Meetings are at times necessary; some, however, are just plain time-wasters. One of the first things to do before you call a meeting is ask yourself if you're better off just emailing the person. If a meeting is necessary, these few tips will help you make the most of it--especially if it's with 3 or more people.
1. Read-ahead: What do you need your team to know ahead of time? Rather than brief them on it in the meeting, send it to them as read-ahead material. This can be anything: documents, articles, news headlines--whatever will be pertinent to the meeting, have your team read it before-hand.
2. Rules of the game: Every game has a set of rules--meetings should too. If you want honest work, you have to create the space for honesty. One rule you can have is 'whatever is talked about in the meeting stays in the meeting.' Or, there'll be no recourse for honesty. You want to have your team candidly, but respectfully, giving their input. This requires very clear rules and boundaries.
3. Have a facilitator, if necessary: If you're working through some really complex issues, consider having a paid facilitator to serve as an objective voice and 'referee' as it were. Often a leader has blinders on that block him/her from seeing the issue objectively. As well, if there are team dynamics that create barriers to a solution, a facilitator can provide a way through that.
4. Document: How often do you leave a meeting and you have little to no record of what was actually talked about? Don't rely only on your team to take notes; have someone either in the meeting or an outsider be a documenter. You may also want to consider having different levels of documentation, such as video recording, audio recording, minutes taking, etc. If you use whiteboards, make sure someone is responsible for taking pictures of everything.
5. Environment: The location of your meeting will either help our hinder its outcome. Working in a cramped room with low-ceilings and blinding fluorescent lighting will attenuate your outcome. What kind of meeting is it? If it's a long meeting, consider working in a space in which furniture can be moved around. If you're in a boardroom and the table can be moved, push it against a wall and use it as a serving table for refreshments. Get large sheets of paper up on the walls and work standing up. Get music in the background that will enhance creative flow, such as baroque. Get bricolage, legos, and other such building materials in the space to get people working kinaesthetically on solving a problem, rather than just in 1-dimension. Make sure there's plenty of natural light and a variety of plants.
6. Good food: If you must have a lunch meeting over several hours, DO NOT serve complex carbohydrates such as pizza, lasagna, spaghetti, large sandwiches, etc--you and your team will be sleepwalking through the afternoon, no matter how much coffee you've had. Instead, you want simple proteins--beef, chicken, or fish--and plenty of greens and other vegetables, sprouts, nuts and seeds. This food will give you the energy you need without the glutted belly and drowsiness that come from carbs. And yes, have plenty of coffee and water on hand--tea as well.
7. Diverse information: Meetings are often counter-productive when people are using the same thinking to solve a problem that created it in the first place. Too often, people draw on the same ideas and experiences while trying to create something new. To break this habit, you need to get new information in the meeting space, such as books, articles, magazines, and periodicals. Cultural etiquette for meetings is typically that reading during a meeting is rude. Trash this antiquated rule and give your team plenty to read--and give them material totally outside the issue at hand. I've worked with many teams that came up with great ideas on medical solutions after reading books on architecture and sea-creatures. It's called the power of divergent thinking. By introducing divergent ideas and frames of thinking to a problem, the brain is making new connections which produce new ideas.
8. Have a plan: A meeting can stretch on for hours with little result. You need to have a plan--not an agenda, but a plan. A good rule of thumb is to get people working on stuff to report out after a set period of time. Synthesize the ideas, then break out again. If you have 10 people, have two different teams working on stuff. If you have 3-5, break out individually to tackle a different side of a problem and come back to report after a set period of time. Break up the time of your meeting into stages or frames that deal with a different part of the problem.
9. High to low and low to high: You want to work broadly then into greater granularity; by this I mean, if you're working on a problem, look at the broader social, economic, political, technological issues of the problem. Then, look at how those global issues are impacting your industry; and from your industry, look at your company. From your company, work your way down into your particular department. When you work on your solution, work bottom up from your department to your company to your industry to the world.
10. Cascade: You should think of meetings as cascading from one another. Work on big meta-issues and lower into granular ones; from a large-scale vision to individual tasks. Take the documentation of the last meeting and use it to create the next meeting, that way your solutions will build on each other. Don't think of one meeting; think of several over the next month that build on each other.
11. Diversity: Don't think just your department, but where you can invite others from different parts of the company to give you a better vantage point. Consider also having people join the meeting from other companies or industries to help give you a different view of the issue. Invite someone who knows nothing about your area of work or your company's solutions to sit in and offer feedback, especially from a customer perspective. For new ideas, you want diversity coming from everywhere--even a competitor.
You will need to think differently about meetings. The standard sit-down and have one person talking all the time doesn't work. You need to think about how you're going to get new ideas from everyone, and how you're going to capture those ideas and put them into action plans. There's plenty of information out there about ways you can do this. Read FastCo. or the Steve Jobs biography, or books by Tom Kelley of IDEO.
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