Year-end meetings offer a chance to tie up lose ends and begin looking at what’s ahead in the new year. But how do you make your meeting an effective one?
In the past decade, a new set of rules has emerged to help with your meeting planning.
Three ideas that appear to be universal are:
- Always have an agenda
- Create concrete steps or action items
- Always have an end time
GetMinute.com shares how some of the largest companies implement these ideas.
Apple
During the Steve Jobs era, Apple constantly worked to stay true to its startup roots while becoming the largest company in the world.
- Every project component or task has a “DRI.” According to Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky, Apple breeds accountability at meetings by having a Directly Responsible Individual whose name appears next to all of the agenda items they are responsible for. With every task tagged, there’s rarely any confusion about who should be getting what done.
- Be prepared to challenge and be challenged. There are dozens of tales about Jobs’ ability to aggresively question his employees, sometimes moving them to tears. While you probably don’t need the waterworks at your office, everyone should be willing to defend their ideas and work from honest criticism. If a person has no ideas to defend, they shouldn’t be at the meeting.
In a recent issue of “Think With Google,” Google VP of Business Operations Kristen Gil described how the company spent 2011 getting back to its original values as a startup, which included reconsidering how the company approached meetings. Some takeaways:
- All meetings should have a clear decision maker. Gil credits this approach to helping the Google+ team ship over 100 new features in the 90 days after launch.
- No more than ten people at a meeting. “Attending meetings isn’t a badge of honor,” she writes.
- Decisions should never wait for a meeting. Otherwise, the velocity of the company is slowed to its meeting schedule. If a meeting needs to happen for something to get done, hold the meeting as soon as possible.
- Kill ideas, and meetings. After Larry Page replaced Eric Schmidt as Google CEO, the company quickly killed its Buzz, Code Search, and Desktop products so it could focus more resources on less efforts. Focus has to permeate every aspect of a company, including meetings.
Technically Media
Not exactly Apple or Google, but at my previous company, Technically Media, we worked hard to make meetings as useful as possible. We met only once a week to update one another on progress, propose new ideas and hammer out any problems. We kept to an extremely strict time table and meeting structure as detailed by my fellow co-founder Christopher Wink on his personal blog. Some key observations:
- There is no judging in brainstorming. Focus on capturing ideas before filtering and critiquing them.
- Bring solutions, not problems. Solutioning in the middle of a meeting wastes precious communication time. If you can’t bring proposed solutions to the table, save it for next time or bring it up in private conversations.
- Review “homework” from the last meeting. Not only does it remind participants what happened last week, it holds attendees accountable.