Keep Your Meetings Short
Recently, I have been a part of a few incredibly well-run meetings. There were three commonalities in these meetings that helped to keep them short and efficient. As a leader, use these techniques to improve your productivity and protect your people from experiencing burn-out due to unnecessarily long meetings.
1. Provide an agenda to all members before the start of the meeting
Giving all parties the information and topics to be discussed should eliminate the need to get everyone "up to speed" in the first ten minutes. The time could be better spent answering questions that will be beneficial to the whole group rather than basics that should already be known.
This also allows people to begin brainstorming earlier which should make for better solutions to the problems you are discussing. Instead of quickly trying to come up with something in the meeting, your team members will have time to come up with truly innovative and creative solutions. Additionally, they will discard bad ideas on their own time. This saves them from feeling embarrassment due to suggesting a clearly bad idea and keeps the focus of the meeting on worthwhile ideas.
2. Stay on topic
It is easy in meetings to get side-tracked about things bigger than the scope of the meetings or get caught in weeds trying to hammer out details as a group. You must avoid both of these. If you feel the meeting starting to drift, call everyone's attention back to the purpose of the meeting and schedule a time to figure out the tangent.
Often times you will not even need to schedule time for the tangent because it is really the responsibility of one person who does not require input from a whole team of people on how to do her job.
The further you drift off topic in a meeting, the more you marginalize certain participants in the meeting. Although they may have been necessary for the initial purpose of the meeting, if the meetings switches topics, they will quickly become little more than a mannequin in the conference room.
3. Give a clear conclusion and announce action steps
Sometimes when a meeting begins to drift, the best course of action is to give a quick wrap-up, state your expectations for the work ahead, and end the meeting. As a leader, you must constantly be evaluating if the meeting has reached its objective. If it has, every minute you spend in the conference room after that is wasted time.
Additionally, if you have not met your objective, you have to analyze the pace at which the meeting is progressing. If you observe that people are becoming increasingly disengaged, it is not a bad idea to end the meeting. It is better to end an unproductive meeting prematurely than to waste everyone's time chasing an unreachable objective.
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