This Is Why Your Meeting Went Off the Rails

You’re killing me. That’s what I’m thinking when I sit in a poorly run meeting during a D365 meeting.

I get it. You have a tough topic, a cross functional group, and a long list of competing priorities. You probably have several places you would rather be. ERP work is hard enough without adding a chaotic meeting on top of it.

If you knew the meeting was going to be difficult, you might have been better off handing the facilitation duties to someone with more experience leading high stakes project conversations.

When a meeting goes off the rails, I usually see three explanations.

1. Your facilitation inexperience.
2. The lack of a meeting plan.
3. The meeting should never have happened in the first place.

For this article, I’d like to tackle them in reverse order.

Weak Meeting Purpose

Meetings are expensive. During an ERP implementation, they are even more expensive. Every hour you pull people away from testing, design, data cleanup, or training has a real cost.

If you are going to ask people to attend a meeting, you need a clear and meaningful reason. If you do not have one, people will avoid the meeting if they can or resent being there if they cannot.

Let me share a story.

I once attended a community meeting about redesigning a major road. The purpose was never clear, and that should have been my warning. We spent ninety minutes developing a vision for improvements. At the end, the leaders told us there was no funding for any of the ideas we had just created. Instead, we needed to focus on crosswalk design at three intersections.

Seriously. They waited until the end to tell us the real purpose.

Everyone I talked with afterward felt the same way. We had wasted our time.

The same thing happens in ERP projects. Even the best facilitator cannot rescue a meeting built on a weak or misleading purpose.

Two meeting types are especially vulnerable: staff meetings and project update meetings.

People defend them with reasons like these:

• Staff meetings keep everyone on the same page.
• Everyone should know what their teammates are doing.
• This meeting forces people to complete their work.
• We need meetings to build teamwork.

Maybe there are good reasons to bring people together, but you will need stronger arguments than these.

And sometimes the real reasons are not so noble.

• Make people think they had a say in a decision that is already made.
• Ask for input to look like I care, even though I will not use it.
• Run meetings because it makes me look important.

If any of these sound familiar, promise me you will never use them again.

No Facilitation Plan

Let’s suppose you do have a good reason to meet. You have clear goals and a real need to bring people together.

If you succeed, people will walk away feeling the meeting was worth their time.

The first step in planning is to identify the goal.

Next, think about the strategies you will use to work toward that goal.

Then work through the details.

• Who should attend and why.
• How much time you need.
• When and where the meeting will happen.
• What activities will occur and in what order.
• What trouble you expect and how you will prevent it.

You may have created an agenda, but do you have a real plan behind it? If not, your chances of success have gone way down.

Ineffective Facilitation

Running meetings requires skill. You may not have those skills yet, or you may not be using what you know.

I cannot guarantee every meeting will be a success once you improve your facilitation skills, but I can promise your batting average will go up.

Here are a few things you should be able to do.

• Set the stage for the meeting.
• Tee up a topic.
• Involve everyone in the conversation.
• Keep the group focused.
• Help the group develop options.
• Help the group make a decision.
• Address conflict.
• Manage the clock.
• Deal with troublemakers.
• Keep the environment safe and friendly.
• Sum up the results.
• Develop next steps.
• Evaluate the meeting.

And that is just the big list. You can drill down and find a hundred more.

Bad meetings aren’t an accident

You can set most meetings up for success by doing three things:

1. Make sure there’s a darn good reason for the meeting.
2. Build a plan that leads towards your objectives.
3. Let a strong facilitator run the meeting.

To learn more, I suggest you download a copy of my book, Meeting Hero.

If you want to tackle the problem of bad meetings throughout the organization, then we ought to talk.