007: Planning Effective Meetings

Do you want more effective meetings so that you can drive more progress and waste less time? Of course you do! So, in this episode, follow my 4 step process to effectively plan out how you will make your next big meeting or pitch a success. In turn, this will help you to drive your retail transformation to a success conclusion faster.

 

 

Challenges with meetings today

Meeting take up huge amounts of time. But are they always valuable? I think we both know the answer to that one!

But so many business meetings are not set up for success. They don’t have the planning that does into driving success. There is often no agenda, or a weak agenda. Even then, what agendas there are drift completely off course. Decisions get missed or postponed. Given these flaws, you also need to consider the costs of holding that meeting. Total up everyone’s hourly salary and you’ll be surprised at what it costs per hour. Now ask – was this meeting profitable for the overall business?

Introducing a 4 step process to drive more effective meetings

So, in this episode, I introduce a 4 step process. Now, quick warning…. there is nothing ground breaking here. Probably no new innovations that you’ve not come across before. But, what I do give you is a 4 step process to help you work through how to plan effective meetings.

Step 1: Define your outcome

What are your goals and objectives? What would a successful meeting do for your transformation or

The top tip here is the start with “to” and then use an active verb. Verbs like “agree” or “decide”. Not loose verbs like “discuss” or “look at” or “update”. Be confident in your outcome and that will help drive more progress.

Step 2: Work out ideal outputs

Now, use step 1 to visualise what you will have by the end of that successful meeting where you have delivered the outcome. This is your ideal meeting output.

Aim for a tangible list of next steps here. Plan what you would like to happen but please get specific.

Step 3: Put together an approach

In step 3, you’ll take the outputs in step 2 and build them into an approach. This is the flow that your meeting or presentation needs to take to be able to take people on the journey. This kicks out your agenda and also offers you a good checkpoint to mentally run through the meeting. Challenge yourself as if you were one of the other attendees or decision makers Would the story that the agenda tells drive me to the desired outputs and ultimately, the outcome?

Step 4: Provide the right intel

Now you know the approach, what information would I need to know to move through the meeting as you would ideally like. This step will show you what pre-read to generate. It will give you the content that you need to include at each stage of the approach. It will also drive your pre-engagement plan.

And you’ll need to listen to the podcast for the final tip

On the podcast, you’ll also find a bonus tip too, so be sure to take a listen around the 10 mins 44 secs mark.

Oh, and don’t miss the ever so handy way of remembering these 4 steps. That at about 12 mins 19 secs.

The bottom line – planning effective meetings

Meetings as a whole are not well run. Yes, of course there are good examples out there. If you’re the type of person who runs good meetings, then well done. You are serving your colleagues and your business with more value than they realise. But if you could improve your meetings, then take a listen to this episode.

Encourage your friends to listen too. They can listen directly on the website here or they can find the Retail Transformation Show on iTunes, Stitcher, etc.