Always close your staff meetings with this simple question: “Who’s doing what, and by when?”

Have each person in the meeting acknowledge what they’re committed to doing, and by when. This ensures that people don’t start projects based on items that were merely being discussed in the meeting. You also make it nearly impossible for people to leave the meeting without outlining their next steps.

After you’ve closed the meeting itself, you need to make sure that you know if another meeting is necessary, and when, and if any other participants should’ve been present. The process can always be refined, and it’s important you remain open to that.

NEVER close a meeting without everyone knowing their exact deliverables.

You want people leaving the meeting like this

‘GS&R’ for short is perhaps the most high impact meeting type I’ve used. I started using them in 1986 when I worked with College Pro Painters, and over the years I’ve learned how to make these meetings extremely effective.

GS&R is a one-on-one meeting that you have with each person who reports directly to you, and so on down the line. It’s when you set goals with your direct reports for the week coming up and ensure their goals are aligned with the objectives of your team and the company. I’ve even used this meeting very successfully in coaching franchisees.

These meetings are meant to be a blend of direction, development and support—it’s not an opportunity for task or project follow up.  This is a weekly thirty to sixty minute meeting during which you coach your team one-on-one, demonstrating to them how to be more effective in their roles. It’s also when a ton of ‘situational leadership,’ an idea developed by Ken Blanchard and Paul Hersey, gets used.

Done right, GS&R will eliminate 80% of the emails between you and your direct reports during the week. How? Instead of emailing each other with random questions and ideas, you add those to a list to be discussed at GS&R, saving you both tons of time during the week.  Needless to say, it also saves a lot of frustration caused by the miscommunication that occurs in email.

If you’re not routinely meeting with your direct reports on a weekly basis in a format similar to this, start today and you’ll see improvements quickly.

pic: from the movie ‘Fracture’ with Ryan Gosling and Anthony Hopkins (I hope your meetings go better than theirs)

Every meeting should have a Chair, a Timekeeper and Participants.

The Chair classifies the meeting type upon invitation to the meeting, announces it at the start of the meeting, and guides the agenda. The Chair also closes discussion five minutes before the end of the meeting to ensure that people can get to their next one, and take care of any other responsibilities along the way.

The Timekeeper role is rather self-explanatory. Timekeepers make sure everyone stays on schedule and that all points in the agenda are covered. They prevent the Chair and the Participants from lingering too long on any one point.

The Participants in a meeting are not passive observers. They need to arrive to meetings prepared to contribute and stay interested throughout the meeting. Participants may also be responsible for maintenance of what I like to call ‘The Parking Lot.’ This is a repository for all ideas that may come up during the meeting, but don’t necessarily need to be handled during it. At a later date, the issues stored in the Parking Lot are addressed.

A company’s leadership teams need a weekly meeting structure to update each other and stay on the same page. ‘Weekly Action Review,’ or a WAR meeting is a weekly ninety minute meeting that each department holds for their entire team. The format is based on a process called ‘Forum Meetings’ used by Entrepreneurs Organization (EO) and Young Presidents Organization (YPO).

For the first thirty minutes of WAR, each person give a quick three to five minute update that answers these questions:

► What went well last week?

► What didn’t go well last week?

► Where am I stuck?

► What are the TOP three things to work on this week?

Having each person follow this system keeps each team aligned with what their working on.

The second thirty minutes is when the team reviews the metrics on the dashboard for that business area, looking for areas of concern as well as bright spots. By reviewing the key numbers for their business area every week, people start holding each other accountable, and realizing their key metrics roll up to the leadership team, so they must figure out the answers before they are asked.

During the final thirty minutes the group tries to “un-stick” some of the areas that team members were stuck on earlier. The group works together to share experiences and ideas to help out their teammates.  This simple sharing process is really impactful in building a team versus allowing the creation of silos, which prevent unification.

When I lectured at MIT at the Entrepreneurial Masters Program, I promised the CEOs in the class that we’d start on time.

When I actually delivered on that promise, they were dumbfounded.

If CEOs weren’t present at the start of class, or hadn’t returned to the class after a break, we shut the door and started without them.

A gesture this simple respects people’s time and helps you stay on course.

I coach and mentor CEOs to try to also ’compress time’ when you are booking meetings.  When you are thinking of booking a meeting if what ever time amount you first think you’ll need to have the meeting in – reduce it by fifty percent and book it for that shorter period of time.  So instead of booking it for one hour, book it and finish it in thirty minutes.

Like so many other obligations, meetings tend to fill the space you give them. By compressing the time of meetings, you increase everyone’s productivity, and implement a highly profitable system of time management.

If I asked everyone reading this blog if you’d ever been in one of those meetings where people say a lot and nothing gets resolved, virtually every hand would go up. If you make decisions for a company, this shouldn’t be the norm.

Getting to a place where your meetings mean something once again is a process, but they will help you build a stronger company and a culture of accountability.

Every successful meeting starts with a clear purpose, and it needs to be stated in one sentence and added to the meeting’s agenda. With every purpose, there is a maximum of three possible outcomes. You must include these possible outcomes with every meeting request so people know why they’re attending and what they’re getting done in the meeting.

“No agenda, no attenda.”
If you don’t have one, you shouldn’t be having a meeting. Create a bulleted list of action items in every invitation to a meeting so that people can figure out what’s going to be covered, and in what order.

Meetings without clear agendas go off track and include people whose time would be better spent getting other important projects completed.