Happy Friday!

One of my favorite topics to rant about is meetings. In particular, how bad they usually are and how easy they are to fix. So, I thought I'd scratch that itch and give a few things that I think will improve your meetings almost immediately.

What I'll share is something that works when you have a meeting in which you expect collaboration. It's collaborative if you expect folks to work together. This is different than a meeting that is mostly about sharing information or providing direction.

I'm going to say that if you have a meeting with collaboration, you need these four things. Obviously, there is a ton more we could say, but these are the four that will improve your meetings the quickest.

1. Purpose
2. Expectations/Agreements
3. Actions
4. Parking Lot

Purpose

The purpose is quite simply to answer the question, "Why are we meeting?" Far too many meetings are built around the assumption that everyone knows why they are meeting. If you've ever walked into a conversation midway and tried to figure out what was going on, that's every meeting that does not have a clear purpose.

So, you need to both identify the purpose of your meeting and then you need to say it as a part of opening the meeting. Stating the purpose helps everyone mentally prepare to participate.

Bonus points if you check if that purpose is relevant to the group. If it isn't, you can excuse the folks for whom the purpose isn't relevant or cancel the meeting outright and try again. As important as saying the purpose is, having a meeting that is purposeful for the group is equally important.

Expectations/Agreements

This is also handled at the beginning of the meeting and establishes the agreements for how folks should conduct themselves in the meeting. People like to skip this because they assume everyone is an adult, and it should be obvious.

I'm a very busy person with very important things on my plate. Is it acceptable for me to be on my laptop for the entire meeting? Can I interrupt you as soon as a thought pops into my head? Can I offer alternatives or disagree outright?

More than likely the answers to these questions have been different at different meetings you've been in throughout your career. So by establishing agreements you can help everyone more fully participate because they know how to participate.

An easy way to start this is to say, "Let's take a quick minute to talk about some of the rules or agreements that, if we all follow, will make a better meeting."

Without these agreements, people will often default to what they feel safe doing, which is almost always going to come at the cost of the group's collaboration and potential decision-making.

Actions

How many times have you left a meeting and wondered if you were the one who was supposed to do something? The meeting was full of ideas and what sounded like agreement to do them, but how sure are we that we left the meeting with actual agreement on those things?

One of the things you can do when you close the meeting is simply to review the actions that came up and make sure everyone knows and agrees. It's astonishing how many times people think they were supposed to do something that was never agreed to or that everyone thought they were going to, but they didn't.

Some folks love SMART goals and might be tempted to use them for creating actions. I think SMART is pretty dumb and I'll instead suggest something much simpler.

For each action, answer the following questions:

• Who will do it?
• What will they do?
• When will we check?

You may need to add, "How will we know it worked?" Optionally, but that is going to be situational.

These questions are far more to the point and remove the dangerous amount of ambiguity that can derail what was otherwise a productive meeting.

Parking Lot

Any collaborative meeting will involve discussing things that do not apply to the purpose but is still important. Far too often someone will say to table it or take it offline or say it isn't part of the agenda. Sadly, these statements don't just delay the discussion but often kill it.

So, a better way to handle this is to simply create a place to put things that are for another time. We call this the parking lot. As topics come up that don't fit the purpose, you can simply identify it that way and put that topic in the parking lot.

At the end of the meeting, you create actions for the items in the parking lot so that folks can start those discussions more focused.

I'm always astonished at how some folks will energetically say the topic is vital right up until the moment you ask who wants to schedule a focused discussion on it.

Parking lots help keep things from falling through the cracks in the organization while also not killing them by shutting the topic down in the meeting. I've watched companies struggle with things for years because it was never the topic at hand.

So there you go, 4 things that will fix up any collaborative meeting. If you want more examples of these let me know!

Sincerely,

Ryan