You closed the chapter on another meeting and the meeting-after-the-meeting starts before before the shadows have passed through the doorway. Some are in alignment and moving forward. Others are playing Monday morning quarterback (and it isn’t even Monday yet). Worse yet, some are actively undermining the agreements made. Before returning to your office, you start to think that another meeting is needed. And the meeting cycle of lunacy begins.
It isn’t possible for us to have everyone rowing in the same direction every time. At the same time, like the “caller” on a rowing or crew team, as meeting leaders we often assume we need to “call” louder and more passionately. Although it might work well in crew, it doesn’t always work for leadership in meetings. The key is to turn everyone from passengers to participants, to get everyone to say what needs to be said in the room, and to hear out all the different perspectives.
There are two simple antidotes to the ills of the meeting cycle of lunacy:
- Plan for the meeting close
- Ask some well framed questions and get responses before adjourning.
One way to solve this painful and all too common malady is to make time and plan for the end of your meeting. I find that it takes about 15 minutes to wrap up a meeting. If the clock is ticking down and you see you have about 15 minutes left, stop the meeting and go into wrap up mode.
A simple way to transition is to say something like, “I know we are starting to run out of time, before we all leave I want to make sure we have heard everything and heard from everyone”.
Then offer a question to the group. Here are some examples of wrap up questions you might ask:
What are you taking away from this meeting?
What will you tell others about this meeting?
What will you communicate to your teams, customers etc about our meeting today?
What has been left unsaid that needs to be said?
What do you think the most power step should be from this meeting?
What agreements have been made?
There are two ways to make this go quickly. First ask everyone to write down their response to the question you posed (ask them to do that quietly to give people a chance to think about it). I keep three by five cards handy in meetings for this exact purpose. This gives the more introverted and analytical types time to think about their answer and it keeps the extroverts from hijacking the conversation. Italso keeps participants out of group think mode where the loudest speaks first and everyone agrees.
Once they have written their feedback, I ask them to go around the room in “rapid fire” mode. This term telegraphs to the group to be quick and succinct. I also like to collect the written feedback because it gives me a written record to review later. I have done this in meetings of 5 and meetings of 50. It can work with both. If the group is too large to allow everyone to share, put them into small groups and ask them to share their “take aways” with each other and then come up with one from their group that they want to share.
I call this the 15/2/1. Leave 15 minutes to wrap up, allow 2 minutes for everyone to write down their feedback and 1 minute or less to provide their feedback in rapid fire mode.
Is this a leadership tactic you’ve used? If not, would you give this a try? You may be thinking “that wastes 15 minutes we could be on topic”, but I urge you to see the big picture benefits this offers.
Until next time,
Doug