Meetings require a whole lot of leadership skill. Running a meeting is much easier when proper planning has been done. Few pay enough attention to this. Once you call the meeting to order, you want to open strong, manage conversations, and bring it to a close in a way that leads to meaningful follow-up actions. This series represents the fundamental skills you should master before ever calling or leading a meeting.
How to Decide If You Should Call a Meeting
Meetings are expensive and should be called when the expected benefits can only be gained by having a meeting, and the value of those benefits equals or exceeds the cost of bringing people together.
This workshop will help you make better decisions about when to call a meeting and teach you how to create a purpose statement that inspires participants and focuses their efforts.
How to Create a Meeting Plan
Forget the agenda and focus on creating a rock-solid meeting plan. Agendas provide a list of topics to discuss. That’s helpful, but not sufficient to guarantee meeting success.
Your meeting must be action-oriented. You must identify what needs to be done and the best way to do it, taking into account time limitations and other constraints. In this session, you will learn to develop a meeting plan that produces results.
How to Get the Right People to Your Meeting
If you’ve ever wondered how many people to invite to your meeting, here’s the answer. Not a single person more or less than you need. The people who show up have a direct impact on your ability to create successful results.
Sometimes the challenge is convincing the right people they should attend. At other times the issue is keeping the known troublemakers away. This session will help you become more purposeful about who you invite.
How to Start Your Meeting with a Bang
First impressions matter, especially when working against the bias many people have about meetings. They believe all meetings are boring and wasteful. It’s not fair to you, but it’s reality.
You are starting in a hole, and during the first few minutes, it’s your job to change their minds. In this session you’ll learn what you should do to help your meeting start off on the right foot.
How to Balance Meeting Participation
If you hold meetings in which you and maybe just one or two others are doing all the talking, this session is for you. There are some people who talk too much. You need them to make room for others. And there are those who have important things to say, but choose not to. That’s a huge problem, and you need to help them make a different choice. Learn how to run meeting in which everyone participates.
How to Properly Close a Meeting
If your meetings don’t produce significant changes, you just reinforced people’s biggest meeting complaint—waste of time. The meeting’s end is where you convert a discussion into meaningful action.
Your job is to make sure you close strong, and in this session you’ll learn what needs to happen during a meeting’s final minutes to leave participants feeling good about what they just accomplished and confident about what will happen next.