058 Anatomy of a Successful Meeting

You’ve likely experienced good and bad meetings in your work and personal lives. Meetings that seem to never end, or as aimless or dull that they possibly lull you to sleep or madness from boredom. On this week’s episode of ProductivityCast, we cover the anatomy of a successful meeting so that if you’re able to, you can lead your organizational gatherings, volunteer group huddles, church committee confabs, and/or family meetings in a positive, productive direction. (If you’re reading this in a podcast directory/app, please visit https://productivitycast.net/058 for clickable links and the full show notes and transcript of this cast.) Enjoy! Give us feedback! And, thanks for listening! If you'd like to continue discussing managing digital notebooks from this episode, please click here to leave a comment down below (this jumps you to the bottom of the post). In this Cast | Anatomy of a Successful Meeting Ray Sidney-Smith Augusto Pinaud Francis Wade Show Notes | Anatomy of a Successful Meeting Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context. Doodle LettuceMeet Advisory Board Anatomy of a Great Meeting 3M Meeting Anatomy Guide Outlook group scheduling Google Calendar group scheduling N.B. G Suite Calendar allows you to see coworkers’ availability for scheduling (if your G Suite Administrator allows it), as well. GTD DC Meetup GTD NYC Meetup Everlast Rocketbook notebooks Raw Text Transcript | Anatomy of a Successful Meeting Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio). Read More Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17 And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney Smith. Augusto Pinaud 0:24 I am Augusto Pinaud. Francis Wade 0:25I'm Francis Wade. Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26 And today we are going to be talking about the anatomy of a successful meeting. everybody listening likely has an understanding has an emotional response to the worst meeting that they probably attended last week. And we wanted to talk today about how to make meetings more successful, how do you how do you really manufacture successful meetings, even when perhaps you're not the person who is managing or organizing the event. So what I wanted to do for us today is first to walk through what really is, and are the parts of a successful meeting, both in preparation, participation and post Ops, I wanted us as a group to discuss how we manage participation during meetings before, during and after, and ultimately have a discussion about some of the the skills that we have to have in terms of communicating during the meeting, presenting and facilitating meetings, as well as closing out meetings, which can sometimes be difficult. So let's start off with what makes a successful meeting in terms of the individual parts that make up a meeting. Francis Wade 1:44 I think it has to do with the mindset of the people who are coming into the meeting itself. A meeting is always a collaborative event between people. And the ones that take place in companies occur because the participants or someone is the someone instigates the need for the meeting. But it's not just the fact that they're instigating it, that's a potential problem is that they're doing so inside of a context inside of a culture. And most companies that I've worked with don't have a culture of seeing meetings as what I call a necessary evil, which is that it's something that needs to be as short as possible, as high quality as possible. As succinct and on point as possible, and should be reduced wherever possible, canceled wherever possible, people should be disinvited. People should be chased out the room, Steve Jobs, because meetings are huge, huge cost and time zone in terms of time, dollars and money to companies, but I've not been in a company that treated meetings as if it were an awful waste. And that there should be an ongoing process of reducing the time spent in meetings and the number of meetings, I'm yet to see them apply rigorous continuous improvement techniques to what I think is a an inherently wasteful activity that cannot be avoided. Augusto Pinaud 3:09 I love the fact that you start by I have never worked in a company who has that. And because he's something that I like you when I don't I don't even know if I will say that my own business, you know, every meeting has that, you know, we tend to, we tend to struggle, you know, I years ago there is I don't remember if it's a GTD fast or one of those audio programs, or was one of the interviews with David Allen and and he was saying that when he was working with his wife on the same hotel room, and he needed to send something for her to do. Okay, the comment was something along the lines of given it's going to age the comment but what Samson underlies I put it on my system, up to the internet, into the server in California, to the internet, until Dec computer and his wife even that they were sitting on the same room. And he was explaining the effective and efficiency on that instead of interrupting the other person. And doing that one of the problems I see in many organizations is we forget that our urgency is not necessarily the other guy urgency, and we really fail to go, what is an emergency and what is not. Therefore, we add an incredible amount of unnecessary meetings, number one, and number two, we think that for every little thing we need to make a meeting with many of these things could be solved. The br other other things, that's one of the things in which I think things like a slack, where allows people to be there to create groups to create chat to create a hug. second meeting is great. The problem is what we must organization I have seen doing with software and pieces of software like Slack, is now let's keep the same amount of meetings plus, let's add now the slack. So what's happening now is the meetings are even less effective. Because you have the people sitting there having shorter meetings on Slack, while they're trying to not pay attention to the meeting they're sitting on, Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:22 I'm a little bit draconian, when it comes to meetings, one, I don't like to have them if we don't have to have them. And to I believe that meetings are about making decisions. And so therefore, that's really the only reason for in essence, the traditional format of a I'm calling a meeting, as opposed to say an event where someone is going to present something, or what have you. So I don't particularly call meeting something where someone's going to give a presentation or something to that effect. But I understand that that can be considered a part of a meeting. But ultimately, a meeting is about making a decision. And whether that is brainstorming during the meeting, and people coming to consensus, either through an autocratic decision or a consensus or majority based decision, there is a decision that needs to be made, perhaps about one thing or multiple things. And so for me, meetings are all about what are the decisions that need to be made for actions to be decided. And if everyone can understand that construct in preparation, during and ending and leaving the meeting, then we can all be more productive. That's that's the lens through which I see it, maybe not everybody does. But that's that's the, that's the ultimate outcome of a meeting is that we've made decisions. So for me, I see the pieces of the anatomy of a successful meeting is that we've had great preparation, in furtherance of making there's decision we have a an understanding, when we sit down to the meeting with the format of the meeting is going to be who's leading the meeting, and how we're going to make decisions, right, whether it's going to be autocratic, I'm the head of the company. And so I'm going to make all the final decisions, or let's take majority vote, or we're going to consent as a group to be moving forward on a particular item on the agenda. And then finally, identification of who the responsible parties are, for what actions we decide, based on the decisions that we make. Those are really the those are really the anatomical parts for me of a successful meeting. Let's continue on in the discussion with how you manage participation, for successful meetings before, during and after. From my perspective, I I typically see meetings as being one person who is managing the entire process, typically the person who calls the meeting, and there isn't a lot of participation from the other members, which is the antithesis for me of a successful meeting, in the sense that if one person is preparing the agenda, and sends out a calendar invite, and then everyone just shows up to the meeting, without preparation, then that is out the gate and unsuccessful meeting, or at least it sets you up for lower possibility of success. So how do we how do we deal with those participatory components of a successful meeting? Augusto Pinaud 8:37 Well, the first problem comes on what the meeting is. Okay, and how the organization understand a meeting, you know, I, I have been organizations work with organizations and participate with organizations that nobody's done without agendas....