How to Run a Great Meeting

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Mitch Lippman. Welcome to the course. How to run a great meeting. This course is designed for anybody, at any level, in any business who would actually set up and run a meeting. I have been in business for over 30 years, and I'm an executive and organizational coach, a leadership trainer and a meeting facilitator, and looked in so many different industries that work in tech and finance in entertainment in publishing and advertising. Medical legal restaurant in hospitality, retail manufacturing, engineering. Oh, my goodness, the list goes on and on, and wherever it worked, I see a lot of the same themes. Recurring on one of those themes is what I call meeting itis. The sickness of meetings. People tell me they go to too many meetings, they get invited meetings. Sometimes they don't even know why they're invited to. And even if they do know why they're there, they don't feel like anything happens in the meeting. That's helpful. And they leave feeling like it was a waste of their time. So I thought Wouldn't it be great if you could run a meeting where people knew why they were there? Uh, what the purpose of the meeting Waas, and there was a clear agenda. And when they left the meeting, they felt like something had been accomplished in the business. Move forward. They feel good about it. They feel good about you, and they sure want to come back to your next meeting. So that's what the course is about. For your class project, you'll be uploading an invitation to a meeting that you would run that includes a plan and purpose for the meeting. Ah, well thought out attendee list and an agenda. And then later, after the course, you can upload additional comments on how your meeting went and what else you learned, So let's get started. 2. Course Overview: Okay, so let's talk about our course to begin with what your meetings like. Now, if your meetings air typical, there isn't necessarily a clear sense of what the purpose of the meeting is and why people are in the room and individuals may not know why they're invited and what their role is. Or worse, They may think that their role in the meeting is different from what you think, which could could create confusion and some problems. Something else that can happen in typical meetings is that there is an agreement on decisions that were made previous to this current meeting, and a lot of time could be spent rehashing old decisions, which can really be disruptive and frustrating to all attendees. Another thing that can happen is people introduce topics that aren't related to this meeting. It may be something that's on their mind, or something that came out of a previous discussion that just happened before they walk in the door. But that can also really derail your meetings. That happens a lot in meetings, and as a result nothing gets decided and people feel like they're time was wasted and they're annoyed, and that's very much a typical meeting. So what we're looking for is what I call the ideal meeting. And in an ideal meeting, there is a clear purpose for this meeting. People understand what that is, and they also understand their role in the room. There is agreement on what was decided in the past, and unless you have a very specific reason to do so there, you shouldn't be going back and re deciding old decisions. That's a waste of time, and it gets back to the typical meeting as opposed to ideal. We'll talk about some tips for that. We talked about running the meeting. You also want to have a clear agenda prepared and be able to follow it, and that will help you get through the meeting and achieve the purpose of the meeting. And as a result, the purpose gets achieved and you have the documentation of any decisions that were made commitments that were made in an action, plans that are coming out of the meeting with the specifics on those and people feel like they've accomplished something and the business moves forward. That's an ideal meeting. So let's take a look at how this lines up with our syllabus, So we're gonna begin by talking about plan and purpose. Now I'm an executive and organizational coach. So a lot of things are recurring themes and for me planning, purpose alignment, having the business move forward, those kinds of things come up all over leadership and planning and purpose for a meeting is a critical thing. If you're going to get a bunch of people from a business in a room for an hour to talk about something, it's worth your while to spend a few minutes planning so that there's clarity. The next thing we're gonna talk about is the attendee list and how to select attendees based on what you need in the meeting. If there are decision makers that need to speak up, then they should be there. Those kinds of decisions about who should be in the room should be made. We'll talk about that. The next thing we'll talk about is how to create an agenda that's gonna help you achieve the purpose of the meeting. The next thing will talk about is communication in generally creating some sort of communication or invitation to your meeting that includes the specifics and logistics so that everyone is in alignment before they enter the room. Our next stop will be tips for actually running the meeting and staying on track. And then we're going to talk about artifact or some sort of documentation of what happened in the meeting, what decisions and commitments were made in the meeting and the specifics around that. So there's alignment coming out of the meeting, and then we'll talk about follow up so that there is accountability. So if you have a great discussion in your meeting, But if people agree to or commit to doing certain things as a result of the meeting and they don't do them, then you've just had a great discussion. But the business doesn't move forward and effectively, it kind of erases the value of your meeting. So there is a great deal of value and following up, and we're gonna talk about that. Then we're gonna take a side trip to talk about some optional elements for some specific types of meetings, and then we're going to discuss your class project and I'll give you some tips on that, and then we'll finish up with the summary, and that's our course 3. Plan and Purpose: Okay, so let's jump right in with plan and purpose. Now, as an executive and organizational coach and a leadership trainer, I talk about planning and purpose a lot in a lot of areas. We're gonna talk about it as it regards meeting. But this is a specific skill that is really critical for effective leadership. So, for example, if you're going to get a phone call or, um or write an email taking a few minutes before you do that to figure out what your plan is or what your purpose is for that phone call or email will be incredibly valuable in helping you set the right tone and approach it in the right way. And the same is true for meetings, which is what we're going to talk about. And as I said earlier, if you're gonna get a bunch of people in a room for an hour, say, or more to talk about something related to the business, you do want to take some time and give it some thought and make a plan. So we're gonna talk about how we make a plan here. First of all, I want to say planning is half the key to success, and the second half is executing on the plan with flexibility. You have to deal with what's in front of you in the room, and I just take a moment here and say I'm going to talk about in the room And it doesn't matter what medium your meeting is taking, uh, form here. And it could be people gathered together in a room. It could be people, videoconferencing or people on the phone, or a mix of all three of those planning Purpose doesn't change at all in that you may have to execute a little bit differently, because if somebody's on the phone, you can't see them, so you might want to do a little bit more specific things. We'll talk about that later when we talk about running the meeting. But in terms of most of everything, we're gonna do the medium itself doesn't matter. So just keep that in mind. I don't want, you know, wing anything. I think planning is a really important aspect to leadership. I've said that already. Probably say it again and you really want to take some time, give some thought and write things down, and I believe that something happens between your brain and and the paper. If you're writing in longhand with a pen and paper, that doesn't happen when you are typing. So my recommendation is that you you spent some time and give some thought with a pen and paper or, if you will, a stylist on a screen, but something before you type and you don't to share that with anybody. But I think that something happens that's different. So I do recommend that you do with that way now. So the next thing we want to do is give you a little bit of structure of what kinds of questions you might want to ask yourself. So what needs to be accomplished? What's the reason we're all getting together? Uh, how we're gonna walk away with? What do we need to decide to agree upon? That's if that's what's gonna happen. And then what should happen Now This proceeds agenda. So, for example, if we're going to select from among three different options of what we're going to do next in our project, the meeting needs toe, have a review of those three options and then perhaps a discussion, maybe a vote or some other selection method that proceeds that's gonna inform the agenda, but that the plan here is we're going to hear about the three options we're going to side about the three options. That's part of your plan. Okay, what we're walking away with. I mentioned that earlier and then is there another way for us to do this? And if there's any way for us to do this other than meeting or convening, let's do that will save the world from one extra meeting. Think of it this way. If the communication is unit directional, it doesn't necessarily need to be a meeting unless the subject matter is important enough that you want to make sure that everybody heard you and you want to gauge their response. But once you're gauging their response, the communication becomes multi directional, so there is a need for the multi directional, and that's what would prompt the need for the meeting. But in general, if you're going one way in communication, sent an email if you need to. You Teoh, hear back from other people, see their response, gauge the response, or have them discuss or hash out or ask questions about something, then that's your meeting. Okay, so give some thought to these questions and other questions that you may have. So let's talk about some examples of meeting plan and purpose. A kick off meeting is a great opportunity for, um, example of a meeting. We're gonna initiate a new process. We kicked that off. We think about what the plan or purpose would be. We're going to decide upon next steps for a project. Your initiative. I just mentioned that earlier in an example where we have three options. So we want to decide upon the next steps from among those three options. We need to notify everyone of information or changes that air new. That's an example of a meeting where if it's important enough for us to be able to gauge response, then we have a meeting on that. Uh, we talked about this earlier, selecting from on options and then a few things that people need to discuss. Nowhere decide. So those were some things to think about. Now let's look at types of plan and purpose. Their two main types, ah, strategic plan and purpose and stated plan and purpose, and we want to talk about the difference between the two. So strategy is ah, plan you make to accomplish er and achieve an objective. Now, you may or may not share your strategy. With a larger group, you may state a purpose that simpler and not is revealing. So here's some examples. Two teams are gonna be working together on a project, so your strategic plan or purpose might be for people to understand the goals and rolls and the project plan for people to work together and get to know each other. Uh, get to know each other as a team. Therefore, creating a better team dynamic to make the team more effective. And everybody should understand how important this project is to the business that maybe your strategic plan, your stated plans probably going to be simpler, which is introduced. The project gets, you know, the team review the timeline and deliverables. So, uh, you have a difference in what you're thinking about versus what you're stating another example of meeting planning purpose. So we've just had a large company meeting where there was a big announcement made. We're gonna have a smaller team meeting just our team to follow up on that and discuss how it impacts us and answer questions you might have. So the strategic planner purpose for that would be to provide support for the change to the team members, to elicit hopes and concerns in a smaller group, to to invite people to ask questions and tell what's on their minds so that you can address it and help them and to unify the team. But you're not going to state that is your strategy. Your strategy is gonna be simpler. If your state and your plan is gonna be simpler, it's gonna be we're going to review what happened in the larger meeting and answer questions give you the opportunity to discuss it is a smaller teeth. So that's the difference between strategic and stated plan and purpose. Now I just want to talk about this. This is not meant to be devious or underhanded. It's about giving you the opportunity. Think about how and why you are doing something, and the strategic will inform the state it So. For example, if you are going into a meeting where your strategic plan includes developing the relationships of the individuals in the room, that's gonna inform how you manage yourself or manage the meeting within that meeting? So, um, you might I encourage people to be kinder to each other. Or you might encourage individuals who are generally quiet to speak up for the purpose of developing this sort of better relationship in the team. But you're not gonna walk into the room saying, Hey, I'm here to make the relationship better that that it's a little obvious. So another example, a completely off subject here