Team meetings, client meetings, 1-on-1 meetings and everything in between are all highly important to your company for a number of different reasons. However, they universally have one purpose: to align individuals, groups or even your whole business in a way that sets you up for success going forward.
As you might imagine, then, there's a bit of an art to hosting the perfect meeting that hits every point you need to check off and keeps everyone engaged throughout. The question is, how do you do that at an organizational level?
Starting off right
First and foremost, it's important to keep in mind that everyone has been in that meeting that could have been a phone call or even an email. As such, The Enterprisers Project recommended asking a simple question: "Why should this meeting happen?" Not only will you be able to figure out whether the meeting should happen, but you can also hone in on its ultimate purpose and then streamline your preparation — so you're only discussing what's absolutely necessary in such a setting.
Along those lines, it will also be helpful to make sure you consider who, exactly, should be invited. You don't want to have too few people involved because that creates communications issues down the line, but you also don't want to invite more than is necessary, because that's a waste of their valuable time.
Getting everyone on the same page
When you want to ensure your meeting is successful, a great way to do so is by sending out an agenda beforehand, according to Scoro. That way, people can adequately prepare themselves for what you intend to bring up, but also flag potential issues you may have overlooked and generally start pulling in the right direction even before the meeting begins. It's also a good idea to err on the side of keeping it brief.
It will often be a good idea to build time into your agenda specifically for a Q&A, which helps ensure the meeting doesn't run long, but still gives everyone time to bring up what they need to.
Going from fine to great
Once it's time for the actual meeting itself, there are two elements that will make it truly engaging: Great visuals and presentation. Management 3.0 notes that if you don't have a slide show or other visuals that capture the attendees' attention, you may lose out on key elements such as interactivity. When those visuals are accompanied not by someone just reading from a vague script, but actually expanding upon what's on the screen, it becomes far more important.
For any business, it is extremely valuable to have leaders on your staff who are capable of running successful meetings that hit all of the above targets and remain highly engaging. At YES Partners, we can help you find them. To see some of the roles that we have already successfully placed, click here.
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