HBR Guide to Making Every Meeting Matter (HBR Guide Series)

by Harvard Business Review

First, model deliberateness about the use of time. Second, share your rationale so that the meeting organizer has some context for why you’re not participating. Third, make an effort to meet the organizer’s needs, even if it’s not in the way they had originally envisioned.

A key aspect of influence is the ability to state a problem without blaming anyone.

Meetings are a series of conversations—an opportunity to clarify issues, set direction, sharpen focus, and move objectives forward. To maximize their effect, you need to actively design the conversation.

I’ve found that closure is more often than not the missing link between meetings and impact. Without it, things can be left unsaid, unchallenged, unclear, and uncommitted.

Reflect on the value of what you accomplished. This is one of the most powerful acknowledgment and appreciation tools. People rarely state the value created by a conversation, and therefore lose a wonderful opportunity to validate both the conversation and the individuals who are a part of it.

Letting people know that you want broad participation is the first step; calling on people strategically and gently is the second step.

Once thought of as a way to get many things done at once, multitasking is now understood to be a way to do many things poorly. Science shows us that despite the brain’s remarkable complexity and power, there’s a bottleneck in information processing when it tries to perform two distinct tasks at once.

“You need to institutionalize rewards around what you’re trying to motivate people to do so that it’s hardwired in,” says Molinsky. Say, for instance, you want to encourage more-open conflict and feedback at meetings, but your workforce is conflict averse. In that case, you could “make providing feedback part of their performance evaluations” and a prerequisite for promotion.

Even if there were several people in one location, each needed to be on the phone separately—not in a room together. It completely changes the dynamic of a meeting if some people are together in one place and can see and talk to one another off-line.

We have found that an ideal podium session includes no more than four presenters who speak for 15 to 20 minutes each, using just five to seven slides.

If you hold the Q&A on the second day, you can ask people to submit questions at the end of day one. That evening, the summit director, editor, and meeting owner can select the best questions and add ones they feel should have been asked; the executive team can formulate responses to the more provocative ones; and the rest can be parceled out to the appropriate executive team members.

The right tool to gather input from a crowd

By adjusting how information flows—more up, more effectively down, and a lot more across—you can turn a leadership summit into a high point of the annual management calendar, one that makes a real difference.