If you are leading a coalition, partnership, team or board, you are also leading lots of meetings. Effective meetings create opportunities for engagement and potential for follow-through. However, effective meetings don’t just “happen.” You have to invest time, energy and resources to prepare, host and follow-up to successfully conduct “effective” meetings.
Join us this week as we provide three tips on how to make your next meeting more effective.
Sometimes it is obvious who may be interested in a particular area (based on what they say during the meetings), but it may not always be clear. Once you determine your purpose and priorities, assess your members to find out which of them are interested and bring expertise to these priority areas. This can be as simple as an email asking for participants to respond with which priorities they would like to implement or you can conduct a brief electronic survey. If you know some of your members may have a particular interest or expertise and they haven’t responded, then try calling them to see if you can connect them with one of your priority areas.
Consider your meeting platform and how to incorporate interactive opportunities. Since we have options of virtual, in-person or sometimes hybrid (though WAY more complex), consider what interactive looks like in each setting. When you’re in person, consider what you can only do in person. Take time for intentional connection, networking, shared learning, decision making, priority setting, small and large group work. If it could be a webinar or virtual meeting, then save that content and approach for the virtual setting.
Virtual meetings can be a great platform to share data, present information or share highlights of who is working on what areas. You can still make a virtual meeting interactive. Begin the meeting with questions and opportunities to engage. If you need practical ideas, check out “We and Me” and their conversation cards. You can also launch poll questions, use breakout rooms, whiteboards and/or seek engagement using the chat feature.
At the end of the meeting, leave enough time to make decisions and develop action items. Determine the people responsible for each action item and a timeframe for completion. If you have not had an opportunity to be clear about specific action items or decisions, then make that your one action item! Ask your participants to reflect on the discussion. Send a follow-up email with clear bullet points and a plan for making the decision.
So what about you, what do you do in order to make your meeting effective? Do you use these methods? Or something else?