 | In my last blog, I discussed the importance of building a cadence of essential meetings so collaboration and decision-making can occur promptly. How often have you said, “We should meet about that,” and it takes two weeks to finally have that meeting because everybody’s schedule was full and that was the soonest you could fit in the proposed meeting in? |
By building a cadence of meetings and putting all non-negotiable dates on your key players’ calendars, you reserve that meeting time and must treat it as sacred ground. That’s the first part about getting things done.
To make the most of everybody’s time, it is essential to structure your meeting (persisting with consistency) to build efficiency and thoughtful decision-making. Here are some tips that can help create a structured meeting:
To make the most of everybody’s time, it is essential to structure your meeting (persisting with consistency) to build efficiency and thoughtful decision-making. Here are some tips that can help create a structured meeting:
Tips that can help create a structured meeting:
- Agenda/Notes Document: Build a document that will serve as the running document for the year. It should hold agenda items and notes. Add that document to the calendar invitation so meeting participants know where to get the agenda/notes. Sometimes people spend a lot of time looking for the needed documentation. The more you can eliminate the struggle, the more time you save them.
- Bookmark and Add To The Agenda Daily: Meeting participants should add agenda items throughout the week as issues arise. They may be in a different meeting, and a topic comes up that should be discussed in your core team meeting. Open that core team agenda immediately and add it so you don’t forget. I always kept a bookmark to the weekly leadership team meeting on my desktop to add to it as topics came up in other meetings.
- Utilize Links: All related documents and policies should be linked to the topic on the agenda so that meeting participants can access all relevant information quickly. The running agenda/notes document is the “anchor” for all documentation and related items.
- Use a Header on Your Document: Place links to frequently visited sites in the header of your agenda so they are easily found.
- Organize by Years: Keep your running agendas organized by years and save them in a consistent place with consistent document ownership so that when personnel changes happen, the whole folder can be migrated to the next owner. Link each year’s document to the previous year.
- Keep Links to Longstanding Documents: Meeting norms and your district and department mission statements should be some of the vital links in the document. Build a list of expectations or ways to behave in the meeting norms. By keeping your mission statements and list of values accessible, you can revisit them often and better discern whether the topic at hand meets the values and mission statement of the district.
- Continue by Absentee: Suppose somebody is unable to attend the meeting. In that case, the expectation should be (if they are able) that they include all their updates and business items on the agenda for other team members to see and react to so that there is no delay in decision-making or information gathering.
- Provide Written Updates Ahead of Time: Team members should provide their updates on the meeting agenda ahead of the meeting so that team members can review the contents and ask questions or request clarification during the meeting. The time taken to provide updates to the group should be asynchronous. There is no need to spend precious collaboration time just providing updates. We expected that all team members would provide updates on the notes document and that team members would read the updates before the meeting.
- Use the Comment Feature: If action or clarification is needed throughout the week, we used the comment feature on the document to notify the author of the note that we had a question. That way, a conversation could occur transparently on the document for all team members to see, providing inclusive information sharing and decision-making.
- Rotate Facilitators: We rotated the facilitation of the meetings so that the responsibility for leadership was distributed among the team members. It was good practice for our new leaders to practice their facilitation skills in a small group.
- Provide a Safe Environment to Fail: By building a safe culture within the group, our team members were not afraid to fail. Innovative and unconventional solutions were invited to the table, and team members knew that our collective work would be better than our individual work.
- Use Robert’s Rules of Order: We used Robert's Rules of Order for large agendas where we were concerned about finishing the meeting within time constraints. A motion, discussion, and vote took place for each agenda item. Implementing this process when needed, allowed us to complete long agendas.
| By keeping these tips in mind, you will be able to run efficient and inclusive meetings that get things done. Do you have any tips for running efficient and inclusive meetings that you might share? What works best for you? |  |