Effective Meeting Outcomes

Hi everyone, I hope you're having an amazing day. You know, probably one of the biggest things that take up the bulk of your time at work is just all these constant meetings that you're going to. And I would suggest that there's really two problems here. And the first problem is that number one, there are just too many meetings and number two, the meetings that you go to are simply ineffective. So in this chat, I wanted to talk about how we can really reduce the number of meetings we go to and for the ones we do attend, how can we make them a little bit more effective? So let's jump into the first problem, too many meetings. And so I'll come at this chat from two perspectives. One is you're holding a meeting or number two, you're attending a meeting. And I'll go over both sides. So let's start with just creating too many meetings. If you're one of the folks that are creating meetings to solve this problem to reduce meetings, here's what I'd want you to think about. And ultimately, the biggest question is, should you even hold the meeting in the first place? And the logic that you want to go through on answering this question is first understanding, what is the benefit of a meeting? And ultimately, the benefit of a meeting is having a real-time conversation in order for you to achieve an outcome. And that's it. So think about that for a second. Think about all of the meetings you're holding. And think about those two test questions, which is, does it need to be real-time? A real-time conversation with one or more people. And are you working towards some outcome that would benefit you? So let's talk about this notion of real time. Look, here's the thing. If you don't need a real-time conversation, then one of the things that you could do is potentially send an email. And look, I know what you're saying is, hey, I already get enough emails. But what would you rather? Would you rather one or two or three emails in your inbox? Or would you rather attend three hours of meetings to go try to get the answer to what you could get in those emails? It's up to you. Me personally, I'm going to opt to sending an email. And hopefully I can get some of the things that I need from somebody else so I can achieve an outcome. I don't have to be in real time. But if you find out that yes, you do need a real-time conversation, then a couple of great things happen at this point, right? Which is, you can start thinking about preparing for that meeting, creating agendas, and so on and so forth. Now let's flip over to you're the one getting a lot of meeting requests from everybody else. The question that I would ask myself, and ultimately you may need to ask this of the meeting holder, is, are you personally going to give value or are you going to receive value? And I'll tell you over my career, I've got invited to a ton of meetings just because of the position I was in or because someone thought I might know something so they invited me just in case all of these things, right? If you're not clear, when you get a meeting invite, if you're not clear immediately through that meeting invite, that you can either receive or give value, the first thing I would do is respond back to that meeting holder and clarify how they expect that you can give or receive value. And if they can't, I think you simply decline the meeting. And that's the power you have, the only power you have to attend less meetings is for you personally to decline them. And yeah, I know this gets especially tough when it's your boss, but here's the thing, if we're going to break this culture together, it starts with you asking your boss these same questions. And that's the only way, all right? So that's the whole thing about, you know, attending all these meetings. Ultimately, if you're holding them, make sure you need a real time conversation and only invite the people that you need to make progress and discourage them from bringing in hordes of other people. Number two, if you're getting all these meeting requests, just clarify whether you can add or receive value. And if you don't, simply decline. And it can be that simple. Okay, that said, that's how we're going to handle too many meetings. Now let's move on to the second problem, which is the meetings you go to are ineffective. And there's really just five simple guidelines that I'm going to cover in the rest of this chat. And I'll go over them right now and then we'll go into each one of them individually. So the first guideline, if you're holding the meeting, well, here's the thing, right? I'm going to go over all of this from the viewpoint of you holding the meeting. But here's the thing. At the end, I'll talk about what if you're a meeting attendee, how can you help? So we'll get to that at the end. So if you're holding the meeting, there's five tips. Number one, make sure you identify a desired outcome for that specific meeting. Tip number two, get the right people in the room. Tip number three, properly facilitate the meeting. Tip number four, take notes and send out meeting minutes. And tip five is if you didn't accomplish your desired outcome, have a follow up plan for any actions or completing the desired outcome of the meeting. That said, let's jump into the first one, identifying a desired outcome. The question here is, what if you're holding the meeting, what do you want to have accomplished? You have to be able to accomplish something by the end of that specific meeting. I will tell you right now, it is an outcome is never quote, just an update or quote a discussion. It is never any of those things. You may ask yourself, well, what if my boss tells me I need to go have this meeting and I he needs to give an update to his boss or their boss. Here's what I would suggest. I would suggest that from an outcome perspective, there's really only four outcomes that you could ever have from a real time meeting. Ever. And actually, I'll go over this list both from the perspective of the meeting holder