions and commitments that help produce desired results.

Here are ten fundamental practices (plus a bonus) that make it easier to realize this goal and improve meeting results and satisfaction.  Links to relevant Facilitate Better posts and other resources are included to facilitate further understanding and application.

Ten High Impact Practices for Effective Meetings

1. Effective meetings (face-to-face, virtual, or hybrid) typically are part of a longer timeline of activities designed to produce results and include appropriate pre- and post- work and connections.  Intentionally design each portion of this longer chain of communication and connection.

2. Different meeting purposes require different designs. Because a meeting’s desired outcomes should drive its format, length, and design, an organization benefits from using several meeting templates or archetypes.  A variety of sample meeting agendas and formats can be found here.

3. A meeting’s environment (room set or online platform and more) should enable and accelerate the desired results of the meeting whenever possible. Different results require different environments. More on this in a forthcoming post.

4. Improving meetings requires evaluating them. At minimum, meetings should regularly gather participant responses to these three simple questions: (1) what percentage of the meeting did you find to be productive? (2) did the meeting design elicit the full contributions you were capable of making? (3) what one thing would have made the meeting even more valuable for those involved? Collecting this data over time will reveal what meetings are seen as valuable and which meeting leaders seem to do a better job. You can then use that information to improve your overall meeting capabilities.

5. The agenda and any advance information require thoughtful attention and intentional design so that they fully support the meeting objectives and help prepare participants to fully contribute to the discussions and decisions the meeting’s desired results require. Think more about designing these materials to align with how the attendees best process information and make decisions.

6. An effective meeting requires participants’ commitment to shared norms and agreements about how they will engage with each other.  This is particularly true when a group is just forming or when a meeting involves people from different teams, divisions, or locales, each of which may have a somewhat unique subculture and way of being.

7. You can’t effectively facilitate the process of a meeting if you also plan on being an active participant in its content deliberations. Leading a meeting differs from facilitating a meeting. The more you want/need to contribute to the meeting conversation, the more compromised you are to facilitate it.

8. Facilitation is a learned skill. Therefore, organizations should help individuals whose responsibilities include facilitating meetings appropriately develop their capacity and competency to do so.  Formal training, mentoring or coaching, and self-assessment and participant evaluations all can help.

9. A meeting must allow adequate time at its end to review discussions and decisions, confirm next steps and individual responsibilities, and review any “parked” items for further action. Meeting follow-up should include “minutes in minutes,” the equivalent of an executive summary turned around quickly to facilitate accurate information sharing.

10. Just as shared norms or values can help shape discussions so can common guidelines or rules inform and influence decisions: the ideal decision will meet the following criteria ….  Use decision-making rules so that people do advocate for options based on their own criteria, potentially creating unnecessary confusion and conflict.

Bonus Practice

The organization has a culture of competence and learning around meeting facilitation.  Individuals who facilitate meetings are trained in the basics of effective meeting management and receive resources, feedback, and coaching to further improve their facilitation skills.

Bottom Line

Improving meeting efficiency and effectiveness isn’t particularly difficult. Doing so simply requires the consistent implementation of fundamental practices throughout an organization until they are fully integrated as cultural norms: “this is how we do things around here.”  Consider discussing these ten practices with your colleagues to identify which ones need additional attention in your respective efforts.

Getting in Action

1. Assess meetings in your organization (and/or involve others in doing so) against these practices and identify strengths to further leverage and those areas that need attention.  Determine how and who will focus on those improvements.

2. Identify a few meeting management fundamentals that you would add to this list of high impact practices.

3. Initiate informal conversations with colleagues about the culture of meeting management and facilitation in your organization, what’s working, and what seems to be less effective than desirable.  Where appropriate, introduce practices from your revised list as possible solutions.

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