7 most effective ways to run meetings

If you are a CEO if you are an executive or you are a business owner, chances are you have quite a bit of a meeting with your team.

If a meeting is done right, it could be extremely powerful, it drives synergy, it drives alignment, it creates energy among a team, and also improves communication.

On the other hand, if a meeting done poorly it creates confusion among your team, it creates miscommunication, it actually lowers performance, or worse, it creates conflict within your organization.

We spend so much time in meetings yet; we don’t spend enough time thinking about how we could run more effective meetings.

Today, I’m going to share with you seven tips when it comes to running effective meetings so be careful and pay attention.

1. Drop unnecessary meetings.

Drop unnecessary meetings. Ask yourself this question, “Do I really need to have a meeting about this?” Or just because it’s effortless, I say “Oh, let’s just call for a meeting.”?

Think that could you get that done in an email? could you do that through a message? Would it be more effective if you actually do a memo on it?

And everybody gets that piece of paper, gets that pdf. Not every single time you have to have a meeting. Now, it’s not a big issue when you have a small team, five, ten people, and let’s call a meeting.

But when you have 10, 20, 30, 50, 80, 100 people, if every single time you gather that many people, you’re wasting each other’s time.

Ask yourself “Do I really need this person to be in this meeting?” Or would their time be better spent on getting things done and doing something else?

So, drop all those unnecessary meetings first, so that you are left with are those meaningful, valuable, practical, effective meetings.

2. Have a one-on-one conversation with key executives.

Let’s say if you have your C-suite; you have your CFO, your COO, CTO, your CMO, you should have a weekly one-on-one with them.

No more than 30 minutes, could be an hour. This is where you talk about their life. This is a way to talk about things that are a little bit more personal, not just business.

Steve Jobs would do one-on-one, kind of walking around the meeting. He liked to walk and have meetings at the same time because he believed this actually sparks his creativity.

Having that one-on-one with your key executives, in a group setting that your key members, your management team, they may not be comfortable with or that may not be the right time to bring up certain issues.

That one-on-one is where you would connect, you’d interact and say, “Hey, how is your wife? how is your husband? how are your kids? what is going on with you?”. That’s where they could be a little bit more vulnerable.

That’s where they could be more transparent about any issues they might be facing but not sharing, but that’s a time that they could share with you.

If there are no personal issues, that’s also where you could share a little bit of your vision or how you see things or whatever that is relevant to their work or their department and say, “Hey, you know what? I’m thinking of adding this, I’m thinking of this is where we’re going, what do you think?”

And your executive would tell you, well, I think this is good, or that’s not good, or maybe we could add that. This is where you interact and deepen that relationship with your executives.

3. No agenda, No meeting.

This is a mistake that you may have made early on in your career, that you would just meet and you would talk. You would just talk about stuff. And then, you come unprepared; the other team members come unprepared.

You do not want to do that. It is an excellent policy to have, no agenda, no meetings. So, if someone says, “Oh, I’m going to call a meeting.” Say “Okay, what is the agenda?” That’s the first question. “What are we trying to accomplish?. What does that meeting look like?”

Now, without agenda what normally happens is that you talk about certain things, and then you go off track, and before you know it, an hour it’s gone. And you haven’t even tackled the issue that you wanted to tackle in the first place. Why? Because you don’t have an agenda.

When you have an agenda, you’re looking at the agenda. Even if someone goes off track, including yourself or any key members, it’s like “Hey, stop, let’s focus on the agenda. Let’s get back onto the agenda.”

You say yourself that “The first 10 minutes, we’re going to talk about this. Then, the 30 minutes, we’re going to talk about that. And then, five minutes, we’re going to do this.”

You have the agenda. You got to have a plan. Now every single person that is participating, If necessary, brings the necessary information statistics, reporting, whatever it might be so that we’re ready to go. We don’t need to waste time.

Let’s say you pay the average executive six-figure a year. Their time is very, very valuable. When you have five, six, seven people in a room, if you spend half a day together, just think about how much that costs your company.

When you look at it this way, you better make sure that the meeting is productive, you better make sure you’re getting a better return from the time invested, from money invested.

If you are going to gather everybody, it’s your job as a CEO, as an executive, as a leader, to make sure that is time well spent. Does that make sense?

4. Start on time and end on time.

It’s very, very critical that you start on time. Sometimes when you start the meeting, you have a couple of members who are sometimes five, eight minutes late, and you would wait for them. And that becomes a habitual thing.

You don’t want to do that. When you start on time, and you don’t wait for anybody, you just go the minute you hit the time. If the person is late, that person needs to catch up it trains them they got to be on time, right?

After a few times, they feel embarrassed; they will be on time. It’s also equally important you end on time.

Why? Because every single time you drag on the meeting, let’s say you block out 90 minutes for it, it becomes a two-hour, three-hour, four-hour thing, screws up their rest of the day. You don’t want to do that; you want to have an obvious cut time because then everybody could be prepared to do the next thing.

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