Improving your "meeting time" (or "Influencing your way to beneficial meetings")

Note: This follows on from the post: Review your calendar for improved value (or “Finding low-profit meeting time")

Now, taking our analysis of recurring meetings from the last blog post, we can start to identify meetings we wish to address/attend differently in order to get more value from our effort. Or maybe we can change our effort but derive the same value; or even different and better value.

I can’t define hard and fast rules or specific actions that would work for everyone reading this. Instead, I have set out some examples to help get your thinking going. Read through the general drives and apply the same sort of thoughts to your meetings.

If you feel a sounding board would be useful during your exploration, feel free to reach out to me and we can explore how I can help with a few specific 1-to-1 sessions.

Review the meetings for action based on the effort vs. value measures

Medium / low input, medium / high benefit:

• These are the sweet spot

• Make sure your energy goes into participating in these well

• Keep spending well-planned time and energy on the inputs, participation and any actions received

• That said, it is worth looking for opportunities to be more efficient with the time you spend but getting the same value

• Can you use the meeting time to also present ideas (maybe in any other business), develop better relationships, practicing speaking up more, offering to help others who have issues?

Medium / high input, medium benefit:

• These are similar to those above

• However, given the greater effort required to generate the input, you might consider the following…

• Can you think of ways to increase the benefit, maybe not 'directly'?

• Is there an opportunity for you to train/coach a colleague into taking over some or all of your role in the meeting, over a few sessions?

Low input, low benefit:

• You might think “Why am I going to these? I’ll just get out of them.”

• If there is nothing stopping you from using the time for something else more beneficial, then you could work out how you either excuse yourself or just stop going

• However, there might be an approach that is more beneficial to you in the medium term for some of these meetings

• Perhaps use these to practice an area of growth or get greater exposure in the firm; keep reading for some ideas

Low benefit meetings that are mandatory and/or attended by senior colleagues

• Identify meetings that present you with opportunities other than just to ‘do what is expected of you' in your role

• Mark up meetings where there are seniors present

• Mark up those where you also know the benefits need to be greater

• For these, consider ways you could increase the overall value of the meeting

• The increased value to you is then being seen to improve the value of the meeting

Consider alternative approaches, rather than just “How do I get out of this meeting?”

It will be tempting, or easy, to dwell on how to 'get out of’ a given meeting.

I’d strongly encourage you to consider other approaches; by doing so, you may find greater value than just the time you get back from ‘avoiding’ a meeting.

For the low value and/or high effort meetings, think about:

• Who runs the meeting and who are the other attendees?

• How big is the meeting in terms of attendance?

• What is the intended outcome; is that outcome valuable but just not being achieved?

• How would you change the meeting to achieve the outcome?

Show leadership with "leading by example":

• Exploring with attendees on how to make the meeting more valuable is an opportunity to show leadership and taking ownership

• Demonstrating to your seniors how you transformed a meeting into a high-value use of time for all attendees can only be beneficial

Consider the following approaches:

• If the meeting has a small number of attendees, is it worth finding out if they get value and discussing how it could be more valuable for you all

• If it is a mandatory meeting consider checking in with the chair to understand the intent, discuss ways of how you could help to achieve that intent

Some low input, low-value meetings may provide non-obvious opportunities for value:

• Consider using these to practice areas of growth or greater exposure in the firm

• Actively identify meetings that present you with chances to practice some leadership growth skills: deep listening; summarising, asking open questions, mediation, driving to decisions or actions, etc…

• Measuring yourself on success in the above ideas is an excellent way of repurposing the time to add extra value to the meeting – even if not immediately obvious to others, over time your growth through practice will come through

• Link to steps towards leadership summarising in meetings co-ordinate decisions etc...

Exercise:

• Mark each meeting the ease of increasing the value, or reducing the effort

• Brainstorm the specific tasks or habits you will use to generate that change; this step needn't be 'perfect' - simply reflect on each meeting openly in your mind; taking notes if you like

• Pick 1 or 2 meetings you have identified as could be improved; really try to focus on just 1 or 2 to start with

• For each of the two meetings, write down specifically what the most important change needs to be; how you could spend less time, get more value or both

• Write down 3-4 specific actions you will take to try and make the change happen

• Try the actions and see how things change over a few weeks/meetings, reflect on how that goes

• Over time pick the next 1 or 2 more meetings and repeat the bullets above

Good luck and I hope you can reduce your effort while also increasing the benefit of your meeting time bit by bit, over time.