would be, Let's say you're interviewing for a job. You're the job interview candidate. You're not going to say, Hey, I'm here to brag and tell you all about the best of me and why I'm better than anybody else . You're gonna say that you're going to just do you answer the questions and quote, do the interview with that in mind as your strategy. Another example might be. If I'm gonna ask you for a favor, I'm not gonna tell you. I'm going to flatter you, but I might flatter you. I'm not saying Hey, you really like your shirt. Can you do me a favor? You'll know that's what's going on, but I'm not going to state it so That's sort of the difference between strategic and the stated purpose. Okay, so you want to give some thought to specific kinds of meetings, cause a single meeting, one off meetings, say, launching a new project or whatever. Those were more clear, but meetings with Peyton's things like weekly or monthly updates for interdependent teens or ah, larger group or even team meetings. You might want to give some thought Teoh to plan and purpose rather than just sort of letting it go on and then special meetings like a new team. You want to think about what the strategic purpose might be is we talked about in a new team. You might wanna have a non opportunity. Teoh, too, get people to know each other better, But you're not going to necessarily state that same kind of thing goes for team and conflict. You're not going to state that they're in conflict or changing Director of priorities. You don't You don't want to say that long range planning, brainstorming and idea selection or other things where you want to give some thought to what you want to accomplish. So brainstorming will pick that as Addison. An example. You might have as a strategic purpose or plan that you want to hear ideas from some of the people who are normally quieter, rather than letting a couple of the louder people dominate. You're not necessarily going to state that, but you're going to structure the meeting or handle the meeting differently. If you know beforehand that that's part of your plan. So again you might not state. Hey, guys, I want to hear from some of the quieter people, but you might create ah, structure where people individually contribute in a orderly fashion like everyone taking a turn. Uh, that will achieve your strategic plan without you stating it. Okay, so that's how you want to think about that. So you want to consider takeaways, and there may be more than one take away. It's very rare that a meeting has just one purpose, So you want to separate out different purposes, and then you might want to see if there's a unifying theme, either for the strategic purpose or for the stated purpose or both. So it's important for you to think about that, because rarely or meetings just on one topic, so you want to think about that for your meeting. So here's an example for a team meeting. So we meet. Let's just their team needs every week, and we always have a catch up and we have updates and things like that. Well, for this next meeting, we're gonna have a specific learning or discussion topic or a review of best practice or something like that. So as you start to get better at planning, you can integrate. Weave this into even your ongoing meetings, and that can help you with developing your individuals or or developing processes and and making the team better for the business. Okay, so for your plan, you want to think about the purpose most strategic and stated, and you want to think about the desired result and there's the asterisk. You may or may not know that specific outcome, so you want to leave some flexibility in there for what the group comes up with. Okay, so don't be too rigid. You want your plan and purpose to have structure, but not so much structure that it doesn't allow for the flexibility of what happens when the group gets together and people ask questions and and bring up things that you hadn't thought about. Do you want to leave room for that? Okay, so for the first part of your class project, you want to write a strategic plan and purpose for the meeting that you're going to run and for the for the project, we want you to think about one meeting. Okay, So you want to actually write it? And and, um so right, the strategic planet purpose and right, the stated plan and purpose. A couple of tips here. Don't give it all away. Keep it simple and keep it compelling. Especially on this. The stated purpose. It should be simple and compelling. And then allow room for input, growth and change as we discussed. Okay, so that's plan and purpose, and we'll move forward from there, take some time, give some thought and remember that the first time you write plan and purpose, it's going to take longer than it ever will again. And I bet you you could do this in 10 to 15 minutes to begin with. And once you get good at it, you could do it in 2 to 3. Okay. Talk to you soon. 4. Attendees: moving on with how to run a great meeting, taking a look at our celeb us. We just talked about plan and purpose, and our next topic is attendees. Now, plan and purpose is so critical it's gonna inform everything else that we do. And that starts with the selection of attendees. So, traditionally, we might say, the more the merrier. XYZ get a bunch of people in a room figured this out or we might go the opposite way and say, Hey, let's only have in the room those people that we like or that think the way that we do or something like that, but planning purposes gonna help us refocus. So I've come up with four types or categories of attendees. That is just for your strategy, and you're planning your not going to share this information, but this is a way for you to think about it in terms of plan and purpose. So the four types are required surrogate desired, N F Y. I, and we're gonna talk about each of these individually, and then we'll have some examples, and hopefully it'll be pretty clear, so required. These are the folks we need in order to achieve the purpose of the meeting. We can't have the meeting without them. That may be because we can't make decisions without them or they have to have input or that they have key information for us. They're major players in our decision or purpose of our of our meeting From practical purpose, we can schedule the meeting if these people aren't available in general, required means we move the schedule around to accommodate the required attendees. Now, on that note, there may be some people at a senior level in your organization who want to be part of it, and they may not be in your eyes necessary to achieve the purpose. But we want to out of deference and relationship development. Uh, we want to accommodate them as best as possible when that happens. So you want to include them in the required category in your own thinking and make sure that they're available at the time that you select the meeting. Ah, the second category is surrogate, so if you have a couple of individuals who can't make it who are required, they may select somebody to sit in for them. Now you want to make sure if that happens that you understand whether that person has the authority to make decisions, take actions or made commitments or whether there there is an information gatherer information provider. This is gonna affect how you run the meeting. So let's just say we have a meeting where the head of finance needs to make a decision as to whether we can go forward with this and the head of finances and available. But it's going to send somebody from her department. So you need to know, Does that person have the authority to approve or not? Um, because me, you might call for a vote and the person might say I'm not authorized to vote or make a decision. Or even worse, they may choose to vote or make a decision, and then later the head of finance says, Whoa, whoa, whoa. I was supposed to be a part of this. We're not moving forward. We need to move back and and rethink this. So, in order for to keep the business moving forward, you want to make sure you understand the roles, and that's gonna, as I said, impact how you run the meeting, and then the other thing, you want to make sure that the person who is acting as a surrogate is up to speed on what you're talking about. I can't just grab anybody off the street and having the surrogate. You want to actually worked with the person who they're filling in for to make sure that they are up to speed by the time the meeting happens. So those two types required in surrogate you really want to think about practically scheduling the meeting so that they tend attempt? Okay, next category is desired. These air folks, they could add value to your meeting. Ah, they may have valuable information. They may have experience knowledge to provide input in perspective. They may have institutional knowledge that could be very helpful. And, um so we want to actually, uh, include them. Uh, they may be able to, through their competence and experience, at additional value to our ah, plan and purpose. So we would include them. And, uh, So you want to think about, uh, how you invite people that could be helpful, And then if they're not available at the time that your meeting is being scheduled, then it would help you to develop the relationship to let them know. Hey, it would be really good to have you in this meeting, but we're having it, you know, Wednesday at 11. In the morning and you're not available, Is that okay? And so, in addition to a cheating plan and purpose, you also want to think about two other factors. From a leadership standpoint, when you're running a meeting, one is developing relationships and the other is moving the business forward. So for the purpose of developing relationships, we want to go to the desired individuals for the desired attendees and say, Hey, we really good to have you in this meeting, But, um, but you're not gonna be available at that time. Is that Okay, So you're doing this check in, but the meeting can't happen without them. And that's how you want to categorize it in your head. Okay, The final one is f y I. These are people that it was good for them to know what's going on in the meeting. They may have a peripheral involvement in the purpose it also your developing relationships . This maybe somebody, for instance, who is not going to be actively involved now, but maybe involved down the road and be good to have them in on the process from the beginning or earlier on in the process. And then they may be able to offer information that we hadn't considered. So, um, these air four categories for you to think about, uh, but remembering that both the desired an f Y i for practical scheduling purposes, if they're not available, you could still schedule your meetings. You want to think about that in those four categories And I just want to repeat, You're not gonna let anybody know you're just an f Y I or your just desired. You're not required kind of thing. You want to just think about that in your head in terms of how you would set up the meeting and who you would invite. Okay, so let's talk about some examples that would, uh should help clarify this. So the 1st 1 is a meeting where we're gonna decide which vendor we're gonna use for fulfilling our orders by mail. Now, in my example, this this vendor is going to be managed by a marketing manager, someone who reports to the head of marketing. Okay, so we have Ah, sourcing person who understands the vendor bids they're required. We might also call them depending on your organization. Might call them sourcing. You might call the purchasing. You might call them procurement. It's the same thing effectively, so that person should be in the room. The person who's gonna manage the vendor should be in the room that person's required. The next person I have is the head of marketing. So remember that the vendor manager, that second person in the list, that person is a marketing manager who reports to the head of marketing. I have the head of marketing as a desired person in the room. It would be good to have input from the head of marketing, but not required, but you notice it in parentheses. Inside, Depending on the size of the job, there may be a financial threshold over which, uh, you know, the marketing manager can't make a decision. So then that might change the head of marketing from desire to required in order to give the approval in the meeting. Or you could figure it out in another way. We just want to keep it in mind. Do I need this person in the room. Do I not leave this person in the room? Head of product? Who would know about the product the way it's built, therefore, full four fulfillment purposes that person would be helpful toe have in the room and then the customer service manager. Now that person is not involved unnecessarily in the decision making process. But once the decisions made and the vendors brought on customer service, manager is probably gonna be working directly with that vendor to help resolve customer service issues, so that person's input would be very helpful. So we put this person, as is desired attendee for the meeting and then an assistant to the person who's managing the vendor. That might be either desire to f. Y. I. And just for the purposes of helping the businessman forward and developing the relationships, just having the person in the room could be very helpful if you think about it moving forward, because that person, this assistant or associate of the of the vendor manager may be very actively involved in managing the relationship later on, so bringing them in earlier may be very helpful, and these are the kinds of considerations that you want to make rather than just saying no . No. We only need the people in the room. We're gonna actually make the decision. It may help to open up the process a little bit more again for the purposes of developing relationships and moving the business forward. And then there may be other players that you might invite. And again, Remember, you're not necessarily saying Hey, you're enough. Why, I you're just saying you would you like to come to the meeting? The purpose of the meeting is this. And if it's necessary, we will talk about this. We talk about communicating. It may be OK to say, Hey, I've asked these people because