4 quick tips to boost your meeting skills

Have you been dreading this day full of back to back meetings, or ever walked out thinking “that’s an hour of my life I’m not getting back?” In a corporate environment meetings are a necessary part of your work, but they are often seen as a necessary evil. Even though it’s a good chance to have positive interactions with your colleagues. To give you a little help, I have gathered four tips from experience which really help having productive and more interactive meetings. Here we go!

A chairman has the responsibility to keep the meeting within time and achieve the result. It is an art which, I admit, not even I am fully skilled at yet, but practice makes perfect! Gently remind colleagues when they are drifting off in endless discussions or being repetitive. Keep an eye on the quiet meeting participants — they might have an opinion which might take the discussion in a whole new direction! A good chairman can focus a meeting on the essentials, without anyone feeling left out or unheard.

Even if you are not the organiser of the meeting, you can still pick up the chairmanship role. You can start out by asking whether it is clear what you are here for, and gently reminding your colleagues about the subject if they take the meeting into a direction it’s not supposed to go. Good chairmanship takes practise, if you set yourself up to practise every meeting, you’ll notice soon enough it’ll be a breeze!

Even if it’s just at the beginning of the meeting, state a clear goal for the meeting. What do you want to achieve within the set time, what do you want the meeting participants to walk away with? Do you want to agree on a decision, inform them about something going on outside the team or organisation or do you want to pick their brain on a subject? One clear goal is usually the best to keep focus and don’t run out of time without discussing everything.

Note that introducing a topic and deciding on it in the same meeting is a very bad idea — instead introduce the topic beforehand (in the invite or in a short meeting before) and decide on it in a new meeting. This way, the participants have some time to maul things over and have informal discussions about it. Deciding on it will be way easier that way.

The form you use for a meeting should fit the goal and participants taking part. If you want to make a decision with twenty participants, an open discussion would probably not lead to a decision everyone feels content with within the set time window. So use breakout groups, post its, forms and everything to make everyone feel heard and give input. There are many tried and tested forms to spice up your meeting and move to results more efficiently. This doesn’t only help you achieve your meeting goal, but makes the meeting more fun for all participants. For instance, Liberating Structures help you get creative input in all sorts of settings and participant counts. With some creativity these are also quite well adjustable to online settings.

To prevent repeat meetings, share the results with everyone! Did you jot down some actions and decisions? Put them on a mail or, even better, the internal documentation place for everyone to see! This way you can make sure your perspective of the meeting is correct and everyone can remember what was decided upon. This cuts a lot of time short from the next meeting: no questions on what we left off with last time, it’s right there in your notes. Don’t worry if your notes aren’t a full written report on the meeting — that is only important in formal events. Just actions and decisions is usually sufficient.

If you’re spending so much time in meetings, it is definitely worth the time to improve your meeting skills. If you think a meeting could just as well have been an e-mail, chances are that more of the meeting participants have similar thoughts. Know that it’s worth the effort to experiment with these tips to sharpen your meeting skills. Practice makes perfect! Good luck.

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