Senior managers report spending up to 75% of their week in meetings. Being able to effectively manage and communicate in meetings is an essential skillset required of any leader who wants to be successful within their organization. The Meeting Tracker tool provides leaders with the framework to maximise meeting effectiveness. To fully understand the tracker’s value, let’s examine why meetings fail and how the tool prevents derailment.
Four Main Reasons Why Meetings Fail
1. The Reason for Meeting is Unclear
There are only four reasons to meet: To share information, to collect information, to plan action and to make a decision. Relationship building could be considered a 5th reason, but this is often a side effect of meeting together and is actually better done elsewhere than within a meeting scenario.
In the Meeting Tracker, we track decisions not just actions. The reason we do this is to force managers to begin thinking in terms of what they need to get out of a meeting rather than what they want to discuss. Projects, tasks, and programs are moved forward by decisions.
We have found that by focusing managers on what decisions need to be made, rather than what discussions to have, teams are better able to shorten their meeting time and report greater meeting effectiveness.
But what if…
There are going to be times when planning, discussion and dialogue are needed. This is okay and a section of the meeting should be used for this. The problem with most meetings is that the majority of the time is spent on discussion with little space for decision making and action planning.
Moving teams into decision making action
The best tools to identify the reason for meeting and get your team focused on decision-making is the Meeting Tracker and Fist-to-Five. We recommend using a version of the Meeting Tracker for tracking all key decisions. To help teams move forward in decision-making, we are big advocates of Fist-to-Five. One way to use this approach is to give the team 5-10 minutes to discuss each agenda item and then interject with a Fist-to-Five check-in. Remember that if everyone is a 3, 4 or 5 then move on and take further discussion offline.
2. There is No Clear Plan on What to Talk About
You may have had someone tell you that he or she would not attend a meeting unless an agenda was provided in advance, that’s silly. Agendas are time-consuming to construct and often eat up more time than they save. If the team is meeting often and is tracking both their decisions and action items, then an agenda hardly seems relevant.
Instead of forcing an agenda culture, use a standard meeting process and set the agenda within the first 5 minutes. This can serve both as a check in as well as priority setting. Begin the meeting by asking: Is there any new business that you would like to discuss? What would we like to achieve by the time we are done here? Or, we only have 20-minutes what would you like to accomplish in this time?
Use the key decisions tab in the meeting tracker to set the agenda
This is a good habit to build as it forces managers and teams to think through the lens of key decisions. And when there are new strategic items that the team needs to tackle, park less important discussions and to-dos in the “tabled discussion” section.
3. There is No Central Place to Track Action Items
If decisions or at least input on decisions are to be made in meetings then action is to be accomplished outside of them. In most informal team meetings, there is no central tracking spot for actioned items. Rather, each individual contributor frantically scribbles notes in his/her notepad and then once they leave the meeting these to-dos are buried under other important work. To keep action items top of mind, they should be documented in one place. Software is good for this, but with the exception of project meetings rarely are teams disciplined enough to keep these tools up to date.
A few simple rules for tracking action items
There is no reason that someone should be spending time outside of a meeting summarizing what was said. The rule is, once the meeting is done the Meeting Tracker should be completed as well and immediately sent out to the team. The process can be as simple as, jotting down discussion notes with a pen on the Meeting Tracker and then taking a picture of the sheet and emailing it to the team. You don’t need to summarize the entire conversation, just key decisions and action steps required.
4. There Isn’t a Formal Facilitator Who is Responsible for Process
It is still unclear why most teams resist designating someone as a facilitator. Often it is the person who called the meeting who also facilitates. This should rarely be the case. If you are calling a meeting then there is something that you either need from the meeting or you need others to know about. If this is the case then you are too connected to the content of the meeting to be able to facilitate the process of the meeting effectively. To help facilitate the process, have whoever has been designated as the Meeting Tracker have them also play the role of the facilitator.
The Meeting Tracker is a great tool to assist your team in providing better meeting form. Some use it as is and others adapt it to their company.
Interested in downloading the Meeting Tracker? CLICK HERE
