Get Yourself Ready for Meetings

As a leader, do you use the 3 key steps for preparation? 


With so many meetings, busy leaders don't always have time to think about the goals of those meetings. But showing up unprepared only makes a meeting longer and less effective. Try blocking out time on your calendar for prep work and to think about what you want to accomplish. If a meeting is an hour, you may need 30 minutes to prepare. For critical meetings you may need much more time. If you plan accordingly, you'll arrive ready to accomplish what you've set out to do, not catching up.


Three key steps for preparation...

1. Establish a clear purpose for the meeting and be sure everyone knows it.
2. Uses processes for engaging participants.  Avoid talking at them. 
3. Be sure to include everyone who needs to know. 

Adapted from "Make Time for Time" by Anthony K. Tjan.

Leading Decisive Meetings

As a leader, do you know how to lead a decisive meeting? 

Simply because someone is appointed to a leadership position, it doesn't mean that they automatically know how to lead effective meetings.  To keep momentum in your work, you need to run great meetings. Make your next meeting productive with these three guidelines:

• Restate the meeting's purpose. Even if you think everyone knows it, it helps to remind them and sharpen the group's focus.
• Include everyone. If one or two people dominate the conversation and others are shy about leaping in, draw out people through facilitating by saying, "Thanks for those ideas, Carl. What are your thoughts about this problem, Megan?"
• End well. Close the meeting with specific actions to take and a clear time frame. State the decisions the group has made, who owns what, and when they need to report back to the team. 

Adapted from Guide to Project Management (HBR OnPoint Collection).

Are You Asking the Right Questions?

As a leader, do you ask the right questions to move forward the work of your school/organization?

As a leader, you have responsibility to set direction, sustain the vision of your school/organization, develop the people within the organization, lead and manage your core business, and secure accountability.  It's a tall order for anyone.  All skilled leaders know that facilitated processes are the most effective to build depth of understanding of issues, to create strategies for moving the work forward, and for ensuring buy-in on the part of staff.  It's a lot to do but this picture is a common one for knowledgeable leaders who get results. 

But something's missing.  Even if we demonstrate these behaviours, we may miss the mark with our facilitated processes if we don't ask the right questions during the processes.  This became painfully evident for me very recently at a facilitated session.  Without the right questions even the most dedicated members of staff can take your school's/organization's work off in different directions. 

Next time you call people together for a facilitated process - regardless of the purpose - be absolutely certain that you're working with the right questions.  If your question isn't finely tuned to your school's/organization's needs, you'll end up with high-quality work......but it won't be the work you need. 

It just might be time to brush up on your facilitation skills or to invest in the skills of a well-experienced outsider.  A misguided facilitation can get you going quickly in the wrong direction.

Saving a Meeting that's Going Nowhere

As a leader, how do you save a meeting that's quickly sinking?

We've all been stuck in long meetings that bounce aimlessly from one topic to the next. Instead of rolling your eyes, take control. Without bulldozing others, be brave enough to propose a solution:

• Play dumb. Ask someone in the room—preferably the strongest communicator—to help you understand what problem you're trying to solve and what needs to happen to resolve it.  This is helping the group get to the purpose.
• Identify the decision-maker. Sometimes meetings stall because no one knows who is responsible for the decision or what the decision-making process is. Ask who that is and inquire about what the decision-making process will be.  This helps get process to the surface.
• Get the right people in the room. Are there absentees who need to be there? Suggest rescheduling for a time when all the stakeholders can be present.  This ensures inclusion and that the best thinking will be available for the group.

Adapted from Guide to Making Every Meeting Matter (HBR OnPoint Collection).

Leading Effective Meetings

As a leader, how do you ensure purpose in your meetings?

As leaders, we generally have the positional authority to call meetings when we wish.  This has obvious advantages but it also has significant potential risks for you as a leader.  If your meetings are purposeful and engaging, you run the risk of dooming all meetings to events your staff members learn to dread.

Here are four simple ideas to ensure effective meetings:

• Have a clear purpose.  Be sure that each meeting has a clear purpose and that everyone attending knows the purpose in advance.  People who attend can come prepared.  If your purpose is clear, your outcomes will be more readily accomplished.
• Ensure everyone who needs to be there is present.  Be sure that everyone who needs to know - or wants to know - is included.  If the meeting is worth calling, it's worth having all valuable perspectives present in the room.  It's annoying and ineffective when you find you need someone there and they weren't even invited.
• Operate by pre-determined norms.  Establish clear, easy-to-follow norms and stick by them.  People appreciate how norms focus meetings and get the work done in a timely manner.
• Use facilitation strategies. A well-facilitated meeting engages the participants and it accomplishes the outcomes desired.  Without facilitation, the meeting can go on and on while its trying to find a focus.  What usually ends up happening is that one person takes over and it becomes their meeting and you lose the value of those who are present. 

