"I love meetings!" - said nobody 📆

Advice for leaders on facilitating effective meetings

I have just released several new chapters of my upcoming book to my 80 beta readers. Here’s an excerpt from the chapter “Habit 9: Unblock progress with collaborative team meetings,” in which I cover essential design ingredients for effective meetings, the role of facilitator and advice for leaders.

People spend A LOT of time in meetings. In many organizations, this may be 25%-50% of people’s time. For managers, this number can even go up to 80%.

The problem is that talking about the work is not the same as doing the work. Most work happens when we are NOT in meetings: 85% of people feel more productive behind their desks than in meetings. Imagine the positive impact if we can improve these numbers.

To do this, we should focus on eliminating unnecessary meetings. But in this newsletter, I’ll focus on making weekly team meetings more productive and collaborative. What should a ‘perfect’ weekly meeting do for the team? I’d say it should help the team with:

• Alignment

• Decision-making

• Progress tracking

• Strategy realization

• Cross-functional collaboration  

• Removing barriers to progress

• Contextual awareness and learning

• Sense of community and well-being

An effective meeting doesn’t naturally emerge from a group of humans sitting in the same physical or virtual space. When there is no structure, existing power dynamics take over. It requires an intentional design to achieve high effectiveness.

A common saying in management is that a meeting can only be productive if it has a pre-set agenda. It does help, but that doesn’t fix all of our problems. Highly effective meetings have the following ingredients:

• Purpose: a clear articulation of what the meeting should help to achieve

• Structure: the process steps that help achieve the meeting’s purpose (these could be agenda items with precise needs, questions to work on, or steps of ‘exercises’)

• Tools: digital or physical tools that enable the structure (like boards with stickies or cards)

• Participants: the ‘right’ list of participants; only invite the ones that contribute to achieving the meeting’s purpose

• Facilitator: a role held by a person that holds the structure, ideally not the ‘highest in rank’

The role of facilitator

One unchallenged assumption of leadership team meetings is that the person ‘highest in rank’ should chair the meeting. This default promotes an unhelpful power dynamic where the most senior person in the room controls the conversation. It reduces participation and quality because when your ‘boss’ is leading the discussion, it can be scarier to contribute or disagree.

As the chairperson, juggling active participation in the content and keeping the meeting on track can be difficult. They are two different roles that require full attention to do well. So when we’ve proposed to leaders that they let someone else facilitate the meeting, it is often freeing for everyone involved.

Facilitation is a lot more than just timekeeping. In the spirit of clarifying roles and decision rights, below is my definition of the role.

Role: Facilitator

• Purpose: Effective meetings that enhance the team's collaboration and outcomes

• Accountabilities:

  • Designing and holding the meeting structure

  • Protecting equal talking time and participation

  • Focusing and redirecting conversations

  • Serving the team, not any single individual

• Decision rights:

  • What meeting structure to apply

  • When to deviate from the meeting structure

  • When to interrupt or close down a conversation

Being a facilitator is a role, not a full-time job. Initially, let a person naturally good at keeping conversations on track be the facilitator. Later, I recommend rotating this role so every member can practice it. Some teams hold an election, where they vote on who gets the role for a limited term.

Don’t blame the facilitator

I’ve often seen the leadership team’s secretary become the facilitator. Many are disciplined and skilled at keeping conversations on track. However, it may be scary or challenging for them to interrupt leaders, as they feel they are not full team members.

Since interruption is one of the essential acts of facilitation, having a ‘less senior’ facilitator may require explicit 2-way agreements between the facilitator and the team that their guidance should be accepted. The interruption should be considered beneficial for the team, not rude.

Furthermore, good meetings are a team sport. Don’t wait for the facilitator to step in if you feel the group is going off the rails. Help each other play by the rules of the game.

When someone consistently finds it challenging to adhere to the meeting structure, try to help them. Share your observations outside the meeting. Invite them to adopt different behaviors, and when it helps, make explicit agreements about what to do when it happens again.

Advice for leaders

Facilitation is not only critical for effective meetings, but it is also an essential leadership competency that can empower others. Even if you’re not the appointed facilitator, you can act like one. 

You can do this by asking great questions and being intentional about your contributions. Be aware of when it is helpful to share their opinion and when to step back and ask a question. Here are a few phases you can try: 

• “I’d like to do a round to hear everyone’s perspective.”

• “Is this conversation still contributing to the purpose of this meeting?”

• “It sounds like there is more to be discussed here, I suggest you two take this outside of the meeting and get back to the group later with a proposal.”

• “What do you need? How can I help?”

• “I haven’t heard from Jenny yet. What do you think?”

If you do this more often, you can create an environment where more people can contribute, promoting inclusivity and diversity.

Furthermore, take control of your calendar:

Do you want access to more chapters?

📗 I hope you enjoyed this excerpt of my upcoming book! If you’d like to access more finished chapters of the book and you’re willing to provide your feedback, please contact me to become a beta reader.

Join free leader roundtables

🚨 Meeting overload is the topic of our next Unblock Leadership Roundtable. If you are a leader, register here.

Formula X news 🏎️💨

• I had a lot of fun conducting a workshop at the Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek on the balance between speed & innovation and reliability & safety.

• The event I did with InnSpire created a beautiful after-movie that features me.

Thanks for reading!