Making meetings work - meeting facilitation and design
Making meetings work - meeting facilitation and design
Making meetings work - meeting facilitation and design
How much time do you spend with your peers every month? Exclude sales meetings, meetings with line managers or your own team. I mean meeting with peers, making decisions about the big strategic issues.
According to research by Michael C. Mankins, the average senior executive team spends less than three days each month working together as a team – and in that time they devote less than three hours to strategic issues.
The result? Ineffective team work and decision making costs time and money, not to mention causing frustration amongst team members, leading to missed opportunities, ill-conceived decisions and a lack of singular focus.
The following tips on meeting facilitation and meeting design could help your decision-making and meetings become more streamlined and effective, enabling you to make better decisions, faster.
1. Deal with operations separately from strategy.
Holding separate meetings prevents day-to-day operations from dominating the leadership agenda and frees up time for debate on strategy.
2. Focus on decisions not discussions.
If you are in charge of meeting facilitation, distribute all reading materials at least 5 days before meetings to give people a chance to review. State why people are being asked to read the information e.g. for information only, for discussion and debate or for making a decision and deciding a course of action.
3. Measure the real value of every item of the agenda.
Prioritise according to the “value at stake” – that is, according to the impact that resolving each issue will have on the company’s long term value. Lower levels in the organisation should address lower value-at-stake items.
4. Get issues off the agenda as fast as possible.
Have a clear way to resolve agenda items. Such a process must include an unambiguous timetable, detailing when and how team members will reach a decisions and who will be involved in approving the final strategy.
5. Put real choices on the table.
Some companies split the process in to two parts – they hold one meeting to discuss alternatives and another to approve a course of action. This ensures that no one sits in the meetings wondering whether another viable course of action was considered and rejected already and therefore not wanting to raise it.
6. Adopt common decision-making processes and standards.
All decisions go through the same process which ensures that people understand where they are in the process and what needs to happen before a decision is considered final.
7. Make decisions stick.
Don’t leave loopholes which mean that decisions fail to be implemented or leave people not knowing whether a decision has been made and what that decision is. Some companies which do this well have a formal performance contract which specifies the resources (time, talent, money) required to execute the strategy, as well as the financial results that management pledges to deliver. Other companies establish norms of behaviour for the members to foster greater collaboration and make decisions stick.
(All statistics taken from “Stop Wasting Valuable Time”, Harvard Business Review Sept 2004 by Michael C. Mankins. 187 companies worldwide with market capitalisations of at least $1 billion took part in this research.)
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If you are interested in meeting facilitation or other aspects of leadership and the stages of leadership development, here are some of our other free leadership articles:
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