Never Miss a Chance to Pay a Compliment

As a leader, do you use every opportunity to compliment your staff?

Never miss a chance to pay a compliment.  As a leader, your word has significance for the members of your staff.  Paying compliments for work well done means a great deal to all of us - regardless of our roles.  However, as a leader, your staff likely look to you for feedback.  Performance appraisals can provide feedback - but they really serve a different purpose.  Complimenting your staff when they do good work can be motivating and inspiring.  Compliments also indicate that you view their work with a positive presupposition.  You're not looking for fault.  If you believe the work that your staff does is important, let them know by acknowledging it with the occasional compliment.  In the end, everyone wins - especially those your school/organization serves.

Just one caution....don't go overboard.  There's nothing more meaningless to staff members than excessive compliments.  They know when you're being honest and when it's just for show.  Keep it real - and keep your integrity intact.

Staff Meetings

As a leader, are all your meetings purposeful?  If not, why do you have them?

Recurring meetings are a drag. These regular updates exist for a reason, but they are often boring and even unproductive. Here are three ways you can freshen up your staff meetings:

• Review the meeting's purpose. People may show up just because it's on their calendar. Remind them why the meeting exists and ask if it still serves a purpose.
• Solicit agenda items in advance. Give attendees the chance to bring up issues that are of interest to them.
• Cancel if there is no reason to meet. No agenda items? Cancel. People will respect that you aren't wasting their time and will show up engaged when there is work to be done and value in meeting.

Adapted from Guide to Making Every Meeting Matter by Ron Ashkenas, Martha Craumer, Anthony K. Tjan, Gina Trapani, David Silverman, Jane Heifetz, June Delano, Jodi Glickman, Melissa Raffoni

The Big Picture

As a leader, how much of 'the big picture' do you share with your staff?

As a leader, it's essential to have 'the big picture' of where your school/organization fits within the larger purposes of the system in which it is situated.  More importantly, as a leader, it's essential for you to have 'the big picture' of where your work and the work of your staff fits.  The question that arises for us as leaders is, How do we support staff in building their understanding of where their work fits within a larger, purposeful context?

None of us likes to work in a situation where we don’t see how our work connects to things that we believe to be of value or to be important.  As leaders, we need to provide opportunities for our staff to engage in conversations where connections are made to what is important outside the walls of the workplace.  If our work feels out of context or disconnected, it becomes meaningless.  Where is our motivation if we don’t see that our work adds value to any thing or any one?  As a leader, do the people you lead have the big picture of where their work fits both within the larger organization and within a greater purpose?  If not, this is an important opportunity for you as the leader to provide opportunities for staff to reconnect with why they chose to work in your school/organization.  Reconnecting to purpose can breathe new life into each of us.  The big picture can help each of locate ourselves within our work and within an important purpose.

Shared and Distributed Leadership

As a leader, do you share and distribute leadership...and why?

If you do an online search of terms like shared leadership or distributed leadership, you will literally uncover hundreds of thousands of links.  There are likely as many understandings of these terms as there are people who use them.  But what do they mean to you? 

As leaders, we are exposed to a great deal of leadership terminology and we often bring it into our daily vocabulary.  However, do we have an understanding of what these terms mean for us and our practice?  Shared and distributed leadership are great examples to work with.  What do they mean to you - the same thing or different things?  What do they look like in your practice?  Do you use them in your work?  Do you use them intentionally for a particular purpose?  The questions go on....

The issue here for leaders is this: When it comes to shared and distributed leadership, can you explain your understanding of these terms, how you display them in your practice, and for what purposes?  Too often, leaders may be tempted to hand unappealing tasks over to colleagues under the guise of sharing and distributing leadership. This is simply dumping jobs the leader doesn't want to do into the laps of others.  Staff members can see through this type of behaviour.  The impact of this is that leaders can appear to be in power positions to unload work they don't like onto others. 

The next time you think about passing a task along to a colleague, or to share and/or distribute your leadership, ask yourself if you are doing this in the best interest of the person and the organization.  If you have solid and purposeful reasons for sharing/distributing leadership with others then you're probably setting up a valuable learning experience for this person.....and your integrity as a leader stays intact.