they're gonna be involved in it later on. They may not be in actively involved in the decision making process, and you can clarify during your communication, we'll talk about that in communication, are communicating. But that's one example. Second example is my ongoing staff meeting. So let's say I haven't ongoing staff meeting of every other week for an hour. My staff meets, so every person who reports to me directly is required for that meeting. But once in a while, someone like people are not not available, they might be out on the road or with a client or something like that. So I might ask them to send a surrogate, someone who can report out and give a status updates on their area of the business. We can call them required or desired, or f y I depending on what their role is again. Remember, that's in our head, these categories, but this is good in a couple of ways. One is it has somebody who can keep us up to date. But the other thing is, this is an employee development. We're looking at developing these individuals by having them be surrogates for their direct supervisor, so they can understand what it's like one level up in New York chart for them, and they can participate in meetings that they might not otherwise have the opportunity to participate in. So that could be very helpful, so I might actually invite guests to present. So I haven't ongoing purpose for my ongoing staff meeting, which is for status updates and information sharing of key information. But I might, for individual staff meetings have additional purpose, like gathering information from other departments So let's just say I I'm the head of marketing. I might say, Hey, you know what? In our next staff meeting, the head of research and development is gonna come into our staff meeting and give up 30 minute talk on what's going on in research and development and for that purpose that person would be required they made. They may decide to bring other individuals who report to them, perhaps subject matter experts in, uh, the research and development group. In my example, those people would be desired, F Y I. And this is where it could be very helpful to not only understand what's going on in the business, but also to develop relationships that will help move the business forward as we move through, um, the life cycle of business. My department assistant is required for my staff meetings, and that's a really good practice, because the perp, the person who is assisting, is an active member of the team in a support role. So we don't want to exclude that person. You want to think about being inclusive. Now we may ask that person to take notes. We can talk about that later, when we talk about running the meeting and and creating artifacts. But having the assistant who's gonna be supporting things be a part of the discussion of information and status updates is to me a critical function that you really want to think about and other department assistance that people from other departments who help us and support as having them come to our meetings once in a while as an active both recognition and inclusion is a really good thing in a smart thing to do. So these were some things just to think about as you put together your meeting attendee lists. Um, we also might want to invite other people to come in tow. Learn about our department, Justus. We are learning about research and development. In my example, we might invite other people to come in and by invitation just to participate or or observe our staff meeting. So again, we're developing relationships in helping move the business forward, and we can include that in our purpose for any individual meeting. OK, so I hope that those two examples clarify this for you. So for your project, you want to think about the meeting that you're using as an example, and you want to determine who would be coming to your meeting or who should be coming and assign a type or category, remembering that, that's not necessarily something you're going to share out with people. But this is for your strategy now for the company to to maintain confidentiality. If you're using a real life example, you may want to either change the names of people or use initials or something like that, but maybe include, uh, title in addition to, um, the category or type. And the other thing I want to say about your project is you should be adding to a document that you started with plan and purpose. You're gonna add the attendee list, but don't submit it until we get to the the topic of your class project, at which point you'll be able to, uh, summarize and put the whole thing together and then uploaded. Add as one finished document. Okay, so that's the attendee list 5. Agenda: Welcome back to how to run a great meeting. Looking at us, Elvis, We've already talked about plan and purpose and attendees, and we're gonna talk about agenda. So guess what agenda is informed very much by plan and purpose. I know, I know I keep repeating myself, but it's that simple and that important. So here's what an agenda should include. What's going to be covered about how much time each topic is going to take. Who's gonna present your lead, each topic or section and what we completed by the end of the meeting. Very simple. So let's take them one at a time. What will be covered? This is a really important because it's helps you set boundaries. So I'm recommending that you send this out in advance of the meeting, and so this allows you to make sure that you have something people can refer to. And while you're running the meeting since they received in advance, you can help keep people stay on track. So we're not just talking about whatever we're feeling or whatever is the most current or pressing thing on our minds. But we're talking about what relates to the agenda of the meeting where the purpose of the meeting. And it also provides assurance that something somebody wants to talk about is actually going to be included. So somebody might bring something up and you say, Hey, you know what? That's the third item on the agenda. We're going to talk about the first item in the second item, and then we'll get to that. So it allows you the structure for that, and it creates a road map for the entire conversation, which is what a meeting is and that allows it every attendee to prepare for the meeting, knowing what's gonna happen so that maybe people who are gonna present get ready to present . But other people may read up on information or or check in on if there's gonna be status update than they come already prepared, having asked the question. Okay, I'm going to this meeting where I have to give a status update, tell me where we are with this. So there they're able to gather information that they're going to be presenting. And in addition to that, publishing in a VAT advance allows people to look at it and say, Hey, you forgot this or you have that or whatever and to make corrections so you can make your corrections in advance rather than having people view it for the first time in the meeting . It's like, Well, what happened to this? Oops, I forgot about that. So it gives you a little on extra buffer for making sure that it's accurate. So taking these this is the next step. Here is how much time will be spent on each topic. This is really valuable for providing boundaries and limiting the discussion and when you get to move on it, so that because sometimes people like to just continue to talk about something, which is human nature, so we honor that. But we also then say, Hey, you know what? We We had a lot of 15 minutes for this. The 15 minutes is up. We need to figure out a different way to discuss this because we need to move on so that that's just a good, professional way to run a meeting. So the next section about who will present her lead each section allows for presenters to prepare, but it also allows for everybody else to understand what their role is and and understand. OK, that person is going to speak on this topic, not me. So well, we create the and set the expectations in advance. And in addition to that, you can also just delegate as part of employee development opportunities, which we talked about in the attendees module. But this is something you could include here so that people know in advance. Okay, this person is presenting, and we're gonna honor that. Be respectful of it. This is what way Expecto have happened in the meeting. So that's just a Nadig benefit here. Okay? Understanding what will be completed by the end of the meeting is really helpful both to stand track and to make sure that everybody understands the shared goal. If waken disagree on a lot of things, but if we agree in advance on what the goal is, it helps us to stay much more on track and and and not veer from the purpose of the meeting . One of the the important characteristic seven a functional organization versus a dysfunctional Minnesota functional organisation is able to adhere to some boundaries and to accomplish what is set out in front of them and so something as simple as an agenda. Being published can be a really great structure for helping the organization stay functional and get stuff done. Okay, a couple tips here. You want to make sure that you remember that everything takes longer than we think it will . So you want to include buffers in your schedule in your agenda to allow for that. And at the same time, you want the boundaries that are set out by the time frame. So you're just including a few buffers. Just so you know, you have some time to go over. You think about you wanna include some sort of warm up, um, which you would never call a warm up. But you want to think about that? Ah, hello. A greeting? Um, intrasection. Whatever you wanna call it for the 1st 3 to 5 minutes. This could be especially helpful for teams that don't normally work together or remote teams that are working together to be able to say, Hey, how you guys doing or what's going on? Um you know even something as simple as saying, Hey, you were in L. A. You're in New York. What's the weather like? And just to establish a report, uh, can be a humanizing thing and help the team function better. So you don't want to spend too much time on that social personal. But a little bit of a warm up could be very helpful. Don't try to cram everything into a single meeting, stay focused and understand that you can differ. If somebody brings up a topic that wasn't on your agenda, you might create a separate meeting. Or if you have a regular ongoing meeting, you might want to include that in the future meeting. So and I'm doing an example in a few moments, and I'm including in that something where someone brought something about a previous meeting and he said, Hey, you know what? Um, we don't have time for that now, but we'll let you speak on that and at the next meeting. So that's that's something you could do easily. Okay, so I want to take a little side trip and talk about an organisation's relationship to time . Every organization has its own unique relationship to time, and you're gonna think about in your organization. If a meeting scheduled for 10 a.m. Does it start exactly a 10 a.m. or does it start five after or to start three after? It doesn't start 1/4 after you want to understand the organization's relationship to time and then you want to decide whether you want to honor that or break it. So as an example, if everything in your organization tends to start it 10 after the hours again. If the meeting is supposed to start at 10 o'clock, do people sort of wander in and around 10 after? Do you want to do that? Or do you want to start at, like, six or seven after when you get a core group and then start? Um, and people have real strong feelings about this, so you just want to be aware of what that is. I know as a teacher, I've taught in places where I was teaching in eight hour class, and it started at eight, and somebody said to me when the clock hands of the clock hit eight, you start to talk. I don't care if nobody's in the room. You start to talk. We're sending that message that the class starts at eight, but a lot of organizations will say, Hey, you know what It's an eight hour class, starts at eight. You want plan on starting a 10 after 1/4 after, and then you want to figure what's reasonable. So, having somebody tell me that as I come in from the outside can be really, really helpful here in this organization, we start exactly on time or here in this organization, we started 10 after quarter after whatever it is, you just want to understand the relationship to time and either honor it, or if you're gonna break it, break it on purpose and let people know. So we're gonna start in the aptly at 10 o'clock, Um, be there or be square. However, you want to do that. But you want to think about it. Okay, So I'm gonna give you an example here. I'm starting with the plan and purpose, and then we'll go through the drafting of a sample agenda. And then how we figure out what what we're gonna publish for the agenda. So for this specific meeting, it's an ongoing project meeting figures, a weekly meeting of a group of core individuals who work on a project together. So my purpose here would be this week toe a line around and review the outcome of pre the previous meeting and then an update on the status of the deliver bals from that meeting. So people committed to doing things we want to check in this creates accountability, and this is an important part of planning the idea of accountability because if we decided something should be done last week and nobody did it, then we really can't move forward this week or we may be on hold. But in order to keep us functioning in the business moving forward, we do need to hold people accountable to the commitments they make in meetings. Um, Joe Schmo last week brought up an idea and we said Hey, you know what? There's no time in the agenda but will give you time of next week's agenda. So we want Teoh include enough time for Jota presented and then to have some discussion on and then on a separate topic. We have to make a decision about the next thing we're going to do for a project. We need to agree on that and then out of that decision or the agreement will come what deliver Bols and action items will be assigned and who who will