or from the meeting attendee. So there's only four outcomes that I think you could ever get from a meeting. And by the way, if you have a desired outcome, as I mentioned earlier, it'll help you to plan attendees, do pre-work, send out or develop and send out an agenda. So the first type of desired outcome is you might need direction from somebody, your boss or their boss, right? You're not sure which way to go with the project. You could go right, you could go left. You're just looking for some advice, right? Some direction. Or you're the leader of a team and you might want to give the team some direction left or right. So direction is one. The next one is alignment and influence. And this is probably what would cover, quote, my boss wants me to give an update. And when you think about it, you're busy working away and somebody taps you on the shoulder and says, Hey, you need to give an update to the VP. Why is that? Have you ever asked yourself, Why do they need an update? Just likely it's because they're either a) unaware or they're not aligned or they're not in agreement with your plan or way where they think you are. So ultimately, these update meetings are about getting alignment with your key stakeholders that you do have the right plan. They are aware of where you are when you're progress and that they agree that you either are indeed on track or not. Because if you're not, then some of these other outcomes kick in, which is they may give you some direction, right? So that's alignment and influence. And that's probably the one where you spend a lot of time. The third type of desired outcome is you may need a decision. It may come to a point where you may need to try to spend resources or ask for headcount or something above your pay grade and you simply just need decisions. And the fourth thing from a meeting that nobody seems to ask for, but it's such a powerful tool, which is asking for help. You may get to a point where you hit a brick wall with your project or your work. Go create a meeting with your key stakeholders and ask them how they can help you or give them give them some request for some help that you need. Okay? A lot of people come in and say, well, wait a minute. What about just having a discussion so that we can educate and share information? Well here's again, what I would come back to is why are you doing that? Why are you needing to educate somebody? And most likely you're going to say, well, in order for me to get alignment or direction or decisions. Ah, well then educating within itself is not an outcome. It's a means to some other end, which is is direction alignment decisions or help. So make sure you have a desired outcome that you can accomplish by the end of the meeting. And if it takes two hours to go through this, then break your meeting up into a couple smaller meetings that you can have small things accomplished in each meeting. Maybe in that first hour, you do get the education and awareness done so that then you can come back in a second hour later in the week to then after they think about it, ask for direction alignment or decisions, right? So go ahead and set, make sure you have a desired outcome. Once you have a desired outcome, then the next step now is to get the right people in the room. So you can't do this next step getting the right people in the room if you don't have a desired outcome. And this is where you can start reducing the number of people that come to your meetings. If you know what your desired outcome is and you know that you want a decisions direction alignment or help, then you know who to bring into the room. Who you would bring into the room are decision makers, stakeholders, project team members, whoever it takes for you to achieve your desired outcome. And I will tell you, I have been to project status meetings where a team is giving a status and the VP says, "Well, hang on, what about this other stakeholder "who you're dependent on? "Are they even aware?" And the answer was, "Yeah, no, we haven't told them yet." You know, and we got thrown out of the room because how could you possibly bring a plan to a VP when some of the key dependent stakeholders aren't even aware are on board? So make sure you're getting stakeholders in the room to make sure they're aligned and they're committed and so on and so forth. So for whatever meeting you have, get the right people in the room. And I briefly talked about stakeholders. Let me define stakeholders a little bit more. Think of a grid on one axis, the vertical axis is how much influence a particular stakeholder has. At the very bottom, they have very low influence. At the very top, they have very high influence. On the X axis, plot their level of interest in whatever you're trying to do. And on the left, it's low interest on the right. It's high interest. So if you look at this grid, at the intersections of influence and interest and the bottom left, it's low on both counts. So that person probably doesn't need to be in your meeting. They have almost no influence over what you're doing and they probably don't care. So there's minimal effort you need to do with them. Now here's an interesting one, right? Here's an interesting one. Well, let's move to the far top right, which is somebody who has a very high influence and a very high interest in what you're doing. This is the person that you want to keep managed very closely more than likely these people are in your meeting. Now, let's move to the top left, which is somebody who has a very high influence, but a low interest. This is one group that tends to not be remembered or considered. But here's the thing, if these people aren't satisfied, they could block you. Remember, they have a high influence over what you're doing, but they don't care. They have other priorities. So you have to keep them happy and most likely you're bringing them into the meeting to make sure they're aligned. We talked about alignment. You may want direction from them. You may need help from