Make Sure Your Next Big Meeting Actually Accomplishes Something

July 29, 2016

Make Sure Your Next Big Meeting Actually Accomplishes Something

How many times have you walked out of a theoretically important meeting and thought, “What did we accomplish?” More often than not, the problem isn’t with what did or didn’t happen at the meeting — nothing got done because the meeting’s goals were never firmly established. 

Whether it’s a 15-person executive team meeting or a 150-person leadership conference, the first step when planning an important meeting should be to draft an initial set of goals based on the answers to these two questions:

What do you want to have debated, decided, or discovered at the end of this session that you and the team haven’t already debated, decided, or discovered?

What do you want attendees to say when their team members ask, “What happened at the meeting?”
Answering both questions will give you a high-level understanding of what the meeting needs to accomplish.