do them. And then our relationship goal is to keep our team on track and working together, and our business gold will be maintaining momentum and quality. Now, these last two I mentioned when we talked in previous topic about, um, attendees. This is something you're never gonna talk about. But you want to keep it in mind, It's gonna inform how you even write the email, if you will, or the invitation or the agenda. All of that stuff you want to keep in mind. Um, and it's something that will inform how you follow up and run the meeting and all the other steps in the process, so just be aware of that. Okay, So how do we make this into agenda? So we're gonna start with this five minute buffer of welcoming intro which we talked about and then, uh, about 10 minutes over you from the previous meeting and updates. And then who's going to do that? Then? We have Joe have Joe has 15 minutes on the agenda. So you want to think in terms of how much of that is Joe presenting and how much of that is discussion, and you want to determine that. So you don't want to say to Joe? Okay, you have 15 minutes to present. Uh, you want Joe Should probably think more in terms of having a 5 to 7 minute presentation and then on 8 to 10 minute discussion. You want to set that expectation with Joe in advance? And then we're changing topics of 15 minutes of discussion about the next steps on one idea here. And then I put in 10 minutes of assignment of delivery, Bols with a five minute buffer for summary and and, uh, next steps and then on a journey at one o'clock. So this is a one hour draft agenda meeting. So let's take a look at how we might edit this a little bit. I might say introduction. The truth is, I'm probably gonna remove this all together and just put in the first topic in terms of the first topic. I'm gonna probably get rid of review of previous meeting notes and updates and just say, status updates from previous meetings. And then who is going to talk about them? And this may be multiple individuals talking about it because there may be multiple individuals that have information on the status update. Then we have Joe's 15 minutes and you might want to set the expectation Joe's gonna present for five and then we're gonna talk for 10. But you might not have to put that in the agenda and then another 15 minutes on that new topic. And then we're just gonna shorten this up and just talk about deliverables and deadlines. And then we've got five minutes a zay said summary in plans meeting, which is really a buffer, and the attorney at one. So this is what we're thinking about her had. This is how we might publish this. We get rid of the introduction and we just say, Hey, from 12 to 12. 15 were doing the status update from the previous meeting and these people that are doing it, then we've got Joe from 12 15 to 12. 30 we're gonna change topics in 12 30 to make a decision. Considerations on X Y Z project or action. And then we'll spend 55 minutes talking. But it's very 10 minutes talking about deliverables and deadlines and then five minutes summarising, and that five minutes is a buffer. You can leave it there. Um, but that's this is something much more like what you would publish and and, uh, and and distribute. Okay, so I hope that gives you some thought on how you can approach the creation of an agenda. So for your class project want you to review the purpose of your meeting and then write a strategic agenda for yourself similar to the draft that we did and then edit it to be published and for your project. You want to include any notes on any reasons you may have done something. Why you've included or excluded some information and maybe even what you learned in this part of doing it. So, um, hope this was helpful. That was agenda. 6. Communicating: Okay, so welcome back. We have covered plan and purpose attendees and agenda. And now it's time to move on to communication or communicating out. This will be the invitation to your meeting, and a lot of the heavy lifting has already been done. By spending some time on plan and purpose selecting the attendee list and coming up with an agenda, the next step will be letting people know or inviting them to your meeting. So here's some things to think about her. Consider, first of all, scheduling. You want to make sure that you schedule your meeting at a time when all of the required and surrogate individuals can attend and as many as possible of the desired and f y eyes can attend. You also want to think about where the meeting will be held and all of that sort of stuff. So the invitation itself gives a heads up to individuals and allows them time and opportunity to prepare for the meeting. Sometimes you want to ask for help. One asked for help within the invitation. You may want to ask for help separately, and we'll talk about that. But for anybody who doesn't report to you or isn't part of a regular, ongoing or recurring meeting. It's good to ask people to participate rather than tell them. And then you do want to consider communicating one on one separately with individuals. So just because somebody has a free hour on their schedule doesn't mean they quote have to come to your meeting. It's really good for you to go to them and say, Hey, I'm actually gonna be having this meeting. You seem to have some time free Thursday afternoon, would you? Would you attend? And we'll talk about that when we talk about examples. But the idea of the communication happening one on one, followed by an invitation which confirms and firms up those details could be very, very helpful in relationship development. Therefore, moving the business forward easier. Okay, so what do we want to let people know? First of all, movement. Let people know. Why are we having the meeting as it relates to the business? And we've already figured that out. We just want to put it in words here for the invitation. Why are people specific people include er invited? If it's appropriate now, if you if you got a recurring meeting for your staff. You don't need to put this in every single meeting invitation, but if you have something that's slightly different, you want to include that, or if you have a different kind of meeting, you might want to include that as well. We'll take a look at this in examples, okay, and hopefully will be very clear there. Any logistics and all logistics should be in one place in the meeting invitation, if possible. And that should include where the meeting is, how to get there if people need to know how to die. Elaine if people are dialing in how toe Video conference in, if people are conferencing in. And also if you have people who are attending the meeting in different fashions, either in person or dialing in whatever, it's good to let people know that other people will be attending by different means. So that's very helpful. A swell just to set expectations. Uh, you do want to include the agenda either in the body of your invitation or is an attachment or both, and this allows you to set ground rules for what's gonna happen in the meeting, and this will be very helpful when you go to run the meeting. But again, it does already set expectations. Now, with any business communication, I want you to take some time and re read your invitation before you send it out to find anything that might still be in your head that you haven't typed out or any assumptions you've made that are not necessarily valid assumptions. This is important in any business communication. We're including it here as well. And then sometimes you're gonna be asking for input into your agenda, for instance, and you want to make sure that you're clear about the deadlines and we have something about that in the example. So we'll look at that. Okay, So first example is an example of used already, which is a vendor selection meeting to to find a vendor to fulfill our product by mail. And, uh, the considerations here cost quality and meeting our three day turnaround requirement. That's those considerations for vendor selection going back to our module on attendees. We've already done this, but I've added fake names to people. So in this example, I'm the marketing manager. I'm gonna be managing the vendor. Mary is the director of sourcing. We've established that she's a required attendee. My boss, the VP of marketing, is named Celeste, and we've established that she's desired. Um, the product manager who knows a lot about the product and will be helpful in in selecting the vendor. Because of that. His name is Patrick. He's desired. Our customer support manager is Evelyn. We've established that she's a desire to 10 D because she'll be working with the vendor very closely after afterwards on customer support issue resolution and then finally, are department assistant. Michael is a desired slash F Y. I because he'll be working with me in managing that vendor a hell of a lot of communication or contact with the vendor. So those are the players. This is the general outline here, and then the logistics are this Thursday from 1 to 2 o'clock in our 4th 4 pump conference room A. And here's the agenda. For about the 1st 20 minutes, Mary's gonna prevent present the RFP to request for proposals and will review the various ones. And then, for about the next 10 minutes will be talking. There'll be some input Cuban A and discussion from everybody for about the next 20 minutes we're going to start to select. We're gonna talk pros and cons, and then final 10 minutes, we're gonna have a final selection. So there could be a little bit of variants in the timing of those second and third items. So another's Mary gets her full 20 minutes the next, uh, 30 minutes or so from 1 20 to 1 50 It's really discussion. So I'm not gonna necessarily hold people to exact timing on that, but giving just a sense of about 10 minutes of us Q and A etcetera and then about 20 minutes of discussion and consideration. But the final 10 minutes are pretty solidly a decision is going to be made. So that's kind of the that set up for the meeting. So here is and this covers two slides. But here's an example of what I'm gonna do for an invitation, and I'll talk you through this here. Hello. As I've discussed with each of you, I'd like to hold a meeting to make the final selection of the vendor to fulfill our product by mail. Have scheduled of one hour meeting Thursday at 1 p.m. In conference from a on the fourth floor. So let's just talk about this. So first of all, it starts out with, as I've discussed with each of you already gone to these people, remember that most these people don't work for me. So I probably gone to Patrick the product managers office, and said, Hey, Patrick, I'm gonna be selecting the vendor fulfilment. I'd love your involvement in this. I think you have a lot to add in terms of value. Are you OK with that? And then I've gone Teoh Celeste, my boss and said, Hey, uh, do you want to be included in this meeting? I think you could be helpful. So etcetera, etcetera. But this communication puts that all together. But each of these people knows already that I'm going to include them in meeting. And I think that's really important for you to think about in terms of how you would put together an effective meeting rather than just fire off invitation and people hearing about it for the first time. In addition to that, I have the logistics here of where and when so moving on Mary will be presenting. The vendor options are vast. Celeste to join us as well as Patrick and Evelyn. Since we can benefit from your insight, Michael will be joining us a swell since he'll be working directly from the vendor. So this lets everybody know everything. So I may have had one on one conversations with each of these people. But this is letting everybody know who's gonna be in the room and what their purpose is. And in case in Michael's instance, somebody might think, Oh, the assistant, he's not that important. I'm giving him importance by saying he's gonna be there because he's gonna be working directly the vendor and then looking at the last paragraph here before I moved to the next live. The goal is to make the final selection by the end of the meeting. I really appreciate your help with this. So a little buttering up here at but also the goal. Now, if you remember from a couple of sides previous, I have some criteria that includes cost quality, etcetera. I don't even need to put that in the invitation that maybe overloading the invitation when we're in the meeting will come up with those and will establish those is as a criteria for selection, but you don't want to overload. We can talk about that in the meeting. You do want to think about that. It's what what needs to be told in advance versus what can be told in the room. Okay, here's continuing on with the email or the invitation, the agenda exactly as we've discussed it. So I don't need to cover that, followed by please let me know if you have any questions. Thanks, Mitch. And so there's a little social nicety here, but there's structure. Okay, so some options here, you might want to put this in a separate email rather than including it in the meeting. Invitation of the second option would be, as I said, as I just mentioned putting your note in the meeting invitation, you could also attach the agenda or included in the body of it. I might even do both. Uh, attaching the agenda gives people an opportunity to print it out or open it up as a PdF and work with it in the room. That could be helpful so that everyone is following along gives him a chance to take notes or a place to take notes. So there's a good benefit for people following the the agenda as part of the meeting. The way that you do this does depend on your company culture. And so in some cases you'll find that my recommendations your no money organization does this. So you want to find a way that works best in your organization. So for an example, I work with organizations where no one reads the notes and meeting invitations, so you wouldn't want to do this in the meeting. Invitation notes you want to do it is a separate email and probably started out with. I've sent you all an invitation here in the details. But whatever works for your organization, I think it's important for you to consider. And then you'll notice. The next point here is I've