HBR Guide to Making Every Meeting Matter (HBR Guide Series)
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HBR Guide to Making Every Meeting Matter (HBR Guide Series)

Harvard Business Review

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HBR Guide to Making Every Meeting Matter (HBR Guide Series)

Harvard Business Review

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About This Book

Make every minute count.

Your calendar is full, and yet your meetings don't always seem to advance your work. Problems often arise with unrealistic or vague agendas, off-track conversations, tuned-out participants who don't know why they're there, and follow-up notes that no one reads—or acts on. Meetings can feel like a waste of time. But when you invest a little energy in preparing yourself and your participants, you'll stay focused, solve problems, gain consensus, and leave each meeting ready to take action.

With input from over 20 experts combined with useful checklists, sample agendas, and follow-up memos, the HBR Guide to Making Every Meeting Matter will teach you how to:

  • Set and communicate your meeting's purpose
  • Invite the right people
  • Prepare an achievable agenda
  • Moderate a lively conversation
  • Regain control of a wayward meeting
  • Ensure follow-through without babysitting or haranguing

Arm yourself with the advice you need to succeed on the job, from a source you trust. Packed with how-to essentials from leading experts, the HBR Guides provide smart answers to your most pressing work challenges.

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SECTION FIVE

Specific Types of Meetings

CHAPTER 23

What Everyone Should Know About Running Virtual Meetings

by Paul Axtell

To make sure that your virtual meetings are adding value and velocity to your projects, do three things:

Focus on relationships.

The quality of people’s relationships in a meeting determines the quality of the conversations that will occur during the meeting. That’s why it’s important to set aside time to build relationships among team members.

Start with casual conversation.

Make it a practice for the conference lines to be open 10 minutes early, and designate that time for catching up. Ask someone to be there to greet and talk with people once the lines are open. If you’re leading the meeting, prepare ahead of time so that you can spend time chatting rather than answering e-mails or reviewing your notes. Encourage others to make it a practice to show up early to converse.
Then, at the start of each meeting, ask three people to take a couple of minutes to share what’s happening with them. Here are my favorite ways to start this brief conversation:
  • Please catch us up on one of your other projects.
  • What’s happening in your country?
  • How’s your family?

Use people’s names.

During the meeting, credit people when you refer to their earlier comments. Keep a chart next to you to help remember who’s out there. People love to be recognized, and in virtual meetings, it builds a sense of community that can otherwise be diminished by not being in the same space. It also pulls meeting participants into a zone of being more attentive and thoughtful.

Meet face-to-face.

When team members visit from out of town or from another country, find time to see them. Schedule a working dinner. Invite them to coffee. If there’s driving involved, ride together. Pick them up at the airport. This lays the foundation for authentic conversation—so you’ll feel less distant on your next virtual encounter.

Prepare, so you can be present and productive.

Publish an agenda.

A clear agenda helps your participants understand how you’ll conduct the virtual meeting and allows them to think about and prepare for each topic in advance. This is particularly important for those who speak English as a second language. When people have time to prepare, they can participate more fully and powerfully. Expecting people to develop their thinking and then express it clearly in the moment during a meeting is asking too much.
The agenda doesn’t need to be elaborate. For each topic, answer these questions:
  • Why is this topic on our agenda?
  • How much time is allocated for this topic?
  • Where do we want to be at the end of our discussion?
  • What do we need from participants?

Give yourself more time.

Plan on 20% more time than you think you’ll need for each topic. The process of getting broad participation and checking to see if everyone has had a chance to express their views and ask their questions takes time— lots of time. You don’t want to feel any pressure to get through an agenda. You’ll sacrifice clarity and alignment if you or your team members feel rushed. You can always end early if the extra time you’ve built in isn’t needed.

Identify who you want to hear from.

Before the meeting, consider:
  • Who would get the conversation off to a great start?
  • Who will be most affected by the topic?
  • Who is likely to have different views and ideas?
  • Whose experience needs to be brought into the conversation?
Part of feeling included and adding value in a group is having the opportunity to share what you’re thinking about the topic. This can be difficult when you’re in the same room and even harder virtually. Once you’ve thought about who you want to hear from, tell people which topics you’d like their input on. Letting people know that you want broad participation is the first step; calling on people strategically and gently is the second step. Knowing ahead of time who you want to get into the conversation for each topic will make this easy.

Lead to accomplish the agenda and to get broad participation.

Review how you’ll manage the conversation.

