Taking Responsibility and the Importance of Purpose for Making Meetings Work!

Welcome to Making Meetings Work!

This blog will be dedicated (at least at this point) to sharing best (and worst) techniques for facilitating ALL kinds of meetings. This is your chance to share with others, best practices for running effective meetings, or nightmare stories that will help us avoid sins of the past. With 17 years of facilitating under my belt my hope is to provide my very own best practices and ideas for running wildly successful meetings. What I'm hoping from my fellow bloggers is to be critiqued and/or validated. To share stories, tools, techniques and processes that help all of us be better meeting leaders.

To start off this blog I'd like to recognize a few things about meetings – most organizational meetings suck big time yet few meeting participants or leaders are willing to do anything about it!? Yeah, yeah I know some of us exist in a resistant top-down structure, or we have idiotic management who know nothing about empowerment and building collaborative culture, but where does the essence of change begin in creating successful meetings? Well to be frank, it's got to be grassroots and it begins of course with us – each one of us taking accountability for running good meetings.

Why you, why me?

Well once we notice or become aware of something in a meeting that isn't working ("how come we keep on going off-topic?" "Why is Joe always folding in to what other members say?") we're therefore at a choice point to, at minimum, bring it to everyone's consciousness, or continue to say nothing. I know that just being conscious does not necessarily mean we can do anything about it, but it does mean that we have a choice to find out:
a. is this also bothering other people?
b. so what can we do about it?

Awareness enables choice. I know this is soooo obvious, however time and time again I keep on seeing the same mistakes being made at different meetings with people consciously doing little to make any changes. The question is why aren't we choosing to do something about changing our meeting when we know something is not working?

I believe that answer somewhat lies in the observation that many of us would rather stay in our fur lined ruts doing nothing different for fear of change, repercussions or having to put in some rigor (or time or energy) to change our meeting behaviors and lord knows I got enough on my plate right to now that could easily qualify as a two person job!!!

Yet, what's the outcome of doing nothing? Wasted time, lost $$$'s, frustration, and declining job satisfaction. Count the number of people around your table at the next meeting multiplied by the per hour salary they make times the number of hours for the meeting. Then multiply that figure by the percentage of time wasted and you'll get the dollars being lost to ineffective meetings that could have otherwise been attributed to value added, bottom-line generating activities.

Yeah we can blame it on management, culture, crappy teams but seriously the only change that we can control is the changes that we bring forth to a meeting. So let's talk about what can be changed to create more successful meetings. I believe the best ideas are those that are simple and practical but isn't going to demand and arm and leg of our time!

(Note: My experiences really only speak to Western culture, however I really want to investigate meeting practices in other cultures. What's different or the same? How can we manage virtual cross-cultural meetings when expectations for leading the meeting and interpersonal norms may be so different?)

In defining best practices in meeting management I want to refer to the more 'stable' elements of meetings that if we were to embrace would actually help to create more successful, collaborative discussions. For me the first and foremost is that ALL meetings require 'structure'. Creating structure is the primary role of a meeting leader, meeting facilitator or Chair. Its purpose is enable meeting participants to engage in brainstorming, decision-making, strategizing, problem-solving, etc. without them having to worry about ‘are we discussing this logically? Are we on topic? Are we achieving our intended outcomes? Are we talking respectfully to one another?’

However it is virtually impossible to structure a discussion until we understand 'why' we're having the discussion in the first place. The 'why' refers to understanding the purpose or goal of the meeting. We can't fully understand or articulate the purpose until we get clarity as to the tangible, concrete outcomes that the meeting needs to achieve.

The purpose is our ultimate destination, the outcomes are the 'what' we want to achieve in getting to our destination. Once we understand purpose and outcomes we can then define the structure or steps required to achieve the purpose and process. Without clearly defining the meeting's purpose we may run the risk of creating an agenda that totally misses out on why people think they're attending the meeting. This could result in meeting attendees not participating, tuning out, or coming across as wanting to push their own agendas. So to avoid this potential meeting pitfall get clarity as to the overall purpose of a meeting and, the purpose of each agenda topic that will ultimately help the group achieve its purpose and outcomes.

What are your thoughts on defining purpose? Is it possible to enter a meeting without clearly defining purpose and outcomes? What are success or failure stories you can share? What about meetings keeps you up at night or allows you to sleep contently?

Michael