discussed this with everyone one on one that lets people know there's a couple things here is there's a respect issue and then, but it lets everybody know that no one's been blindsided and that everyone's on the same page now. My preference would be to include the notes in the invitation if it's at all possible, and to attach the agenda as well as or instead of including it in the body of the of the notes again so people can print it out or open it up as a PdF on their on their device and follow along with It doesn't matter. Just that's my suggestion. OK, second example. So this is a recurring team meeting, and this time we have a guest speaker. So normally we have one hour meeting where we have status updates, info, sharing and questions, and we may have a couple of other topics. But for this one, um, we're gonna add research and development. Matilda, who's the head of R and D, will be talking about new initiatives. So who are the attendees? All of my direct reports except one of them. My digital marketing manager, Alicia, is not available, so she's going to send a surrogate Martin, who's a digital marketing marketing specialist who reports to her, and he's going to sit in for her. And then we have Matilda from R and D, and she's asked for two product specialists from R and D Stephen Vikram to to participate, said those air the players. Okay, so the logistics of my meeting every Monday from 2 to 3 in the marketing conference room and the agenda for this meeting. It's gonna be a little bit different from the usual team meeting agenda. For the 1st 20 minutes, we're going to do status updates on key projects, which is something we do in every team meeting. And then for the next 10 minutes we're going to do key questions for me and for each other . But then, at 2 30 we're going to stop, and we're gonna hand the floor over to Matilda and then Matile that will with Stephen Vikram, Um, talk about whatever it is that they want to talk about in terms of what's coming out of research and development. And this, 30 minutes is completed will include a Q and A etcetera. So setting up the expectations, I want to say to Matilda, You guys have 30 minutes, including Q and A and discussion etcetera. So if you're doing a presentation, you don't want to 30 minutes presentation. You might want to do a 10 minute presentation, followed by 20 minute cumin, A whatever it is that you think is best used. But you want to make sure that the expectations set that the meeting ends at three. Okay, so here's an example of the communication that I may send to my team for this meeting. Hi, team at this. Monday's team meeting will have guests from research and development to let us know what's coming down the pipeline. Matilda at Steve and Vikram will be joining us to give us some background on projects in the works. We'll start off with our usual team status updates and keep questions. And then, from 2 30 to 3, Matilda takes the floor with Stephen Vikram. A leash is going to be at a client site, so Martin will be joining us, representing digital marketing. The agenda is attached. Please let me know if you have any questions. Thanks, Mitch. And then there is another slide which go forward to which says as a reminder. If you want to add any item to any team meeting agenda, please send me an email by the end of Thursday for the following Monday's meeting, I'll do my best to include it. So this is what we talked about earlier. I'm gonna back up to this previous slide, which is a lot of things were happening here. First of all, I did not let anybody know that I chose him until that. And she chose Stephen, Vicar in my eyes and in my communication there three equals who were invited to the meeting . Anything that's important rather than saying I've chosen Matilda and she's chosen to drag along. Stephen. Vikram, Um, you don't want to do that. These all three of these people are welcome is invited guests okay? Ah, and then also setting up the boundaries here, which is to 30 sharp Matilda takes over. And so, um, the other thing I'm letting people know is that Martin is going to be joining us for representing digital marketing, and that gives him some credence. And it gives him a shout out, if you will, that he's joining Our team is a member for this team meeting. So this is kind of what I'm thinking about in terms of establishing what the planning purposes, who the attendees are, what the agenda is, but also what the expectations are. And I'm creating relationship development and, uh, relating it all back to the business. So we're not just having a conversation about r and D for no reason, right? Right now, letting us know some background on projects in the works so that we have some insight into the business. This is developing business insight. So that's the purpose for this invitation. I'm gonna skip forward, and we're gonna look at what you're gonna do for your project based on this information, including these examples which I hope were helpful. So you want include the text of your communication and and perhaps some notes on why you're communicate or how you're communicating it and why you're doing it that way. So, for example, I'm gonna include this in the notes of my meeting invite throughout. Look, or I'm going to include this in the notes through Google Calendar or whatever it is. But the other thing would be really helpful for you would be to include any notes about things you consider, And that might be Normally I wouldn't do it this way. But after thinking about this, this is what I've decided to include or I've decided to do things a certain way because of blah, blah, blah, so that includes what you've learned through this. But don't upload your project yet. We have a little bit more to go, so I hope that covers communication well and I'll season thanks 7. Running the Meeting: All right, so now it's time to talk about what we actually do running the meeting. So my first tip for you, I say several times, begin the meeting on time. We've talked already about the idea that different organizations have different relationships to time. For some organizations, that is exactly on the DOT Start time for other organizations, it means a couple of minutes in whenever it is for your organization. You want to honor that, and you want to make a difference between this is the time. We're not having the meaning. And now we start so that it's very clear to everybody that you are beginning the meeting. Now you might want to start the meeting, were precede the meeting, if you will, with a little bit of chat or welcome. And this is especially helpful if you're working with, say, remote teams that work on a project together. But don't ever really see each other. There are opportunities for a couple minutes, the beginning of a conversation, and people are getting together convenient to have a general conversation that humanizes the individuals on both sides of the call. Um, this is you can use something that simple is the weather or special events to just say, How's it going and again by humanizing people who work remotely and and are working together as a functional group, you can smooth grease the wheels a little bit and develop relationships and help the business before work, so that could be very helpful. But then, when it's time to start, you change the tone and the way that you're doing things, and you begin with the first topic on your agenda. So the first topic on your agenda you want to make sure you stay with the agenda. But the first up, the topic on the agenda, may very well be a brief review of what happened in the previous meeting, and a lot of formal meetings begin with this. So a lot of board meetings, for instance, may begin with review of the minutes of the previous meeting. You don't necessarily need to be that formal, but if it's appropriate to sort of say, this is where we left off and this is where we're beginning, that's good. The one thing you don't want to do when we've already talked about this is you don't want to rehash old conversations or revisit decisions that have already been made unless there's a specific business reason to do so. So this is an optional element in your agenda that you might include. But you don't have to. You want to make sure that as best you can, you keep to the schedule. You've got the agenda, you've got timings on it, and everyone has the same road map, if you will. So keeping to the schedule helps you look good and professional in the meeting, and it keeps it. It shows respect for the individuals in the meeting, and it gives again structure to the meeting that could be very helpful for accomplishing your business purpose. We're gonna talk about a couple of methods parking lot and offline conversations as well as other meetings. Aziz as tools that you can use to move your meeting forward. Sometimes people bring up topics that don't pertain to your agenda, or they require further in depth, conversation said. You want to make sure you use these tools and we will talk about them and additional meetings with something else I mentioned, and then something that's really critical is when something comes up that needs doing. That's the time to decide who is going to do it. And by when. So this allows for accountability and responsibility, and it prevents things from falling away, falling through cracks and not getting addressed. You want to have somebody designated to take notes. Now that maybe somebody who's brought in specifically as a note taker, it might be an admin or an assistant where it might be a member of the team. And in a team meeting, you decide there is an opportunity for professional development through no taking. It sounds weird, but the idea of being able to listen to a meeting figure out that the golden nugget of the topic that's being discussed and then identify what the deliver bles are and who the people the parties are. That ability is a professional development ability to be able to figure out what's going on and summarize it. So that's something to think about. It's not always great for the person running the meeting to take notes, because it can be distracting. As a matter fact, I don't recommend it, but you do want to have somebody who takes notes during the meeting and you wanna have that figured out in the beginning before the meeting starts. And then you want to make sure to the best of your ability that you end the meeting on time . It shows respect. You start to lose people as well if they have another commitment. If they've allowed a certain amount of time for your meeting and you're going over Julie to lose them or you'll prevent them from doing the next thing they need to do, so you want to do the best you can and on time. And if you have things that air hanging over, you want to figure out how you're gonna handle that. And sometimes it's even good to say, You know, we didn't get to talk about this. This and this all send out an email on will figure this out, either will included in that next week's meeting or whatever it is that we're going to do. But you want a smudges, you can try to end on time. So in terms of setting boundaries, you can remind people of the purpose of the meeting and the agenda. The agenda is a road map. It is a set of ground rules. If someone is bringing something up that's not on your agenda. You can use the agenda and the purpose to bring them back, and we'll talk about a couple of other methods. But you can say that's actually not our agenda topic. That's a separate thing. It's an important thing, and we have to figure out when that's gonna be talked about. Okay, yeah, You want to make sure that you, as the meeting leader, keep a safe space in the room, So you want to make sure that things stay professional and not personal? You wanna make sure that you remind people of the purpose and goals the meeting, and if things start to get out of hand that you call it and say, You know what? Let's stay professional on this and let's not get personal and let's keep to the agenda and the purpose of the meeting. So that's just a way for you to kind of corral rally people if things kind of start to get out of hand, which doesn't happen very often, but you want to develop a reputation for being somebody who can just savory simply hang on a second. Let's keep this professional not personal, and let's stick to our agenda and then move on. Okay, so a lot of times we have background conversations have happening in a room you want it just sometimes you can just use the phrase. Can we have one conversation, please, to remind people that distractions can be large from either background conversations or side conversations happening in the room? And this is kind of cliche, but it's like if it's worth saying to the person next to you, it's probably worth staying in the room or not worth saying at all again that it's a little elementary school for many people to say, But you can find a way to just stay. Hey, can we have one conversation, please? So that we can get through our agenda. If people are doing things that are distracting, just ask them politely not to do it. See, you want to be known as somebody who can find a way to respectfully let people know that you're there for a specific purpose and that what they're doing isn't on that purpose. The best you can doesn't happen all the time. You something You have somebody very senior in the room that you're not able to say, Hey, could you put your phone away? But you want to do this the best you can? We talked about this earlier. Don't let deliver balls or commitments go unclaimed. Don't just let things hang out there. If the person who needs to do something isn't in the room and needs to be told that they're volunteering, then you want someone in the room to own that conversation. So somebody says, Okay, Celeste, you're gonna go back and tell Vladimir that he that were requesting that he participated in this so that we have an owner of the delegation. If nothing else, if somebody is missing that is required for conversation, determine whether you can still have the meeting. And if you can't have the meeting, you want to think about canceling your ending the meeting early or skipping that agenda item because that scene is extremely respectful of everyone in the room. If you need Celeste to