Are you meeting all day and working all night? Stop this madness!
Find out how you can run more effective and efficient meetings by watching this
video.
Hi my name is Adriana Girdler. I'm a Productivity Specialist, President of
CornerStone Dynamics and MyVisual Vision.com. Today I'm going to share
with you my top seven tips that I use all the time for running meetings, and
why is this even something that you want to think about? Because I get called to
run meetings all the time with top organizations and this is something
which over and over again I find to be tried-and-true,
never fails me and I always get complimented on it. So take note, get your
pen and paper out, and let's start talking about how to run effective and
efficient meetings. So why are we even looking at this, well back in 2012
salary.com did a survey, and they found that the number one time waster at work
was ineffective meetings. They just wasted tons of time, and that went up
from the number three spot in 2008, and I promise you it's not getting any better.
More and more I see meetings are becoming more ineffective and less
efficient and I really can't pinpoint why this is occurring. But all I know is
we have to go to the root and teach people how to run proper meetings, so
let's go on to my tips that I want to share with you, now in order to even look
at these tips we've got to think of meetings in kind of these three buckets.
The first bucket is meeting preparation, the second bucket is actual meetings
themselves, and then the third bucket is post meeting. Now if you look at a
meeting and you consider in all those three stages, that's a huge benefit,
because meetings aren't just the meeting that you are attending, it goes beyond that,
it's a preparation and the post as well. So on that note here are my top seven
tips. So let's talk about the first section meeting preparation. So tip
number one is, I would like for you to ban all the update meetings and I want
you to rethink your meetings, no more updates, that is probably the number one
time waster I see all the time, meetings need to be purposeful they should be
about resolution, brainstorming and any activity from like risk management
approvals, things where when you're bringing people in a room and you need
them together in order to move forward on an issue or to create ideas,
that's what you use a meeting for, not updates. We have amazing technology so
let's use that technology, ban those update meetings, and you will see a huge
difference. So from now on, in your pre meeting preparation, is ask yourself, what
meeting are you running? I it's an update meeting, don't even bother sending
out that invite. I want you to put some sort of summary in an email and send it
out to people that way, or do your one-on-ones and get your information but
do not do a meeting for an update. That's the greatest gift you can give to your
team members and the biggest paradigm shift for you, in order to run meetings
more effectively and efficiently. Tip number two, is get all your
documentation in order, what? Yeah, yeah I know I know Adriana,
that's probably simple and everyone goes "of course we do it", well how do you do it
and when do you do it? A lot of times we get this meeting preparation the night
before or a day before, and that's just not enough time particularly when
someone is on the agenda, in order to prepare what they need to do the meeting.
So think about what is it that you need, now that you're being purposeful with
your meetings, prep things accordingly, think of your pre read, if you're doing
more brainstorming resolutions stuff, that stuff you will need and you will
have to give it to the participants, so you have to think about that timing, and
that's really critical, and by the way if you're looking for agendas, which are
really important for a min meeting perspective, then you can go to my
website below, saying actually it's CornerStone Dynamics not MyVisual
Vision, I gotta remember which one it was, at CornerStone Dynamics, and you can get
a free agenda template. This video by the way has tons of downloads, so I want you
to really contemplate going afterwards to the show-me section and checking out
all those downloads that I'm going to have for you. Tip number three is prepare
your meeting kit. Now that you're purposeful with your meetings, you're
gonna have to have some things with you all the time, so when I do my
brainstorming and resolution and risk management meetings, I have my sticky
notes, my sharpies, my stickers for voting, my white paper, there's tons of things
that I have and I actually have a temporary container with all that stuff
in it. So now that you know your meetings are of a purpose, then you need a good
meeting kit to ensure that you have those things at your fingertips because
the last thing you want to do is kill your flow of your meeting and having to
walk it to grab something. You just lost precious time and you're
going to take a lot more energy and effort getting people up to that flow
that you were originally at before you left. So that's really important, is grab
a meeting kit. Now that we've done a preparatory work I want you to think
about the meeting itself. So tip number four that is, arrive early to set up
your meeting. If you're a meeting facilitator or the organizer, please come
early to ensure that you have everything there, as well as that you're set up for
any of those conference calls with screen-sharing, cause I don't know how many
times I've been in meetings where there's been "technical issues", the
meeting was supposed to start at nine o'clock sharp, and we really didn't get
the ball rolling to 9:15 because we were dealing with "technical difficulties". So
the biggest tip from a meeting itself, is come and early, get everything set up, so
when everyone walks in, you can just get going and start being effective and
efficient. Tip number five, when you're in your meetings, is use specific tools to
help ensure that your participants understand what is expected of them.
