I googled ‘meeting management tips’ and here is what I have learned
Have you ever wondered what it takes to lead the perfect meeting?
Have you looked at your own performance in leading meetings and wondered if it was effective? You may have been tempted to google ‘meeting tips’ only to receive a plethora of Top 3 or Top 10 and the like in your search results. But which one to follow? It seems the number of meetings we attend in a week makes project managers ‘professional meeters’ and one would logically conclude there must be some sort of magic formula.
The reality is that managing meetings effectively takes a lot of practice and a lot of skill. Needless to say that no meeting is ever the same and no attendees are ever the same so dynamics, emotions and agenda items will vary and each will need to be managed. Meeting Management, of course, refers not only to the meeting itself. Meeting Management primarily encompasses three phases, the preparation before the meeting, the facilitation of the meeting and the follow up. The various authors of best practice advice have recognized many components of successful meeting management so each of the three areas has several essential components to consider that appeared most frequently in a google search on ‘meeting management tips’.
Effective Meeting Preparation must include setting clear objectives, setting an agenda and selecting participants.
Let’s focus on the first phase, Preparation. The number one, most frequently given piece of advice is to set your meeting objectives. In preparing for your meeting you should consider if the meeting is necessary, and what the defined objectives are for this meeting. This may detail the specific outcomes from the meeting, such as if you want to merely discuss a topic to level-set or make a decision. Visualize the meeting’s agenda and critically think how you will guide the participants through the topic(s). This will help you firm up the agenda. Consider the level of prior knowledge or interest of the participants and structure the content accordingly. You should start with broad topics and then move to a narrower description, or start to give high level information before tackling detailed discussion. Knowing your participants and selecting appropriate decision makers will be key in arriving at your desired objectives. Sometimes the length of time you have available may not be sufficient to work out the relevant detail so pre-work for participants may be required. This has a nice side-effect in that it may create a feeling of ownership of the meeting and the meeting outcome.
Now to the actual running the meeting. As a project manager you may be facilitating your team to lead a discussion, make decisions, provide status updates, and many other purposes for assembling a team for a period of time.
Facilitate your meeting by controlling your meeting logistics, manage to time and manage your participants.
Aside from planning the obvious meeting logistics, such as selecting the right room, technology and set up there is a number of other logistics items that you can influence ahead of time that will make your meeting run more successfully. Planning a ‘no technology meeting’ and informing participants in advance that no laptops or mobile phones can be used could encourage a faster completion of the agenda and promote more engagement during the meeting. After all, multitasking is a myth, at least if you want to give quality attention to one thing. Another overwhelming number of best practice tips focuses on participant selection. What would a meeting be without its participants and therefore how can you make sure that the right participants will show up?
During the meeting, manage to time. It seems to be one of the biggest grievances of meeting attendees when a meeting runs over time and topics are not handled with sufficient attention. Not only will consistently over-time meetings annoy your patient attendees, it will create a snowball effect for subsequently meetings where attendees show up late. One of these meetings may be your own.
It may sound obvious but facilitating an effective meeting means managing your participants well and this can be one of the biggest challenges. Whether you know your participants well and have to tackle a difficult conversation, or you do not know your participants well and try to get through unfamiliar topics. In the first scenario your challenges might come in the form of unexpected emotions, or on the other side of the spectrum a phenomenon called ‘group think’ where in order to ensure harmony the group may make irrational decisions to keep the balance within the group and what is worse the facilitator is often unable to recognize it. The second scenario of unfamiliar attendees and topics already provides a queue to the facilitator to prepare in advance of the meeting, learn about the individuals invited, and prepare the agenda well.
Follow up and close the loop.
Meeting done and closed. Let’s move on. Not so fast! An integral part of any meeting is to close the loop in the form of action items and notes from the meeting. Following up on the discussions held and making sure that agreed decisions and actions are communicated not only ensures that attendees remember what they agreed to, but it creates a sense of purpose that the meeting was time well spent, opinions and ideas were heard and documented.
Some final thoughts
Did you know that the average office worker spends about 35% of their time in meetings? You may say this is true for you. Or you may say this is widely underestimated. The truth is, we all hate to waste time in badly planned or facilitated meetings only to find that the agreed actions are not followed up. Our job as project managers and meeting facilitators is to make sure that we facilitate effective and efficient meetings that will ultimately further the aims of the project. The above meeting management tips are not a comprehensive guide to any meeting but they touch on the most essential components that authors and meeting facilitators again and again select as their top tips.