them. So you have to keep this population satisfied. So really the kind of rule of thumb here is anybody with high influence, that's who you're bringing into the real time discussion. And the last quadrant that we didn't talk about yet, which is they have a very, very high interest in what you're doing, but a very low influence. And here's the thing, those people keep them informed through meeting minutes. You don't need to bring them into your meeting, right? Good meeting minutes down and send them out later for them to go read later, right? So that's just a little bit on stakeholders. Now, the third step is facilitating the meeting. Now, when you first go into the meeting, absolutely make sure you have an agenda that facilitates the desired outcome. And that agenda is really a roadmap of topics and points and whatever. It's a roadmap of how to get through the meeting. And the way you want to think about it is if you can get through all of those points in the agenda, you should be able to achieve your desired outcome. So the first thing you want to do when you start a meeting is to state, articulate what the desired outcome is, do an attendee check to make sure you have everybody in the room and then set up any context as necessary, right? And this is usually the problem statement, why should they care about this meeting? What do you want from them, right? So those are the things that are necessary when you're facilitating the meeting. If the meeting is gonna be very, very complicated, or even not, right, decide on someone who's gonna take notes. Remember, one of the practices you're gonna start doing is sending out meeting minutes. So make sure that you decide on a note taker. Ideally, it's not you, because you're gonna be busy engaging and facilitating the meeting. You don't want to keep taking these mental 30 second, oh, let me write that down, 'cause you're gonna lose track, you're gonna lose flow. Ideally, if you can get somebody else to take notes for you, that's perfect. Now, the other thing is, now that you have an agenda, you have to actively manage through the agenda. You need to realize that when you pull a bunch of people from your company into a room, most likely, they're all somewhat working on either the same thing or related things to the topic you're bringing in. And here's the thing, if you don't start with a desired outcome or you don't start with an agenda, they will automatically seize that as an opportunity to pursue their own agenda. So make sure you actively manage through your desired outcome and the agenda you set up. Another gotcha point is, look, everybody in these companies are, they're good problem solvers. So what happens is a topic is thrown out there. And all of a sudden, people start working the problem and they try to create solutions. Look, if that's not the desired outcome for the meeting, then you have to shut that down. And I don't have time to go into a big example, but that happened to me and the response simply is, hey, guys, it sounds like a really important problem, but that's not why we're here. So let's go ahead and park and lot that and somebody else who cares about that then go create another meeting. But the meeting that I set up is for this desired outcome and this is the agenda we need to get through. So for the sake of time, let's keep moving. And that's how you shut that down, right? Because people just have this ever burning desire to solution while there's something that goes, hey, that's a problem. What are we doing about that? Look, you know what? I don't know and probably don't care about what you're doing about that. Let's talk about what you wanna talk about. At the end of the meeting, do a check to see if you accomplished your desired outcome. You have to do this, right? Get into the habit of saying, did you achieve everything you wanted to achieve? And if you did, recognize and thank the participants. If you didn't, schedule a follow up meeting. Okay, let's move on to the next step, which is taking notes and sending out meeting minutes. And Lee Aikoka, he was a chairman of Chrysler. He had a great quote. He said, "The discipline of writing something down is the first step toward making it happen." So I'll tell you right now, taking notes is a skill that has to be developed. When I first started taking notes, I tried to capture the discussion verbatim. You can't do that. It just doesn't work because meetings are dynamic. But I would suggest some type of template for taking notes and then be flexible with your template. So pick whatever media works for you, whether it's an email or a notepad or whatever, it doesn't matter, just whatever you wanna capture. And the template that I personally start with is just these blank fields on this page. And my template is, it has the word context. It has the word direction. It has the word alignment and has the word decision. It has the word help needed. It has the word actions and it has the word next step. And so what I do is, as the meeting is going on, I only capture relevant pieces of information that fit into those categories. And I generally don't put in a lot of context unless I need to. But how many times have you walked out of a meeting and you wondered, did we decide this or that? 