How to Participate Effectively in a Meeting

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How to Participate Effectively in a Meeting

Are you trying to get noticed or get ahead in your career? How you show up to meetings is one of your best opportunities to make a great impression. You’re trying to create an impression that you’re strategic, smart, a good team player, and a good communicator, and there is no better place to put that to the test than in meetings.

How do you participate in a meeting in a way that will skyrocket your career? There are three broad categories:

Meeting Participation Category #1: Prepare

One is preparation because I’ll tell you, most of the folks sitting around that table, or on that Zoom call, have not prepared. They’ve lost an opportunity to demonstrate their investment and forward-thinking insightfulness. All of these qualities make a positive impression on people, which is lost if you don’t prepare. And how do you prepare?

1. Understand the Official Agenda

First, understand the official agenda. What are the objectives that the person convening the meeting wants to accomplish? How can you prepare in a way that will make you more valuable in achieving those outcomes? Do you understand what the key questions are? What are you solving for in this meeting? Have you read the primer material? Do you know who you’re supposed to be representing in this conversation? Are you advocating for specific stakeholders? If so, can you speak with them in advance to understand their perspective? That’s a great way to come at it.

2. Understand Your Agenda

In addition to the official agenda and making sure you’re prepared for that, I encourage you to consider your own agenda for the meeting. And no, that’s not to say that I want you to have some ulterior motive or shrewd way of taking advantage of the situation, but I do want you to give some thought to what you want to get out of it. Do you have a developmental goal for this meeting? Do you want to demonstrate your executive presence? Do you want to show that you have a longer time horizon and are more strategic than everyone else?

One of the ways I love to approach this is before I go into a meeting, I just ask myself, “What is one thing I could do in this meeting that I would be super proud of afterward?” For example, that might be disagreeing with Frank, who tends to be mouthy. I usually give in and say nothing, but if I could challenge Frank in this meeting, I would feel amazing.

You’re not trying to be insubordinate here, but consider your own agenda and ask yourself:

What do I want to do?What do I want to work on?What do I need to make sure I bring to this conversation?

Prepare by being ready to contribute lots of value to the official agenda and by being clear about your own agenda for the meeting and what you hope to accomplish.

Meeting Participation Category #2: Balance

Balance in meetings is also something hard to come by these days, and people who help create balance in a meeting are incredibly effective and helpful. They stand out, and that’s what you’re trying to do. And how do you create more balance?

1. Listen

Most people in meetings are kind of on transmit. They’re talking all the time, probably interrupting, and leaving very little silence after somebody else speaks. You can create some balance in a meeting by doing less talking and more listening.

Now, listening might not be something that people can see you doing unless you do it really well. For example, using the I’m curious head tilt. That’s a good body language move. But you demonstrate that you’re listening by reflecting on what other people are saying and asking for clarification. All of those things show, “Hey, I am right in it here.”

2. Ask Questions

A second way to balance is to ask questions. Most people in a meeting chime in with a statement like “I think this,” “This is true,” “We need to do this.” Another way you can balance a meeting more effectively is to make fewer statements and ask more questions. I like to think of this as bringing more oxygen into the conversation.

When we throw more wood on the fire, it doesn’t always burn brighter. Sometimes it just smokes and goes out. More and more statements don’t make for a better meeting, but stopping and asking a great question is going to make you stand out in a meeting.

3. Disagree

A third way to help achieve balance is that often we get this unproductive, unhelpful dynamic in a meeting where everyone is violently agreeing with each other. For instance, “let me be the seventh person to chime in and say in my own words exactly what the last six people have said.” What a waste of time.

Instead, shift from speaking when you agree to more frequently speaking when you disagree, when you have something novel to bring to the conversation, when you want to put a little tension on where things are going, when you want to stop the freight train and say, have we considered this? Are we making this assumption? Where’s a scenario where this wouldn’t hold?

Again, all the people who jump on the bandwagon and go along with a meeting that’s got a lot of forward momentum aren’t very memorable afterward. However, the person who says, “Before I throw my hand up to agree with this decision, I would like us to spend a few minutes considering this potentiality.” That is going to make you stand out.

Balance the meeting. This means more listening, less talking, more questions, fewer statements, and making sure that you’re dedicating more of your contributions to adding tension and providing novel insights, rather than simply saying, “Me too.”

Meeting Participation Category #3: Optimize

The third major thing is to help optimize the meeting. So many of our meetings are not as effective as they could and should be. Anything you do to contribute to making the meeting a more productive and effective tool for collaboration on your team is a big win, and there are three roles you can play to help optimize:

1. Be a Connector

When I sit, and I sit in a lot of hours of meetings every week as I’m facilitating teams, I notice that points are often completely disconnected from one another and it doesn’t create momentum or a flow in a meeting. I’m often thinking, “What? Like, how did that point fall at that point?” If you can be someone who says, “Okay, if we go back to something that Lucian said, how is that connected?” then you’re being the connector, and being a connector is a great role to play to start to create alignment. That’s one way to optimize a meeting.

2. Be a Communicator

Another thing you can do, and it doesn’t have to be you or your point, but you can be an effective communicator, bridge, or ambassador between other people talking. For instance, you may hear some friction starting to build up between two people, but you suspect it’s because they’re not understanding each other. They’re kind of missing each other. For you to ask, “Can I just take a crack at this? I think what I’m hearing from you is this, and I think what I’m hearing is, am I getting that right?” When you help to moderate conflict so that it becomes productive, when you spot friction and help turn it into some kind of productive tension, that’s a great way to optimize in a meeting.

3. Be a Closer

The closer means don’t let everybody jump up and run out of a meeting without agreeing on what you’re doing next, who’s doing what, for whom, with whom, and by when. Also saying, “What else did we identify today that we should put on an agenda for a future meeting? How did we do today? Do we think this was as effective a conversation? Were we talking about the right things?”

You don’t have to be the meeting chair to be the closer. When you take a moment, look at your watch and say, “I notice we only have five minutes left, I would love to pause, and not add anything new, and just make sure that we stick the landing on all the things we’ve already discussed,” you’re being the closer. And being that closer is going to have a lot of people around the room thanking you for creating better clarity outside.

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Meetings. We do spend way too many hours in meetings, but they’re the main opportunity where you are on display to your colleagues and to your boss. They’re the chance to show that you perform well, that you have lots of potential, and you do it by being more prepared, by helping to bring balance in many ways, and by optimizing the meeting so it leads to some positive outcomes. That’s a great way to use your meeting time to advance your career.

Do you want more tips on meetings? Check out the benefits of virtual meetings in my next post.

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