make a decision on a specific agenda item and Celeste is only able to attend your meeting, then it's kind of a waste of time for a bunch of people to talk about things that that can't be decided upon. You get to determine what you can do and what you can't do in the meeting. But when you get to when you hit a wall and there's something you can't do, it's good to say, You know what? We can accomplish this. Let's figure out a different way to do it. You'll learn a lot of respect by doing it that way as well. Okay, so we have this tool called a parking lot. So this isn't opportunity for you to capture items in writing that are either off topic require further drilling down or that you may be getting to later. So you don't want a change the topic at this moment. So you want to do this? As they said in writing visibly. So I recommend whiteboard, electronic white board, flip chart, something where people can see that you've written down what they what they've brought up. And either we're gonna find a time later in our meeting to address them, or we're gonna handle them separately. But there's a respect idea here that's important, that your assuring people that that that you're gonna get to So we're writing it down. We're gonna get back to our agenda and were assuring people that the item will be covered either in a separate meeting war later in this current meeting. Okay, the other thing we can do is we may have a core group of people, a smaller group of people that need to talk about something separately. We don't want to take the time up in this meeting with all of these individuals. We want to be respectful, respectful of their time. So we want to have to discuss having an offline conversation, which means maybe two or three people that are in the current meeting will discuss this separately. Okay, so you can capture that in writing, perhaps near your parking lot, which is often conversations. And you want to make sure notes are taken on that and people will actually have the conversation. So we capture that topic and then we move back to our agenda. We acknowledge that it's time that needs to be spent, but not everyone in the room needs to sit there. Well, a few people talk about this so again, it provides assurance that the topic will be covered. Okay, Some additional things to think about all questions air good. They just might not be able to be answered in this meeting. So capturing them either on your parking lot or an often conversations list, or even just in the meeting notes and acknowledging that something needs to be addressed. It's perfectly fine when presenters representing you want to thank that, and the idea here is in business. We want to reward the behavior we want by thanking people by giving sincere kudos in whatever way works in your organization. You want to make sure, and I talked about this couple times that anything that was previously decided upon stays the way it waas. Unless there's new information or new reason to change it. You wanna ask for input, opinions and thoughts, and then you want to listen for it. So one of the one of the hallmarks of a really great meeting leader is somebody who says, Are there any thoughts? Are there any questions or input and then pauses makes eye contact with people were appropriate? Um, you. The other thing you could do is if someone's on the phone calling into a meeting, you could ask them by name. Hey, Muriel, do you have any questions on this? How does this sitting with you? I can't see your face because you're on the phone that you may not say that, but that's imply in the question. So rather than putting somebody on the spot saying, you know what, I want to make sure that we are considering any input from you. You want to use open ended questions to elicit additional information. So what if we not considered or anything else? We should know something. Toe add. Please add it now. Or is there anything we haven't thought about? Any impact we haven't thought about? And the other thing you can do is you can invite people to send you that afterwards by email or a phone call or text. Er were in person, whatever that is, if sometimes people don't feel comfortable in a larger meeting giving you input. But you want to make sure that you will allow for so that goes hand in him with the idea of feedback, which is people letting you know what they thought of something or how they think something went. When you get feedback, you want to accept it without defensiveness, and you want a model, the behavior that you want other people to exhibit when they get back, which is, say thank you and then consider it. And if you agree, make changes. But if you don't agree, don't. But you don't have to argue about it. Just thank people, save you'll consider it. This is a really important part of leadership. It's helpful in meetings. So it's three idea of somebody being able to say to you, You know, the idea that you ran 10 minutes long, it created a problem for me in my schedule. I didn't get to participate in this discussion because I had to leave early. Whatever it is, thank that person for the input and acknowledge that you'll think about it that you want to address it, whatever it is that you do when you're asking for feedback, don't say, Do you have any feedback because that becomes loaded? You could ask, Was this helpful? Did we accomplish what you wanted to accomplish, or is there anything I could do differently or better that could help us achieve our goal? This is these air some ways to address the idea of feedback without actually using the word feedback. Do you have any feedback for me? Okay, so common sense in my work, I think I see a lot of common sense missing from a lot of things. So sometimes it's good to have people who may not be subject matter experts on whatever is your meeting about, um, and asked them, Invite them to provide common sense input. Does this make sense? What do you think of this, etcetera that can be really helpful and encourage simple solutions and identify areas where things air unnecessarily complex? That could be a really effective thing to do. Was a meeting leader, which is to say, Hey, that sounds like it's getting very complicated. Let's see if we can simplify. Okay, so those are some tips in terms of closing the meeting. You want to Clara clarify any follow up methods, whether you'll be talking to individuals, whether there's going to be an offline conversation, whether there are parking lot items that didn't get addressed, whatever that is, you'll clarify. Even if you're saying I will email you to let you know the status of blah and blah involved that can be very helpful. You want to make sure that commitments, Air reiterated and acknowledged, Uh and then you want to thank people and acknowledge the fact that you have achieved the purpose of the goals in the meeting. Thank people. This is very helpful. Thank people for their help. Their time, their input, something very simple, as thanking people can make you a better leader and a better meeting leader. So, for your project, did you have your meaning? If you do, if you did include some notes on health went and how you ran it and what you learned and especially looking at things you may have done differently as a result of this material. Okay, so don't put your project yet, but we're pretty close. So that's some tips on running the meeting. Great. 8. Artifacts: Okay, so you held your meeting, and now it's time to talk about artifact. So first of all, what is an artifact? One artifact is a record or documentation that something happened. And in the case of a meeting, it's a record that the meeting happened. And it includes a documentation of any commitments, deadlines, decisions and discussions that happen, especially the Golden Nuggets. What I called the Golden Nuggets the key points of discussion. So it doesn't include every single thing that was talked about, but the idea of recapping or summarizing what happened in the meeting, and it gives you something to refer back to and allows you to keep momentum. So the flow is we planned for the meeting. We hold the meeting, and in the meeting we have discussion, debate, discovery, and out of that come decisions and action items. And so moving out of the meeting, you create an artifact that documents those decisions and an action items and allows you to keep momentum around them. So it realigns us around the purpose of the meeting, and it gives us a reference point for accountability and for follow up. So if you think of the agenda as a road map for the discussion in the meeting. The artifact is a road map for following up after the meeting. So documenting those golden nuggets the key points of discussion as well as decisions and action items. So without artifacts, people may forget what happened in the meeting. Forget that they made a commitment to do something or they not may possibly think it wasn't important. People are busy. See one include that in your thinking and your planning. So you do want to get the artifact out there so that you remind people of what happened without artifacts. We lose alignment around the goals, and we looked disorganized as leader. So you want to make sure that you get an artifact created. So who is responsible for that will? Ultimately, as the meeting runner you are, can this be delegated? Absolutely. Justus taking notes can be delegated to an admin or assistant or a team member. So can the creation of an artifact. And we're gonna talk about the difference between an artifact and and notes shortly. But the general idea here is that the creation of an artifact is the distillation of the conversation into those golden Nugget points, those key points as well as the commitments in action items along with the details of those who is responsible invite, went. So this can be something that you have your admin or assistant. Do our A team number do or you can actually have them. Take notes and give you the notes, and you can do the distillation. Create the artifact. It doesn't matter. What matters is that you understand that the ability to distill a now and 1/2 or an hour to hour conversation down into ah brief executive level summary with all the key points is a great leadership competency. So either you're doing it yourself and you're developing it yourself or you're developing in and people who work for you. But this is not grunt worker busywork. This is critical work, the ability to capture this information in a digestible fashion and a reasonable size document. Okay, so some tips for artifacts that will include a difference between notes and artifacts as well. So, first of all, you want to try to get the artifact created and distributed within a business day. It keeps the momentum going. Doesn't matter exactly what format you use. You do want to use the same format each time. The most important thing is that you want to do something that is already in existence in your organization, in terms of format and stores location because, um, if people have to search in a different way, they're not going to look for it, and then people are gonna find it. So you want to honors the systems that already in place within your organization in terms of distribution and storage of the artifact, You want to think of this as a permanent record. So don't use text or other temporary forms of communication you want to think about. You're going to need this next week and the week after, and then you might want to be able to refer back to it a year or two down the road and say , Hey, wait a minute, why did we make this decision or when do we make this decision and who was in the room? So you definitely want to think of this as a permanent artifact of permanent record? Uh, you want to make sure it's accessible, and we mentioned this, the harder it is for somebody to find it or receipt or read it, the less likely they are to do that. So you want to make sure that it's easy for somebody to read that, that in terms of format, location and even the length of the document, you don't think about all of those things. So your artifact is going to include all the action items, commitments, responsible parties in den lights. You want all of that detail in there. And then where do we differ from notes? It's shorter than notes. You want to again distill the conversation down into those golden nuggets or key points. So it's really high level and not so much detail. But you do want the summaries. So this and people should be able to read this and understand the outcome of the discussion . Even if they did not, didn't here and don't want to read through all of the individual discussion points, you might want to add missing information that happened. You're missing in the meeting that happened afterwards, so people might have asked a question that you weren't able to answer in the meeting. If you have the answer that could be included in your artifact. You might want to highlight any open items, but you also might want to highlight items that are closed. So if we are going to delegate something to someone who's not in the meeting, we might include that in the artifact and give that person a copy of the artifacts that they're included in the process. Eso That's a good way to develop relationships and be inclusive of individuals who were working together on a project. It's an opportunity to thank people and to call out or identify and recognise particularly successful participation or actions. You always want to reward the behavior you want. This could be simple but again, relationship development. Moving the business along. They are related. So here's an example. This goes over a couple of slides. You'll notice I don't call this an artifact in my mind and in our discussions for leadership and running a meeting. We think this is an artifact we're gonna call a meeting summary. So this is a meeting summary based on the example that I used earlier of vendor selection for fulfilling our product. So it's called the meeting summary, and I have the title of it, which is a vendor selection meeting of fulfillment of this product and then the date and the time and the list of the attendings. So we talked about this. This is me, Mary Celeste, Patrick, Evelyn and Michael. So this is moving forward in the same document, Mary