Stepping into a team management role means becoming responsible for leading meetings for your team as well as peers and supervisors.
The basics of leading meetings as a new manager are all about asking the right questions to ensure your meetings are effective and worthwhile for everyone in attendance.
Worthwhile meetings have clear objectives. And not only do they have objectives, but they also require collaboration to meet those objectives. Your objective might be project planning, solving a problem or delivering news and responding to questions. How do you figure out your objective? Answer these questions:
Beware of regularly scheduled meetings and be quick to cancel them if you have no new objective.
Determine what format and location will help meet your objective.
Keep in mind meetings can be held online if the team works remotely or you can implement project tools that keep everyone moving without meetings.
Avoid including people to ‘keep them in the loop.’ Ask yourself:
If you are still worried about inclusion, make it a practice to make them aware of the meeting and objectives, but be clear attendance is optional. You can send a follow up email with meeting notes and materials.
Planning is essential. It’s easy for meetings to be derailed by conversation, but an agenda will help you guide discussion.
Being prepared means details like equipment and contributors too. It lends itself to the productivity of your meetings.
Figure out equipment requests and set up ahead of time. Test your presentations and review materials to make sure both match the agenda.
Give notice to team members you expect to contribute on certain topics even if it’s just an opinion or status report.
As you begin to lead meetings, learn to watch the clock. Stick to start and end times as well as the timeframes you built into your agenda for each topic.
Training yourself to watch the clock will make you more aware of derailed discussion and help you refocus on the objectives. This will ensure no time is wasted.
Collaboration is essential in effective meetings to meet objectives, but discussion can quickly derail an agenda.
To keep discussion productive, learn how to:
Every time you close a discussion, there should be an actionable item attached to the objective that started the conversation. If you have nothing to take action on, the meeting did not produce results.
You and everyone in attendance will feel the meeting was worthwhile if they come away with new, clear procedure, a definite decision on a problem and the action to continue working on a project or goals.
Practice your meeting craft and be critical of your own leadership in meetings. Continue to grow into your leadership position by making each meeting more impressive than the last.