Now there's three tools that I love using all the time, the first one are
meeting rules. I'm a big proponent of meeting rules and I highly recommend it,
in fact that's another download I have, is a free poster that you can download
off my website CornerStoneDynamic.com and those I recommend you have in every
single meeting room, and the first thing you do, is when your participants come in,
is "hey let's review the rules" and you go through all the rules. The second tool
that I use all the time with my participants is I then talk about time
outs. Like a referee, in a game, you have to call a timeout when a play is not
done well. Now in a scenario for a meeting, it's "hey I'm running at a time"
or "you didn't follow one of the session rules" so you call a time out. Now for
this to work well, you have to actually ask permission from people at the
beginning of the meeting, so when you walk in your meeting, not only do you
review the rules, you go "do I have your permission to time you out so I can keep
things on track" and you'll be amazed, everyone always says ye,s because guess
what, everyone has the same purpose, they want to have a good meeting. And the last
tool that I use, that goes in conjunction with the timeout, is a parking lot. So if
someone is passionate about something and time is a-tickin,
because I'm looking at the clock, then you need to actually put their idea
somewhere, because if you just cut the conversation right there and then, you
lost them, their innovation and their ideas is not going to be on the table,
because they're gonna feel very hurt that, "wait a minute that was really
important to me, you just cut my conversation" so you put it on a parking
lot. Now please just don't put on the parking lot and then throw away the
paper. Put it on the parking lot and do something with it. Uou want to either
make it an agenda item or speak to the person afterwards to get the
information that they need. So that, three tips, three tips, is what's going to help
you to manage your participants in your meeting. Tip number six, this one is
something I find most organizations don't do, which really results into why
when you have a meeting, people walk away and you're really not too sure where
statuses on stuff, and that is at the end of your meeting, the last 5-10 minutes,
summarize all the agreed-upon action items. So many people don't do this, they
actually just hope that everyone took their notes and then no one is following
up, and then you wonder why perhaps tasks didn't get done according to plan. So
ensure at the end of the meeting, go through your tasks "okay let's review
what we all agreed upon" and put responsibility and due dates associated
with those tasks lists, that's a fantastic way to keep effective and
efficient. And the last part that I want you to consider, is the post meeting
ritual that you now have to look at. And that is, everything you've collected I
would like for you to send it within 24 hours max, ideally two to three hours."
What? "Adrian you know what's cleaning up I have to do". Hold it! You're going to
be effective and efficient, you're gonna be starting to do things differently,
you're gonna have templates that you're going to use, you're going to be
collecting information in the meeting, so that when you're doing your review, you
should have everything you need in a nice template. And so, all you got to do
is clean it up, and then send it out, so yes you can send things out two to three
hours after meeting. Highly recommend it. It's fresh in people's mind and it
ensures that they stay on track with what it is that they have agreed to do.
So let's recap. In order to run effective and efficient meetings, you need to do
the three big buck. There's the preparatory work, there's a
meeting itself, and the post work. I think one of the biggest takeaways is really
think about what type and meaning you're having. If you're having update meetings,
ban them. I know it's going to be a new way of working for you because you're so
used to just collecting people and asking them, so you can check things off
your list. But in actuality, you're doing, and you're perpetuating a problem that
we have in our organizations, and that is: meetings are wasting time! So on that
note, if you want more information on meetings, I have lots of resources in the
show-more section underneath this video. Please check it out. I also have a pocket
book which is called Good Meetings = Great Results. I promise you
there's a lot more information in there too, because you also have to
consideration team dynamics, facilitation techniques, perhaps those would be more
videos down the road. Let me know. On that note, if you can give me a two thumbs up,
subscribe to the video, as well as share this with your colleagues, because the
more people that know how to run effective and efficient meetings the,
better off our corporate world will be. Thank you so much and I'll see you at
the next video, bye!