Note #1: Habits for a Winning Meeting
A set of pre, during, and post meeting tactics to drive effective meetings
Hello there! I am Ilana, and I write about learnings from my roles in Biz Ops and Consulting. If you’re new here, welcome! You can subscribe to my Smooth Operator notes where I share tactical items I learned to be a more effective problem solver, driver, and leader.
Meetings have been getting a bad rep lately, inspiring myriads of articles, memes, and even Dilbert comics (see exhibit A-E). Below are meeting mechanics I’ve picked up to set-up (pre-meeting), facilitate (during meeting), and follow (post meeting) through on for an effective meeting.
An effective meeting…
⚡ Energizes the audience
🔮 Provides clarity
➡️ Progresses a topic forward
The set-up (pre-meeting)
To set-up the meeting for success it is critical that you clearly communicate the purpose of the meeting to all attendees.
Three ingredients for a successful meeting set-up:
Define the Objective 🎯
This is the WHY behind the meeting. Why are you all here? This can range from formal (i.e., making a decision or kicking off a new initiative) to casual (i.e., connecting with a peer to build a relationship).
Establish What Success Looks Like 🏆
This is the HOW for the meeting. How are we going to achieve the objective? It helps to use action verbs here to define success. For example: Agree on X decision, Commit to a timeline, Learn about Y concept, etc…
Set the Agenda 🕔
This is the WHAT for the meeting. What will be discussed? Set up a game plan for how you will facilitate the meeting. It helps to add time placeholders for each section of the agenda to gauge what is feasible to cover in the allotted time. This timing might not hold, but it will give you a sense of how you are progressing through the meeting. If the meeting is to be facilitated by multiple individuals make sure to establish owners.
💫 Rockstar practice: Send out the 3 components above when you set up the invite to ensure everyone is oriented in advance. Below is a sample layout of the types of meeting invites I send.
Sample Meeting Invite
The facilitation (during meeting)
Stand in the role of the facilitator. As the facilitator you are like a party host. You set the tone, guide how others engage with each other and the content, and ensure that there is progress to the objective or deviation as needed. At times things will not go as planned and just like a party host a facilitator needs to be adaptable.
Fundamentals of facilitating a meeting:
Kick-off the meeting ⚽ with the objective, what success looks like, and the agenda. This primes the attendees on the topic and gives them an opportunity to communicate any points of mis-alignment. This also establishes your role as the facilitator.
Own the transitions 💪 and push the agenda along. As the facilitator you are responsible for the flow of the meeting, and attendees will look to you to guide the topics. Feel comfortable to step in and say “let’s move on to the next part as we have agreement here” or “we are going off topic here, [Tom] let’s discuss this offline.” It can feel uncomfortable to interject but like the party host you will need to say “we are moving to the dance floor now” or “it’s time for the cake.”
Wrap-up the meeting 🎁 by stating what was agreed upon and outlining defined next steps. Next steps should be a specific action or outcome that has a specified captain and timeline.
The follow through (post meeting)
And that’s a wrap…send a follow-up note to recap what was discussed, the decisions made, and aligned upon next steps. This ensures that you don’t lose momentum from the meeting and keep the ball rolling. Below is a sample follow-up email I send post meeting.
Sample Follow-up Email
Let me know how the above works for you and if you have any habits that you lean on to support smooth and effective meetings.
These are great ideas! I also know from first hand experience how you are masterful at doing this.
Super helpful! Sharing this with my students. Thanks, Ilana :)