How to Lead a Meeting - Part 2

The best leaders know how to run meetings that people actually want to go to.

In the last article in this series, I talked about the foundational principles of meeting facilitation, so make sure you check that one out. Today it’s all about how you capture and keep people’s attention with a good meeting opener, a good wrap-up, and good energy management in between those two things.

If you’ve ever done a yoga class, you know that the instructors make a big deal of letting go of everything that’s happened that day, forgetting all the preoccupations of the “real world,” and just being present in the moment. It’s hard to be intentional about what you’re doing when you’re distracted by a dozen other things. There’s ample evidence that multi-tasking just doesn’t really work that well.

Similarly, in a work meeting you want to try and create this sense of being outside of time and space - everyone is fully focused on each other and on the task at hand. That starts with how you open the meeting.

We’re looking for something that signals to everybody “ok, we’re here, in this place, in this moment, for this purpose, so let’s get into it.” And that engages them actively in what’s happening. It can be an emotional check-in. It can be a creative prompt like “based on how you’re feeling today, what kind of snack food would you be?” It can be a “which llama are you and why” check-in grid.

Sometimes there’s no time for a full ice-breaker, but I ALWAYS like to get all participants in a meeting to name what they’re aiming to get out of it: whether there’s a certain outcome they want, information they need, or a decision they’re hoping to make. That primes them to start working towards their goal, and it also helps me gauge whether I’m giving everyone what they need during the course of that meeting.

Around this time you also want to clarify expectations, especially if the group is new to working together. Do you want everyone to put their phones away for the duration of the meeting? Do you want them to share actively or listen politely? What’s the vibe of this meeting: is it a sensitive topic requiring careful communication, or a no-bad-ideas brainstorming session? What expectations do you have of them, and what expectations do they have of each other?

So now you’ve opened the meeting and created this sort of pocket of time in which you’re all focused on particular goals. Here’s how you complete that process at the end of the meeting.

You don’t want to just let things fizzle out. That leaves people feeling kind of unsettled and unsatisfied, which is pretty demotivating and can cause them to lose focus. Instead, make sure you bring things full-circle with a wrap-up that highlights what you’ve accomplished and what comes next. I like to wrap up with a summary of key decisions that were made, and projects or action items that were identified as priorities. That helps focus everyone’s mind on the progress and next steps. Then, I ask everyone to share their own next step.

And when I say “step,” I mean step. I don’t mean project. I don’t mean 5-year plan. I mean the literal next action they will take to move things forward. Something that can be done in 30 minutes or less, preferably before the end of the day so that they keep up their momentum. Something like “share my availability for a call next week” or “look up the contact information for that supplier.” A clearly-defined, simple first step leads to the next step, and the step after that, and so on. For many people, a poorly-defined, large project leads to paralysis. NEXT. STEP.

Then you thank everybody and say goodbye, so that it’s clear the meeting has ended and everybody can go back to their work feeling like something tangible has been completed.

So that’s how you create a “container,” so to speak, for your meeting. A sense of structure so that when the meeting starts people switch into that fully-engaged group mind that the meeting requires, and when it ends they switch back into doing their thing as autonomous individuals. It feels complete, it feels satisfying, it feels purposeful.

(Quick note about terminology: “group mind” is not the same as “groupthink”! Groupthink is a state of mind that discourages creativity or individual responsibility; Group mind, at least the way us improv nerds think about it, is a sense of intense connection and creativity, in which everyone is vibing together and working towards the same ends, but there’s still space for challenges and disagreements.)

But what happens in between those two points? While you’re in meeting mode, you need to keep people’s attention. The best way to do that is to get them actively participating, not just passively listening.

If the meeting involves presentations, make sure these are interspersed with plenty of opportunities for everyone else to ask questions, give feedback, or discuss the ideas with each other. Every time you engage someone directly, you re-focus their attention on the task at hand, so regular interactions throughout the meeting are a good way to bring people back when their attention has started to wander. Just make sure that the interaction you’re asking from them starts off pretty simple and not too demanding, and you can work up to more complex or difficult discussions.

A little while ago I signed up for a workshop. It was at 8:00 on a Monday morning. I was off to a bit of a slow start and logged onto Zoom without having finished my tea or done my hair. Within 5 minutes they were sending me into a breakout room with a group of total strangers, which is an awful thing to do to an introvert who hasn’t even caffeinated yet, and asked us to discuss some pretty complicated ideas. Anyway, I logged off to eat some breakfast, and caught the rest of that workshop on the replay. It wasn’t an ideal scenario, but none of us are robots and we need to design our interactions in ways that make the most of our human brains.

I’m going to do a whole installment of this series on how to accommodate introverts and extroverts in your meetings, but for now let’s leave it here: create a well-defined structure for your meeting, with a clear beginning and a clear end, and make sure you manage the flow of energy and attention within that span of time by creating regular opportunities for people to participate in active and meaningful ways.

Let us know in the comments: which meeting practices work well for you? Which ones don’t? What are your burning questions about leadership communication?

Oh - and if you want to talk to a member of our team about group or 1-on-1 support to make your own meetings more productive, get in touch! We’ve got your back.