And, information can be shared and leadership can take note that there will be slow changes not only in delivery, but how people are working. At its best, the list below is how teams and individuals transform:
It’s good to know your stuff, but no matter how good you are or how many books you’ve written, if you are perceived as being difficult to work with, people will find ways to avoid you. If you’re a contractor this will result in, at best, the non-renewal of your contract, or at worst you may find yourself being escorted off the premises by security. If you’re an employee, you may find yourself tasked with a make-work project that requires minimal interaction with staff. Either way, the outcome will not be pleasant, so make an effort to be courteous and pleasant with your colleagues and you will find your day to be more enjoyable and the people that you need to interact with will want to talk with you. Remember, you’re never too important to be nice to people (John Batiste).
If you are an experienced business analyst, you probably have lots of great advice to offer and lots of stories to share. The challenge is to limit the sharing of your personal experiences and to spend more time listening than talking. The saying that you have two ears and one mouth so you should do twice as much listening as talking speaks volumes.
Have you ever been introduced to someone and then immediately forgotten their name? You’re not alone. As a business analyst, you will meet many people that you will interact with on a regular basis, so you may as well get to know them. That begins by not just remembering their faces but by remembering their names. There are lots of techniques that you can learn in order to remember names, and we won’t go into all of those methods save for one: When you are introduced to a person for the first time, repeat the name by saying “Hello Jennifer”, or “Hello Peter”. This will emphasize the name in your memory.
Equipping yourself with knowledge about the organization will demonstrate to your clients an interest in the organization and will also enable you to adjust your approach in order to be compatible with the organization’s culture and work environment. Some factors to consider when researching an organization are:
As a business analyst, especially as a consultant, you are hired to use the experience that you have acquired over the years to deliver innovative and creative solutions. Your goal is to contribute to the successful delivery of the project or the organizational initiative. You are not looking for a promotion, but your client might be, and if the project or the initiative that you are working on is successful, the chances of your client being promoted, or at least recognized, are elevated. This may be warranted because if your client was smart enough to hire you, and you delivered, then that deserves some recognition. Therefore, try to be humble and make it your mandate to make the people who hired you look good by letting them take the credit for your work. If you put those around you first, this will be noticed, your client will love you, and you will be rewarded with respect.
Although the administrative assistant holds one of the lowest paying jobs in an organization, they play a key role in its success. They are usually the first person in an organization to answer the phone. They are responsible for booking meetings, arranging documents to be signed, and locating specific documents.
If you work long enough in an office environment you will eventually find yourself having to work with someone who is difficult. This is a person who will irritate you by either being uncooperative, disagreeable, unfriendly, or outright caustic. If it hasn’t happened to you yet, it is just a matter of time, and if it has happened to you, it will probably happen again, so it is a good idea to equip yourself with a few ways to manage this type of person. The first step is to realize that there is always an underlying reason that makes the difficult person difficult. It may be due to an insecurity, a perceived sense of a lack of respect among their colleagues, or problems that they may be having in their personal lives. Whatever the reason, you do not want to add to their stress by becoming a threat to them. A natural tendency is to avoid such people altogether, but before you revert to this, there may be a better way. Instead, draw them into a conversation where they do not feel threatened. The manner in which you engage them needs to be gentle, and the topic needs to be carefully chosen, but the main point here is to make them feel valued. If you don’t know the person, then you have no reason to doubt that they can make a valuable contribution to the task at hand. If on the other hand you are acquainted with the person and know that they may not be that helpful, you will need to find a way to gracefully minimize this person’s impact on the project and the team members.
We are all writers and readers with the need to be understood and to understand, and therefore, writing in an effective and efficient manner is important. Written materials such as formal documents, slide decks, handouts, and emails that you produce are a direct representation of you and the quality of your work.
Up until now, we have talked about being better at what we do as business analysts. We have talked about talking less and listening more, remembering people’s names, being humble and not seeking validation all the time, greeting people in the morning (when all we really want is to be left alone with our emails and our coffee), working with grumpy people, writing awesome documents, and so on. But sometimes, it’s ok to take a break from this drive to be the perfect business analyst and be satisfied with who we are. The suggestion is not to revert to sloppiness, but rather to strike a balance between what is desirable and what is achievable. The perfect document, for example, that is never shared is far less helpful than one that is 80% quality, since the extra 20% may not be worth the time required to achieve it.