Meetings are like rivers: the more powerful the current, the more easily objects are ushered downstream. If you want to own your next meeting, you need to create a strong current that makes it difficult for people to step outside of the flow. As with most professional abilities, the key is in solid preparation beforehand.
It starts with the plan. How will the time spent, and how serious are you about the way that time is spent? Whether a meeting involves 3 people or 300, they need to know upfront what the plan is. If you don’t want people wandering in an out of your meeting due to restroom, smoking or coffee breaks, they need to know that you’ve anticipated these needs and built them into the agenda. If you don’t want people interrupting the initial presentation, they need to know that you’ve carved out time specifically for Q & A. A little bit of setup (and some early enforcement when individuals test the boundaries of the agenda) goes a long way to controlling how the time is spent.
Then, it’s on you. In social settings, it’s fine for conversations to wander and for various individuals to control the conversation. No one cares where the conversation winds up, either, and you’d be sociopathic to constantly be trying to shepherd your friends to a certain end-point. With business meetings though, you’d be crazy not to. You need to know where the conversation should end: resolution on an issue, approval of a plan, etc. The presentation should support that, and questions, comments and other discussion points that occur should be moderated for relevance.
In a business meeting, it’s ok to politely acknowledge that a certain question or point really takes the conversation off-topic, and that you’d like to keep things focused on the issue at hand. People may be a little off-put by this, but everyone else will appreciate the context and boundaries that strong moderation provides.
Finally, it’s important to understand that if you really want to own the meeting, you need to trust the process yourself. Owning meetings is about softly guiding conversations so that people reach accords more easily; if you’re trying to guide that conversation while at the same time acting as Chief Litigator and Persuader, you’ll only activate people’s resistance. If you have such strong views that you’re not willing to compromise, or if the honest reality is that you intend to railroad the other side, you’d be wise to prepare and install another moderator to help control the context and direction of the conversation. Simply put, you can’t do both.
So the next time an important meeting comes around, take time to ask yourself where it should end up, and what your personal intentions are. By taking time on the front end to plan how the conversation will go, you’ll greatly increase the likelihood that it actually goes where it should.
Question: Have you ever been in a meeting where everyone had a different plan and agenda? What happened?