'Cause no one really wrote it down. But if you put the word, let's say, decision on a piece of paper and you write something down. At the end of that meeting, you go, okay, let me review my notes very quickly. We decided, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Let me tell you what, if anybody was on the fence, that's when they're gonna step up and go, wait a minute, I don't know that I decided that, right? And that's where clarity comes in. So capture any background and context as necessary. And capture actions. Now, I will tell you, you're probably laughing here because the last time you either received an action or whatever, it was, most action items, we don't even know who the owner is. We don't know what the due date is. We don't know anything other than the activity itself. A lot of people just write down, send out that report. So, Here is the best way to capture an action. You're going to need a few things, right? Number one, what is the activity itself? Send out the report. But here's something new. Add the outcome. Why are we sending out the report? What do we want to have accomplish when that report gets sent out? Write down who is the owner of that action? Write down the customer who gets the benefit when the action is completed. And write down what the completion criteria is. And the reason you want to write all this down is two weeks from now when you're going through the meeting minutes and the actions, you're going to forget things. But if you have the action, the outcome, the owner, and the customer, you can close that loop if you totally forgot what this was about. You can go back to the owner and the customer and says, "Hey, you know, that action we wrote down for the purpose of this. I need some clarity. It's a lot easier to get clarity." And lastly on taking notes, send out those minutes within 24 hours when everything is fresh and everybody's mind so that if somebody disagrees, then you can make some corrections without losing time. And the last step is to have a follow-up plan in case you didn't complete the outcome. And as a great quote from Walt Disney, he says, "The way to get started is a quit talking and begin doing." So if you didn't accomplish what you needed to accomplish, schedule a follow-up meeting as necessary for specific actions and next steps. Set aggressive but appropriate due dates for all actions and next steps. If you go look at all your meetings that you attend now, one of the due dates for all the actions. Automatically, they are the next meeting, which may be a week, a month, or whatever. Why? I don't know why. So this is why things take so long, because we automatically make our due dates the next meeting. If there's a task that can be accomplished in the next day or two, then set that as the appropriate due date. And then have that ready to report on whenever somebody calls to report was the action completed. But the point was it was done and progress is getting made. If your action tracker gets hugely long, then create a separate tracker and diligently manage it. And lastly, now that you have actions the way I talked about, now you can start holding people accountable for their commitments. So those are the top five guidelines. I'll go over them again real quickly, identified desired outcome for the specific meeting, get the right people in the room, properly facilitate the meeting, take notes and send out meeting minutes, and have a plan to follow up on any actions or open items. So let me close with a call to action. So if you're the meeting owner, you're the one created in the meeting, I simply just ask to just start adopting and utilizing these guidelines immediately. Pretty simple. Now what if you're the meeting attendee? What can you do? Well, there's a lot you can do. First, start holding each other accountable for these guidelines. So if you get a meeting notice without a desired outcome or an agenda, respond back and ask for one. Do not accept the meeting. Make sure you're going to add value or receive value. Based on that desired outcome, if you can determine if you can add value, if not align with the meeting owner that you're not going to go and decline. That's how I get a lot of meetings off my calendar. You might even suggest somebody else is more appropriate. If you're in the, if you are in the meeting and the meeting owner start without a desired outcome and what they want from you and the agenda, I'd hold up my hand and say, excuse me, can you recap for everybody what you're trying to accomplish in this meeting that the desired outcome is and do you have an agenda? Right? Ask for that upfront. It'll force them to properly facilitate the meeting. When you're in the meeting, help the owner by contributing to the discussion toward their desired outcome. Don't start going sideways on your own topic and everything else. You now know what their desired outcome is. You know what their agenda is. Practice that weight, which is, it's a saying. It says, why am I talking? If you can't answer why you're talking in that meeting, then you shouldn't be talking. Is it your turn? Is what you're saying going to add value? Is it helping them toward the desired outcome? Is it appropriate? So on and so forth. So practice weight when you're in a meeting. Ask yourself why am I talking? If you see others going off topic from the desired outcome, try to help to remind them of the desired outcome for this particular meeting and gain agreement to park and lock. Maybe the facilitator of the meeting isn't that strong and they just need some help because they can't do it. Right? So don't contribute to going off topic. And if you see somebody going off topic, help the meeting owner to try to stay on topic. Get the other person to stay on topic. After the meeting, if you didn't get a copy of the notes, go ahead and email and ask for them to be sent out. If everybody starts doing this, trust me. People who aren't standing meeting minutes will start standing meeting minutes. And if there are any notes, actions or next steps that are unclear, immediately seek clarification to those meeting minutes. So that it doesn't sit for days and weeks without any action. So those are the five tips guys. I'll remember. Start with determining how to go to less meetings by making sure you need a real-time conversation that has a specific desired outcome and follow these five steps. Identify the desired outcome. Get the right people in the room. Facilitate the meeting. Take notes and have a follow-up plan and an action plan for open items. I hope you enjoyed this chat. If you did, please subscribe. And if you know someone else who may like these types of chats, please share the podcast with them as well. Thanks for listening.