Building responsibility for bringing our best to meetings.
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
A lot of time gets wasted in meetings because people arrive poorly prepared to play their part in making the meeting efficient. However, simple questions at the start of meetings can often serve to build greater awareness of this, and help people to better prepare themselves and their contributions.
Preparing ourselves
How do you feel? Right now?
It is surprisingly easy for us to progress through our day without really thinking about how we are actually feeling at any point in time. And yet, how we feel – our optimism or pessimism; our hope or our cynicism; our compassion or traces of resentment – can make all the difference to how we respond to things and how we influence others.
This ‘checking back into ourselves’ has gained a lot of support of late as the mindfulness movement has gained in popularity – the idea of preparing ourselves to be fully present as ourselves in the way that we want to be. While the full benefits of mindfulness can take some time to develop, and require daily practice, just pausing for a moment to reflect and choose can make a big difference to the start of your meeting.
Too often we find ourselves doing and thinking things that we have not made a conscious choice about. But it only takes a minute to pause, check who you are being at the moment, and to make a choice as to whether that is the person you want to bring to this meeting – the person who will best help your friends and colleagues, make progress, and contribute to the culture and values you want.
To help you in this, you may find some useful ideas in Early Participation and Opening Questions.
Preparing our contributions
People often arrive for meetings without having completed the necessary preparation, pre-reading or actions from previous meetings. As a result, it is common for meetings to repeat the pre-reading to ensure everybody is up to date, to schedule presentations and updates on progress that could more efficiently be read (if you could rely on people to read them), and to spend time discussing actions that have not happened.
In fact almost 70% of meeting inefficiency arises because of the behaviours of the participants, particularly in respect of their preparation beforehand.
One simple tool to address this in remote meetings is the Readiness Check-in – a simple Venn diagram of overlapping circles which enables people to quickly indicate their readiness for the meeting. From this it is easy to see (and track) meeting preparation, to drive improvement, and to make data-based decisions on what needs to be included in the meeting.
To use the Readiness Check-in, simply right click the image above, copy it, and paste it into your meeting whiteboard. Then invite people to move their cursor over the circles to the cover all of the circles they have completed (but not the ones they haven’t).
Ideally you are looking to have all cursors in the central section – the intersection of all three triangles. But if it isn’t it does give you the opportunity to follow-up with any defaulters and talk through with them how they plan to be better prepared for the next meeting.
In reality, a lot of laxity in preparation arises because there is no visibility and follow-up. The Readiness Check-in helps fix this, and sets better expectations of what is required.