presented three Vendor Options Company A company B company. See, So we will list the companies. The selection criteria included cost quality and meeting our three day turnaround requirement. Now, this is the criteria from my goals. Remember that I didn't include this in my meeting invitation, but I did say that we would discuss it in the meeting. So I've included it here as a record and you'll see we moving forward. The group discussed all three vendors. Company A couldn't meet the required the time requirement company became in under price. But the group agreed that either this was a low estimate or that quality might suffer. And then companies seem that all our requirements So we selected companies. See, you can see this includes the highlights and not the individual detail. So here are the next steps, and this is where we get into more detail. So Mary's going to notify the contact at the company by end of day Friday and determine who the contact will be for contract negotiations. And you'll see many of these. All of these, I think, including the date. So not just Friday. About what? Friday. So you want to make sure you include the dating, all of these. So Mary is going to notify both company and company be that they didn't get through the contract, and that will be buying today. Monday, and obviously the date will be included. And we're including a new person here. Ephraim from legal was gonna being put in touch with the company. Contact a company C by Monday morning to begin that vendor on board process, which includes contract and all of the other vendor paperwork, Um, and include that date and then we have a 10 day go for the contract completion and include what that date is of the 10 day and then the next thing is as soon as Ephraim gives me the go ahead, I'm going to reach out to the account manager at Company C to set up an action plan regarding transfer of information. So this is a dependency. I'm waiting for Ephraim in legal to tell me when it's OK to to reach out to them because I don't want to reach out to them too early because they're in contract negotiations. And then the gold for the first shipment is 30 days from today and include that date and then thanks. So these air the specific takeaways that came out of that discussion, probably most of these were were discussed in the last five minutes of that meeting. But they're the most important action items coming out of the decision making process. So this is my example artifact for that meeting. So now it's your opportunity to think about creation of an artifact coming out of your meeting. So for your class project, I don't know that you want to upload a riel artifact from a real meeting. I think you could violate confidentiality in your organization, but it's up to you. Would you definitely want to do is includes and notes about what you learned regarding artifact. So that's artifacts, and we're gonna move on to follow up 9. Follow Up: So we had our meeting and we distributed our artifact in the form of a meeting summary. And now it's time to follow up. So you, as the runner of the meeting, want to follow up on any commitments, deliverables and action items that come out of your meeting to make sure that everything runs smoothly. Now, the way that you are going to follow up is gonna be different, depending on who it is. The nature of the relationship and the nature of the reporting structure Do they report to you? Are they have pure of years, a superior of yours? New York chart? How does that work? That's gonna be something to consider, and we'll take a look at that. But you want to make sure that you're checking in on action items to make sure that they're on track to make sure that the people who are supposed to do them are on board. And if you remember in our previous example, sometimes the people who have to do stuff aren't even in the meeting, so we might want to reach out to them. We'll take a look that in examples in a moment, but we also Our goal here is to discover any blocks to completing those items and to escalate them to jump in, to make sure that that they do get accomplished so that the business moves forward. If we don't follow up, people might think we weren't serious or it's not that important and they might feel that there's no accountability. So we want to show that there's accountability and there are different ways of doing that. So we can do this by talking to somebody in person or calling them on the phone, or we can send an email. We can include it as an agenda item in the next meeting. If we have regularly occurring meetings, or if we have a one on one with an individual, we can put it on the agenda for a one on one. So they're a bunch of different ways to do this. Let's take a look at some examples and the examples I'm gonna use. They're gonna come from that same example meeting that we used in earlier modules, which is the vendor selection meeting. Now, if you remember, that meeting happened on a Thursday, and it included Mary from sourcing or procurement and Mary was gonna be notifying the vendor that we selected on Friday of the selection. That was her deadline. I'm not gonna contact her on Friday. Mary doesn't work for me. She's a peer of mine in the organization. I don't want to micromanage her. I'm gonna wait a few days till Tuesday or Wednesday. I'm gonna send her a thank you email. Very kind, polite. Thank you. Email that says, Mary, thanks so much for your help in selecting Vendor. I hope everything went smoothly with connecting with them. That opens the door for Mary to write back to me and say, It's my pleasure to work with you and everything went smoothly or to say, You know what? I wasn't able to contact them where there was a problem. At that point, we can work together now. Chances are really good of Mary and I have a good relationship. She would have escalated this earlier if there was a problem. But this is just a nice way for me to reach out to her and check in. So that's one thing. The second thing I'm gonna do is is send a note to effort. Now, if you remember Ephraim wasn't in our meeting. Mary was gonna be contacting Ephraim and putting him in contact with the right person from the vendor to to connect on the contract. So again, I don't want to micromanage him. I'm gonna wait almost a week. So next Wednesday or Thursday, I'm going to send him a note just saying Hi, Ephraim. Just want to make sure that everything is running smoothly with you and the vendor and make sure that they connected with you regarding the contract and that we're on track. Simple, not micromanage E, but simple gives him the opportunity to write back and say, Yep, we're on track or no, there's a glitch or whatever, but then we can work it out. And this is way following up with somebody who wasn't even in the meeting. And you'll notice that I let some time go by, assuming that these people are professionals and choosing specifically not to micromanage. And then the third thing I'm gonna do is I have a regular one on one with our department assistant Michael, and I'm gonna include in our next one on one, which is going to be next week, uh, on agenda item to discuss getting ready for the next steps, which is the creation of an action plan in conjunction with the vendor. So we can't do anything until we get a go ahead from Ephraim illegal. So we want to make sure that we're ready to go once he gives us the go ahead. So that's my way of following up with Michael, and I may ask him to come up with the action plan, or we may work on it together or whatever it is that works for us. But you can see that I'm following up with him in some way. So those are some examples of how I might follow up and again. They do take any consideration, the nature of the relationship, and you're wanting to be business appropriate and not micromanaging. So here's some tips for following up. You want to make sure that you put deadlines in your calendar or you to do list that that's something that for good housekeeping you might want to do at the same time as you create or distribute that artifact. Because that artifact contains the deadlines, so you want to think about what your timing's will be at the same time, so nothing falls through the cracks you definitely want. Consider the nature of the relationship, and that's going to impact. How you follow up on how it's off to touch or later touch you. You use in that follow up, but you want to think of it as a follow up, even if it's a thank you note or check in now and then we want to remember that it was your meeting, so you do own it. But you also want to be respectful of other people and their areas of expertise and their business, So that's following up. So for your class project, just some add some notes to your class project document about what you learned about follow up from this module. Terrific. 10. Optional Elements: We've talked about ideas, suggestions, structures and best practices for running any kind of meeting. And there are also some specific types of meetings that require special considerations. So this little side trip into optional elements. It's really about some things to consider for specific types of meetings, and the first type we're gonna talk about is brainstorming. So a brainstorming session is a special kind of meeting where you get a bunch of people together in a room, and the purpose is to come up with his many ideas as possible. And in general, you want to keep the the idea generation very broad and and creative. And the way that you do that is by asking people for wacky, Crayola crazy wild ideas as out of the box thinking as possible. And you'll always down the road have an opportunity to modify, refine and select ideas. But during the brainstorming session itself, your your gold is to encourage creativity and get those creative juices flowing. So you want to set that up a za ground rule effectively that it's crazy ideas you're looking for, and then you need to limit criticism. Need to prevent criticism of ideas because criticism of ideas actually stops the creative juices from flowing. So the moment that somebody says, Nah, that'll never work. Or here's why we can't do that. You need to stop and say Hang on. This is not a criticism opportunity. This is this is creativity. Opportunity. So you wanna make sure that you keep the room safe and that encourages creativity. You can add ideas together and flipping together and modify. It is you just can't limit, negate or eliminate ideas from the table, because that is what stops the creative process. So you really want to encourage the idea that all ideas air good and keep in mind one of my favorite phrases, which is the ridiculous suggestions of today, become the realities of tomorrow and again in brainstorming or idea generation. You want to not think about the fact that later down the road, you're going to do idea modification, narrowing down and and selection of ideas. So that's brainstorming for off sites and other long meetings. 1/2 a day, full day and multiple days. Her some tips to think about. It's a great idea to have a set of ground rules that the group comes up with and then us the meeting runner facilitate rather than tell. So this is an opportunity for you to start the meeting off by saying, Hey, what would you like our ground rules to be? And when you do that, you first of all earn their engagement. The people are engaged in in the facilitation of ground rules. They actually start to work together as a group instantly, and you also earn the right to contribute some ideas to the ground rules yourself if they don't come up with some of the things that you're hoping they do come up with, and we'll talk about that in a bit. This also makes it much easier to to hold people to those ground rules were enforced the ground rules. It's a lot easier to enforce Brown rules that people have helped to create that it is to enforce Brown rules that you've imposed upon them. That's a really good way to think about ground rules for longer meetings. We'll talk about ground rules Maurin a little bit whenever in a longer meeting, your someone contributes something honestly, whether it's ah factor, piece of information or an idea or a suggestion you really want to encourage that? That kind of behavior of contributing honestly to the meeting by attendees is a really, really important one for keeping your meeting slowing. So sometimes you need to separate out the behavior of honest contribution from the content of that contribution, whether it was a good idea or bad idea. Because the moment that you you focus on whether the idea is good or bad, especially bad, then you start to just is in brainstorming. You start to diminish the amount of participations. You almost have to separate the act of contributing honestly from the contents of the contribution itself. So you're rewarding the behavior. And sometimes I find one of the best practices is to thank people for their honest and brave contributions and not even deal with the content of the idea at that moment so that you were encouraging the meeting to move forward for some kinds of meetings. You might want to use the facilitator as a neutral third party or someone who is well versed in navigating difficult conversations or challenging conversations. So as a facilitator, I could tell you there were times that I do suggest using somebody like me and there times that you can run the meeting yourself. A lot of it depends on the group, the topic, the length of the meeting and how you want it, how you wanted to run. What do you expect to get out of it, What the purpose for your meeting is. So just consider a facilitator for certain types of things. Here's some sample ground rules that you might want to use or think about and again. You do want to facilitate ground rules. But these air some that you wanna have kind of in your back pocket as things that that if people don't come up with you, can either encourage them to to to contribute or you can contribute yourself. As I said, if you are facilitating the development of ground rules, you've earned the right to add one or two yourself. So being on timekeeping technology toe a minimum. Are those air basics that air helpful being open to possibilities? It's kind of a broad statement, but again, you're looking for a