4 Things Every Meeting Facilitator Should Remember

-         “Know Information, Commit & Kickback”

-         KICK Meetings should always end in a Kickback

Meetings, especially when run poorly, can often be one of the biggest headaches that you may experience in your workday.

In an article on cnbc.com, Catherine Clifford touched on this sentiment when she shared Elon Musk’s opinion on meetings:

“Excessive meetings are the blight of big companies and almost always get worse over time. Please get [out] of all large meetings, unless you’re certain they are providing value to the whole audience, in which case keep them very short.”

Whether your company is a fortune-500 company, a mid-size brokerage, a non-profit, or a small startup, it is important to reject low quality meetings and demand that each member comes to the meeting ready to contribute and conceptually move the business toward an objective.

"reject low quality meetings and demand that each member comes to the meeting ready to contribute"

Before I jump into the four key facets of great meetings, answer this question: how do you feel after a day of wasted time versus a day of time well-spent? The answer to this question should directly contribute to your urgency to adapt.

Think of that feeling when at the end of your day you’ve crushed your goals and achieved most of what you wanted to achieve. You were exhausted and drained, but there was a sense of a “job well done,” right? Effectiveness and efficiency cause this reaction. Hold onto this motivation as you keep reading.

My goal with my words is to encourage you with four steps to put in the extra work to cut out meaningless work.

Here we go.

1. Know - Lay out what you know about the meeting.

The key of this step is complete and concrete awareness. Anything that is assumed or guessed needs to be highlighted as assumed or guessed pieces of information.

In order to be successful in this step, you should lay out the information based on what you should know before the meeting starts as follows:

Who is coming to the meeting?

What is their name? duh. I don’t think anyone is that much of a stranger to meetings to understand that the easiest way to derail a meeting is for a new addition to jump on board at the last minute. If someone (aka the boss) demands that they are a part of the meeting, you better reevaluate the purpose of the meeting immediately and start from step one.

What is their role? This is an important question to ask because it immediately connects to what they are trying to accomplish. If you are talking to a specialist, they do not care about the overarching strategy or idea of what the department is trying to accomplish. Similarly, if you are talking to an executive, they probably do not care about the ins and outs of how a problem is going to get solved.

Why are they there? There are many times that two people come to a meeting only to realize half way through the meeting that their reasons for being at the meeting are completely different. Two outcomes usually come from this arrangement, either nothing gets done in the meeting or one attendee must submit his or her agenda to the agenda of the other – also inefficient. If you go into a meeting knowing what the other person is there for, the meeting will at least be on the same page throughout.

"If someone (aka the boss) demands that they are a part of the meeting, you better reevaluate the purpose of the meeting immediately and start from step one."

2. Information – Lay out what information you need to give and get in the meeting.

The key to this step is the establishment of what information is not known going into the meeting. If you go into the meeting with a list of questions that you need answered you will be more likely to come out of the meeting with the answers to those questions.

What do you need to know?

In order to glean what you need to know from the conversation, you must first establish what the single accomplishment objective is. The sentence should be able to be answered as follows: “To accomplish __a. objective__ with __b. partner__ for __c. purpose __ by __d. date__.”

a.      Objective

The questions that you need to ask surrounding the object should narrow down what the single goal of the meeting is for the person that you are partnering with. Questions for all of these variables should confirm what is already known, find new information, and understand how the partner’s attitude is toward the goal.

b.      Partner

If you do not know the one person or team of people that is integral to the success of the goal, you will keep circling and searching for the partner that will get the job done. If you can figure this person out as soon as possible, you will efficiently and effectively allow anyone that is not that person or team to move on to the next part of their day. Questions that might help move this along is to ask who is the final person that will sign off on this goal. Working your way backward is much easier than trying to single-handedly accomplish the objective.

c.      Purpose

It seems obvious, but too many meetings are bogged down by a complete unawareness for the actual purpose of the meeting. This is separate than the goal or objective of the meeting. The purpose goes past the objective to understand why accomplishing the objective should be urgent for a person or team in the department. Understanding the “why” is a form of motivation where the team is on the same page. If the objective of the meeting is not relatively urgent for someone on the team, there should not be a meeting to discuss how to accomplish the objective.

"If the objective of the meeting is not relatively urgent for someone on the team, there should not be a meeting"

d.      Date

This last variable in the objective sentence is almost the most important. If the objective, partner, and purpose are not tied to a deadline, the objective will not be accomplished. Period. This should not be a “by next week” thing or a “when I receive this” thing, but it should be where all of the other dates are already concrete, and so if something has not happened by the date established, the team will need to reevaluate if it is important enough to be on the agenda.

3. Commit – Lay out a specific commitment that both parties must agree to.

The key to this step is mutual adoption. Each person that is a part of the meeting must commit to the success of the objective in a tangible way to move the objective along.

In order to ensure mutual adoption, it is crucial to make sure everyone in the meeting holds to a specific action commitment that is tied to a deadline. No one in the meeting can just slide by and say, “yes, I think I can get that done some time next week.” The special piece of commit comes through setting up a calendar appointment where it lays out specifically who is going to provide what by what time on what date. This way, when that date comes and someone does not have the item that he or she promised, you can respond with a definite “where-did-the-miscommunication-occur” conversation that is awkward for all parties involved.

If there is not a specific commitment from each party involved, it is really easy to sweep things under the rug. Get the commitment before your get off the phone; make the person attending the meeting respond at that point. With technology as accessible as it is, you can pull up your calendar in under 15 seconds.

4. Kickback – Enjoy the mutual benefit of a meeting well-done.

The key to this step is mutual benefit. The term kickback refers to a get-together of friends that does not constitute as a party because only close invitees are participating in the relationship building aspect of the low-key event.  The importance of this step is paramount because if each party in the meeting does not see and experience the mutual benefit after the conclusion of the meeting, then the meeting was not in fact effective or efficient; it was ineffective and wasteful.

"The key to this step is mutual benefit."

If each party in the meeting knows the information and commits during the meeting, the outcome should always be a kickback. Logically, the outcome of a great meeting cannot be a kickback if either party leaves the meeting without feeling that he or she received the information and commitment from the specific person in the meeting that they purposed at the beginning of the meeting.

Any result other than true kickback is not mutually beneficial and will usually result in either bitterness or confusion.