If you are gainfully employed or if you volunteer at church or some other organization, chances are you attend meetings.  Most normally sane people do not care too much for meetings.  Ask for adjectives to describe typical meetings and you’ll get a laundry list of pejoratives: long, boring, waste of time, frustrating, etc.

Why do most meetings suck?  It’s not because meetings are inherently bad.  Some meetings are tolerable and there are even rumors that a few meetings are worthwhile, productive, engaging and even fun.  So what makes bad meetings so bad?  My experience is that there are three common missteps made at the beginning of meetings that contribute to 90% of all meeting malaise:

1. Meetings start without clarifying the purpose. Sometimes I get in my car and just go for a drive without any particular destination in mind. In those cases, it doesn’t matter if I take a left or a right out of my driveway.  In fact, until I’m ready to return home, very few turns matter because I’m just wandering.  While meandering might be a good way to get some idle steering wheel time, it makes for a terrible way to have a productive meeting.
   Without a clear purpose and destination, meetings don’t just meander – they unfold like a maddening cacophony of competing agendas.  When you don’t take the time to identify and agree on the purpose for the meeting, people don’t know how to contribute.  You end up with people trying to steer the meeting in the direction they assume it should go or just sitting back and going along for the ride – neither of which is what you want from meeting attendees.
2. Discussion starts without clarifying the process (or “plan”) for the meeting. While purpose is about “why” you are meeting, the process is about “how” you will conduct the meeting.  Are we going to all listen while one person talks?  Are we going to brainstorm possible solutions and then narrow to the best options?  Are we each going to share our opinion and then check for consensus?  How exactly are we going to conduct this meeting?
   Without an agreed-upon plan, each person follows his or her own plan, which almost guarantees that someone is going to think someone else is off track.  Talk about frustration!
3. You dive into the meeting without clarifying how decisions will be made. There is no right way for decisions to be made, but there is a big-time wrong way to conduct meetings: have a discussion that makes it seem like you’re going for group consensus and then surprise everyone at the end by declaring that the leader was only looking for input and is going to make the decision on her own.  Ugh!
   When it comes to decision-making, there are plenty of options: majority vote, unanimous consensus, super majority (9 out of 10 or something like that), leader with input, leader without input, leader and two trusted team members, etc.  Knowing how the decision is going to be made before the meeting starts is crucial.

So if you want a simple (but not all that easy) way to vastly improve your meetings, reverse these three missteps and turn them into the four legs that hold up every good meeting:

1. Start with a clear purpose for the meeting. A purpose is not the typical agenda that outlines the various topics that will be discussed; instead, it is the reason why each agenda item is on the agenda.  For example, you might have “fourth quarter budget” on the agenda and the purpose for discussing it is that you want to identify cost-savings strategies so you can reduce expenses by 10% in the fourth quarter and stay in the black for the year. BTW, you also need a clear purpose for each item on the meeting agenda.
2. Establish a clear process for conducting the meeting. Your plan for how to meet is akin to the ground rules for any discussion or the rules for a game or sport.  Using the example of the fourth quarter budget, the process might be to review the budget line-by-line in pairs for 30 minutes, then everyone will come back and share suggestions so that common suggestions can be given the most weight.  Of course, there could be other, equally valid processes, but just remember that a clear and average process is always better than an unclear but otherwise superb process.
3. Clarify the who and how of decision-making. The process for conducting the meeting toward the desired purpose typically leads to a decision of some sort, or decisions along the way.  Who will make the decisions and how they will make them is important.  Going back to our example, the decision-making process could be a group decision based on the weight given to various suggestions – those with the most weight will be the first to be cut.  Notice how knowing that this is the decision-making process will more than likely change how people engage the process since each pair’s suggestions could directly impact cutting a budget item.
4. Start discussion only when clear on purpose, process and decision-making. Okay, so this point is really just a sum of the other three, but I find it helpful to consider this the final step in getting started with a not-so-sucky meeting.  You have to do the slow work at the beginning in order to have a much more efficient and effective meeting.

For an absolute gem of a book on meetings, be sure to check out Patrick Lencioni’s Death by Meeting.  His four types of meetings model is a good start for considering what the general purpose of a meeting needs to be; you can move from there to a more specific purpose given the nature of your topic(s).

Coaches need to know how to conduct great meetings because anytime we coach a team or group we are, essentially, conducting a meeting.  Coaches work well with teams because we insist on clarity of purpose (what are we talking about and what outcome are we aiming for?), we know all about process (we’re experts when it comes the best ways to be intentional about holding a conversation) and we push for ownership (knowing who’s making and who’s carrying out decisions).