How to lead better meetings

Written by Katie Test Davis

It’s 4 p.m. and you’re sitting down for your 5th meeting of the day.

Your email pings. Five unread emails haunt you.

The slack alert sound - you know the one - shuffles through.

A lawn mower revs up outside your window.

An alarming NYT news alert pops up.

And you’re supposed to… pay attention?? In this 4 p.m. Zoom meeting? Pfft.

You’re not the only one feeling this weary. Our brains are stuffed. Our overwhelm is preventing us from thinking clearly and from making decisions in the way that we used to.

And yet…we’ve got real work to do. Fighting for change for children and families is necessary today. The time is now. Our work, our life’s work, it’s more important than ever before.

As consultants who work with busy brains every day, we have a few tricks up our sleeve that we use to focus and move our work forward. Here are a few of our current favorites:

Make An Agenda

It’s a hard and fast rule here at Forthright that ANY meeting that lasts longer than 30 minutes requires an agenda. The idea here is that a meeting agenda is not only administrative, it communicates to invitees why they should join and what they can contribute and expect. Our agenda template starts with a list of meeting objectives. What are we going to walk out of this meeting having decided or accomplished? Most meetings suffer from a lack of “why” - why are we here today? How will we know this meeting has been a success? Agendas do that work for you and for meeting attendees.

Sample meeting objectives include:

Agree upon and finalize the target audience for our campaign.
Approve the updated core messaging.
Review findings from the communications audit and answer any remaining questions.

SIGN ME UP

Now that you’ve got a meeting agenda, you’ve also got a north star document and a visual you can show to help get your attendees’ attention. When starting a meeting with an agenda, drop the link of the agenda into the chat, and if possible, pull up the agenda in the meeting and share your screen so that there’s a visual to accompany the verbal.

Show Visuals

If your meetings are like ours, you’re often walking a team through a document. Bring that document up on screen, and use your cursor to highlight what you’re discussing, so that everyone is (literally) on the same page. If you’re discussing a project status, show a visual (like a flow chart or a process list) to contextualize where you are in the full process. This context can save a lot of confusion and keep everyone engaged. Effective meeting visuals don’t need to be fancy - they can be as simple as a PowerPoint slide you put together right before the meeting - they just need to help your attendees center themselves.

Here’s an example graphic Forthright Senior Advisor Ashley made for a recent project that helped us show the client where we were in a communications planning process.

Prioritize

It would be irresponsible for me to end a list dedicated to reducing your overwhelm if I didn’t land here: you cannot do it all. In fact, you shouldn’t do it all. In her book, Drop The Ball (10/10, highly recommend), author Tiffany Dufu asks us, “what is your highest and best use?” That question has stayed with me for YEARS. It’s a great question in all settings, but it’s especially helpful at work. Yes, you could chime in on that project. But is it your highest and best use right now? Where is your attention most needed? And what will you stop doing in order to dedicate yourself to your highest and best use?

Your work is so important, friend. What you’re doing for our country’s children and families is essential to creating a better world. We need you and that big beautiful brain of yours.

Spending just a few more minutes preparing for meetings will ensure that you are getting clear decisions and meaningful results.

Forthright Advises