Three Foundational Building Blocks of an Effective Meeting
Subject Line: Staff Meeting Thursday
Email: Hey everyone, don’t forget we have our 90-min. staff meeting Thursday. Eian’s bringing the snacks. See you then!
My Body’s Reaction: I sigh, my shoulders slump, my eyelids close, and I wonder what the snacks will be.
Internal Thoughtst: Oh gosh, I hope these aren’t my staff’s thoughts about the meetings I lead . . . but how can I avoid that?
When was the last time you were in a meeting where your voice was important, your ideas mattered, and you left feeling energized and motivated? If you are like me, you don’t want to lead the kind of meetings that you dread attending.
So, let’s get started. What are the foundations of any meeting? Meetings have three building blocks: the topics, the outcomes, and the process. Sounds obvious, doesn’t it? But one or more of these elements is often forgotten or done poorly.
The Topics
The topics typically create the segments of the meeting. Whether it’s adjusting the budget, relationship building, vision casting, troubleshooting a programming glitch, or staffing, each topic needs to have its own segment of the meeting. If not, topics can meld and blend into other subjects, making the meeting a messy blur. When topics aren’t distinct enough, progress can’t be made on anything in particular, and people leave the meetings feeling like there was a lot of talk, but no progress. They leave feeling drained.
Topics must be clear to the group, and may be covered over the course of several meetings.
Example: The topic of choosing a new curriculum may have many pieces (student needs, budget, integration with other subjects, staff abilities to deliver the curriculum as designed, etc.) Each piece needs to be covered successively, and sometimes iteratively, over several sessions before the need is fully addressed.
Application: Take a moment and write down 2-4 topics you want to cover in your next meeting.
The Outcomes
For each topic, one or more desired outcomes are needed. Having clear goals sets a direction or a destination to head toward. If we don’t have a destination, we just wander around and don’t make any progress. This is a major cause of frustration for meeting attendees.
Example: The topic itself might have an overall goal like “choose a new curriculum for our debutante English students.” There also needs to be more specific outcomes for today’s discussion, which might be to “create a committee to research new curriculum options.”
Some types of outcomes are:
Making decisions
Building capacity
Sharing information
Building community
Clear outcomes for each topic should be decided in advance and communicated clearly at the beginning of the meeting or, even better, in the agenda sent in advance. If a decision on something is the desired outcome, be sure to also mention what decision style will be used.
Application: For each of your topics above, jot down an overarching goal or reason for addressing that topic and a specific, manageable outcome for your next meeting.
The Process
This is the activity, or often set of activities, used to arrive at the desired outcome for each topic. Most meetings I’ve attended only use a small range of the possible activities available: brainstorming, open discussion, and voting, for example.
But, there are so many activities that will increase energy, capture insights, surface new thinking, create synergy, and draw on each member, not to mention build cohesiveness within the team. Adding variety stimulates better outcomes and engages and motivates staff members. Consider categorizing, individual writing, or fish bowls (where one group observes another small group’s discussion), to name just a few options.
The tasks that make up your process should move you toward your topic outcome and should consider the needs of the group at that moment in time.
Processes have a beginning, a middle, and an end. When they don’t, it creates confusion, tension, disappointment, and even chaos. So, make clear beginning remarks (often instructions) and clear endings. For example, “Before we move on to something new, let's share our takeaways from this segment,” or “Would someone restate the conclusion of that decision?”
Example: The topic outcome is to create a committee of four people to research new curriculum options. The meeting, in general, has an additional desired outcome of giving all members a voice and increasing the sense of community on the team.
The meeting process:
Application: Take each of your topics and design a process that has a beginning and an end in order to reach each outcome. It may take several processes to arrive at the desired outcome.
Consider the meetings you are attending or leading. Are the topics, outcomes, and processes clear? Does each segment of the meeting have a beginning, middle, and end?
How might this email strike you differently than the one at the beginning of this article?
Subject line: Reminder Staff Meeting Thursday
Email:
Hello! At tomorrow's meeting, we’ll work toward our goal of choosing a new curriculum for our debutante English students by creating a committee to research new curriculum options. Specifically, we will:
In small groups, come up with 5 (big picture) considerations for the new curriculum.
Make nominations for the research committee. We’ll do this using a silent writing process we haven’t used before.
Vote to create a committee of 4-5 members.
I hope this helps as you prepare for the meeting. And thank you, Eian, for volunteering to bring snacks.