Virtual meetings require a stronger leadership approach because you don’t have access to the nonverbal cues about whether people have questions or would like to get into the conversation. These meetings also require more empathy and thoughtfulness on your part because people have this sense of being less connected than when they’re in the same room.
Ask for the permission you need to be able to relax and enjoy leading the meeting. This is what I usually request:
  • Permission to be firm about keeping the conversation on track
  • Freedom to call on different people when it seems appropriate
  • Agreement from everyone about setting aside their technology, unless they have a good reason for keeping it available
I also let people know that while I have a plan for the meeting, I’m open to their coaching and ideas on making the meeting work for everyone.
Asking for what you want gives you the opportunity to guide the group without making anyone wrong. It also gives people in the group permission to step outside of their normal ways of interacting and participate authentically. It’s easy to be ourselves in small groups of four or five people over coffee. In larger groups and virtual groups, the conversation needs to be set up to be safe and effective.
Consider covering these points in your opening:
  • “With your permission, I’d like to manage our conversation today in a deliberate fashion so that we all stay on track and to make sure that everyone gets heard. This doesn’t mean that I intend to be heavy-handed; I’d just like more freedom to keep the conversation focused and permission to call on people to ensure we have everyone’s questions and views expressed before we end a topic.”
  • “For each item, I’d like to ask certain people to start the topic off. I’ve made notes on who I think might be affected and will check with each of you. Of course, if I haven’t called on you and you want to add something, please do so. You always have permission to get into any conversation if your ideas, questions, and views have not yet been expressed.”
Then, manage the conversation thoughtfully.
Go slowly. Without being able to see people as they speak, it’s not only harder to hear, it’s more difficult to process what’s being said. Speaking succinctly will help, and a calmer pace will provide openings for people to ask their questions. Refer to your chart of who’s in the meeting to keep track of who’s already spoken and to remind you to invite others to add to the conversation.
Consider adding a process step to check for clarity on each topic. Without visual clues, you can’t always tell when people aren’t understanding or are disagreeing. If you have people with different language or cultural backgrounds, getting to clarity and alignment may require more time going back and forth.
__________
Paul Axtell provides consulting and personal effectiveness training to a wide variety of clients, from Fortune 500 companies to universities. His latest book, Meetings Matter: 8 Powerful Strategies for Remarkable Conversations (Jackson Creek, 2015), received awards from the Nonfiction Book Awards and the Benjamin Franklin Book Awards, a Silver award in the Nautilus Book Awards, and was first runner-up for the Eric Hoffer Prize.

Adapted from content posted on hbr.org on April 14, 2016.

CHAPTER 24

How to Run a Great Virtual Meeting

by Keith Ferrazzi

Virtual meetings have the potential to be more valuable than traditional face-to-face meetings. Beyond the fact that they’re an inexpensive way to get people together— no travel costs and readily available technology—they’re also a great opportunity to build engagement, trust, and candor among teams.
Virtual meetings are just as effective as in-person gatherings if key rules and processes are maintained and respected. Here’s my comprehensive list of simple steps you can take to get the most out of your next one.

Before the Meeting

Turn the video on.

Since everyone on the call is separated by distance, using video is the best thing you can do to make everyone feel like they’re in the same room. Choose from several options, including WebEx and Skype. Video makes people feel more engaged because it lets team members see each other’s emotions and reactions, which immediately humanizes things. No longer are they just voices on a phone line; they’re the faces of your coworkers responding to what you and others are saying. Without video, you’ll never know if the dead silence in a virtual meeting is happening because somebody isn’t paying attention, someone’s rolling their eyes in exasperation, or an individual is nodding their head in agreement. Facial expressions matter.

Cut out status updates.

Too many meetings, virtual and otherwise, are reminiscent of a bunch of fifth graders reading to each other around the table: a waste of the valuable time and opportunity of having people together. The solution is to send out a simple half-page document in advance of the meeting to report on key agenda items—and then only spend time on it in the meeting if people need to ask questions or want to comment.
This type of prework prepares participants to take full advantage of the meeting by thinking ahead about the content, formulating ideas, or getting to know others in the group. This can help keep team members engaged, says business consultant Nancy M. Settle-Murphy in her book Leading Effective Virtual Teams. But one thing is critical: It has to be assumed that everyone has read the pre-reading. Not doing so becomes an ethical violation against the team. I use the word “ethical” because it’s stealing time from the team—and that’s a disrespectful habit. The leader needs to aggressively set the tone that the pre-reading should be done in advance of the meeting.

Come prepared with the team’s opinions.

Not only do you need to do your pre-reading, but after seeing the agenda, you should also discuss what’s going to be covered with your team—that is, do your own due diligence. Often people get on a virtual call with a point of view, but because they haven’t done any real homework beforehand, they end up reversing their opinions once the call has ended and they’ve learned new information that they could have easily obtained in advance. If there’s a topic that seems to have interdependencies with people who work in another location, get their input ahead of time so you’re best representing those constituents in the meeting.

During the Meeting

Encourage collaborative problem solving.

Replace the standard detailed status updates that can weigh meetings down with a group problem-solving session. ...

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