couple things with your ground rules you're looking to establish yes, the way that we're gonna operate. You're also looking to establish guidelines that you can hold people to, in case they quote, break the ground rules. And you're also looking for a way to set the tone for your whole meeting. Another one? No, no criticism we talked about in brainstorming. But it's also really a good idea in most kinds of meetings and then no personal attacks, which is really about professional behavior, and then saying explicitly that we're gonna focus on our shared goals, these air, some ground rules that you might find helpful. I have etcetera up here on purpose because I think it's important that whenever you facilitate the establishment of ground rules, you realize that you're gonna get stuff that you never even considered, so you want to be open to that possibility. Next, I want to take you through a list of some of the favorite ground rules that I've gotten from people when I facilitated over the years, that may just give you some things to think about learning something new. Somebody contributed that to ground rule, and there's so many ways to look at that. Learn something new about yourself when something new a vote. When another learnings learned something new about the business there's, there's lots of ways to frame that that can open up your meeting and set a really good tone . Consider that you're not perfect. Consider that it's you. Sometimes someone will contribute an idea, and I find that people have to two types of responses. Either it's that's not me, it's not made that does that. And then the other one is, What if it is me? And when I find this that the people who are most successful of the people that take a moment to say, Well, what if it is me? What can I learn or what? Can I gather from that from that observation or fact or suggestion? It's just something to think about the present be present in the meeting 80 20 participation. I love this this rule. So this is the math doesn't work out, but this is a great way of thinking about it, which is 80% of time. You should be listening and 20% of the time you should be talking, and this is a great way to do for you. Is the runner of the meeting to navigate perhaps some people who may over participate in talk, too much. You can actually say something simply like you know what? You're kind of over EUR 20%. I'd like to hear from somebody who's under 20% and it prevents you from having to say something a little bit more critical. It also allows you to encourage people who are generally quiet to participate by saying, Hey, we've heard from you and you're under your 20%. So it's just a great ground rule toe have that helps you establish a little bit more equity in the room in terms of petition participation. This one was a great one that I got from somebody which is Ask your questions in the room, not on breaks and on it meals. Not when we're done at the end of the day, but unless it's personal and very company or personal or confidential. You want us to add your suggestions, your ideas, your observations into the room while everyone's there. Other people can learn from other people, invent if it from it. So that so That was a really helpful ground rule that I that I discovered have fun. I love it when people at this one these when we're having fun our defenses drop were more productive, and we can move through even difficult or challenging topics easier. Staying on topic. This is a great ground rule toe have that you can refer to in case people start to wonder, paying attention to time. And that can help you with meetings, word. You know where there's a new agenda. I hope you haven't Jennifer every meeting, but when we're running out of time on a topic and we're ready to, um, start a new one or when we're going on break and then one make sure awakens back on times who we can start those kinds of things. And then we talked about this when we talked about running the meeting. If you have a ground rule that says one voice at a time, it's a lot easier to manage the occasional background conversation or side by side conversation that happens in the room. So these are just some of things that I've discovered that I wanted to share with you some suggestions for regular or recurring meetings that sort of team meets every week or whatever every month. Whatever it is, it's a great idea to establish ground rules for the group, and you would do that the same way by facilitating them, and you can facilitate them once and then use them again and again. You might want to post them or have them handy. As a reminder. Email referred them every single week or every single meeting, but you know that they're there, and that could be very helpful. Some of the ones we've talked about in the past couple of slides to be very helpful. You might want to revisit the ground rules from time to time. Uh, as groups or teams develop, uh, you might have new topics to add to your ground rules. A lot of times when a team is new, we don't even consider how will manage conflict. But after we've been a team for a while, we do engage in conflict, and we might want to set some ground rules around what that looks like. That's just one example of the opportunity that you have to revisit ground rules after a period of time. This might be every quarter or twice a year, or just to revisit them when there's been some conflict for an example. So this is just something that you can do is part of running a recurring meeting. We do recommend that you keep the same general agenda for your for your recurring meeting and also allow people to contribute ideas for special topics for these meetings and that you share the responsibilities for note taking and for the creation of an artifact. And we talked a little bit about that in the past, so these are some things to think about. Four. He's recurring regular meetings for one on one meeting. Here's some ideas, and this is specifically a manager with the person who reports to that Manager will call. That person is subordinate. And so here's my ideas for what? What might happen in that? I do recommend that managers meet regularly with their direct reports. It could be 20 minutes every week. It could be an hour every week. It could be 20 minutes of whatever it is. But the idea of having a regular one on one is something I strongly recommend for all leaders. Um, so I recommend that the subordinate recaps the meeting in writing after the meeting, usually by email, and then the manager would check it, edit it and contribute to it, and this is a It's a great way of, of creating accountability and a lot of other things, but also just making sure that you guys were on the same page. So the final version of this becomes your artifact, you say, Okay, we're in agreement. There have been edits from the manager edits from the subordinate, and now we have a final version. You can either keep that an email, or if you have another, uh, device or mechanism for storing that, that's fine, too. But I do recommend that you have a document are in fact, of that conversation. This creates alignment between the two parties, so it makes sure that we're on the same page coming out of the meeting. It also creates the documentation of the conversation, which could be very helpful for both parties. And it develops in the subordinate the ability to summarising and think critically about the meeting. So sometimes this some the summary A recap can be an opportunity for the subordinate to think about what happened. Maybe something happened that they took personally, and it gives an opportunity to think about it in more business fashion. Put it writing and and reframed with it. They're looking at it through this process of shared contribution between the manager and subordinate. So it's a really good tool that I strongly recommend. I use this and my coaching anybody that I coach has to recap the conversation so that I make sure that we're on the same page and it gives them the opportunity. It's actually an exercise for them in thinking about what we talked about and what they said they were going to do and putting that in writing. It's a great tool, so sometimes people will come to me and say I want to have a meeting but I don't think there's a good business reason for doing it. So I came up with this list that I wanted to share with you of some things that are legitimate business reasons for having a meeting. So team building is a legitimate reason for having a meeting, and you don't need to spend oodles of money on this. It would do it every single week, But developing and building a team is on important thing, and team building opportunities are legitimate business reasons for meetings, resolving conflict. A lot of times when conflict happens in the workplace, you you want to take a meeting or make a meeting for the purpose of talking through that. Working through that, sometimes that's using a facilitator, sometimes not. But don't think you can't do this. I don't think that you have to address conflict on the spot. You can actually take it separately in tow a meeting and not not in a punitive way, but in a productive way. Recognizing people or thanking people is a great opportunity for a meeting that specifically focuses on that. It could be a short meeting. If you're doing this, you want to be specific, not just say, Hey, that was a great job. But really talk about why, in relation to the business, something was really good. Any time the business is changing, you want to meet with people, you want to meet with them multiple times to make sure that they understand it. If there's an opportunity there for them to contribute to ideas to the change in the business, you want to meet with people and and understand that running that meeting you have to be very specific and focused in purpose, not that that's any different from any other meeting. But there's a little bit more rigor that you need Teoh have around understanding your purpose and your agenda in that meeting. Sometimes we need to just realizing around our goals, remind everybody why we're here and what their roles are and shared goals. So this is an idea of a refresher. So these are all purposes for for meetings that are legitimate business meetings. It's not all of them, but it's just a few that people bring up to me that I wanted to share with you, so that really takes care of optional elements, and we're gonna move on to your class project. 11. Your Class Project: So it's time to talk about your class project and make sure you have all of the elements before you upload. I hope that as we've been going along, you've been adding to a document that you have, but it doesn't matter as long as everything's there when you're ready to upload. So let's just take a look at the list for your project. In one document, you should have the following Ah purpose statement for a meeting you would run, Uh, so this would be a purpose for yourself. It might include some strategy or strategic thinking or planning about your meeting. This would not be what you would necessarily share out with attendees of the meeting, a list of attendees who would attend. And what's your reason for inviting them thinking about those categories and functions. Now, when you come up with both the purpose and the list of attendees, you do want to remove confidential information So you're not uploading confidential information about your your business so you could use initials or titles or something like that. Uh, then the next item would be an invitation itself. We've discussed the invitation summarizing the purpose, and the attendees and any logistics. And if there's anything that needs to be brought to the meeting, things like that and again, you want to remove confidential information from this, then some notes about what you learned from some from running the meeting based on the module that we had on running the meetings or anything that you did differently and anything that you learned or discovered as a result of that. Some notes about the artifact did recommend that you not necessarily upload the artifact because it would contain probably some confidential information you would want to disclose . If you're able to upload a sort of generic artifact, that's great. But you might really want to focus more on some notes about what you learned about the creation of an artifact and include some notes about what you learned about follow up, anything that you did that worked anything that you tried that recommend or anything that you did that didn't work, anything you learned from the module or from doing it would be helpful. And then you put that all in one document and uploaded, and we're all set 12. Summary: great. So we've completed our course, and I just want to summarize is a way of cementing this information in there. I hope that you've moved from typical to ideal in terms of your meetings, and I know that that's an ongoing process, not a light switch you flip from off to on. But I hope that your readings were moving from, uh, people having a big notion of the purpose to people understanding a clear purpose from invitees, not really knowing why they're invited to a meeting to people knowing why they're attending meeting from people, not agreeing or understanding what happened last time. To clarity around what was decided in the last meeting, from the entering topics to a clear agenda, from nothing being decided in the meeting to a sense of purpose, that we achieve something and that it was documented through an artifact from the meeting being an annoying list of time. Two people having a sense of accomplishment from that meeting and again just to review the topics. We talked about plan and purpose for a meeting, choosing the attendees, carefully, creating a solid agenda, communicating that out through an invitation that's clear running the meetings and tips for how to do that creation of an artifact that documents the meeting, follow up on action items and deliver bols and commitments. And then, finally, some discussion about optional elements for some specific types of meetings. So I hope you got a lot out of the course. I know I had fun doing it, and here's my contact information. In case you have any specific questions for me, thanks so much.