Executive Podcast #301: How to Lead an Effective Meeting

Perry Holley:
Welcome to the Maxwell Leadership Executive podcast, where our goal is to help you increase your reputation as a leader, increase your ability to influence others, and increase your ability to fully engage your team to deliver remarkable results. Hi, I’m Perry Holley, a Maxwell leadership facilitator and coach.

Chris Goede:
And I’m Chris Goede, executive vice president with Maxwell Leadership. Welcome and thank you for joining. If you’re interested in downloading the Learner Guide for today’s lesson, I want to encourage you to go to maxwellleadership.com podcast. If you’ll click on this podcast, then you’ll be able to fill out a form. You can download the Learner guide there that Perry’s created for today’s episode and follow along. I am super excited about today’s topic. 70% of meetings are considered ineffective and a waste of time.

Perry Holley:
Did you do research?

Chris Goede:
Again, I am so excited about this. Cause I am in way too many meetings. A lot of them are not effective, and I lead them. So today’s topic is titled how to lead an effective meeting. And what’s awesome about this is that people are actually listening and going to maxwellleadership.com/podcast, and they’re actually putting in the form. Hey, I’m struggling with this. Will you guys talk a little bit about it? This is a listener question, and so we’re grateful to be talking about it.

Perry Holley:
Yes. And I was always grateful. I couldn’t believe it was another topic we haven’t talked about. But I was gonna ask you, I said, what about this topic? How to lead an effective meeting? Is that a leader skill? I mean, we talk about leadership and developing leaders here. Is that a skill that we need to develop?

Chris Goede:
Yeah. Listen, I. Well, wait a minute. I told you that most of these are my meetings, so I’m not gonna ask you what you think about our meetings that we’re in together. I don’t want you to answer that. I do think this is a huge skill. And as I mentioned, most of our days are consumed with meetings, one on one, small groups, sometimes bigger group. What does that look like? And if you calculate, I’ll never forget this.

Chris Goede:
Mark cole started coming in to some of our leadership team meetings years ago, and he would say, hey, don’t forget what this meeting is costing us. Let’s be productive. And he’s like, so I tallied up all of your compensation around the table and the fact that we’re gonna be together for 2 hours, and I ran some math, and this is an expensive meeting, and so we need to make sure that we take steps to have highly effective meetings as leaders.

Perry Holley:
I’m gonna lay this out and just tell you that it is a. It’s gonna sound simplistic. Yeah.

Chris Goede:
Not easy, but simplistic.

Perry Holley:
Simple, but not easy. And I wonder how much of it we really do. So I would challenge you to get the learner guide or even take your notes here on these few things, but are you doing them? And the first one, I. The reason I said it sounds simplistic, number one, is, who’s the leader? You know, is it. Do we have a meeting leader? Is it generally the person that sent out the meeting request? Is it the boss? Is it somebody on the team bringing that together? It’s often assumed that whoever sent it out is, you know, the request is the leader. But just make sure that’s so that somebody’s identified. And when you’re identified as the leader of the meeting, you’re really. Your job is to run the meeting.

Perry Holley:
So whoever the meeting leader is assisting us toward getting to a conclusion on the topic, whatever it is, and in the best form and most efficient way possible to do that, your job is to interpret and to clarify, to keep people on track. It is to move the discussion forward. If you’re unclear on who the leader is, the role, you’re off to a bad start already. And I’ve been in many meetings where it was, I’m going to tell you, was a little unclear. Somebody called the meeting, but somebody else was. Had the question that was going to be answered. Somebody else was the expert. We don’t know.

Perry Holley:
Whose job is it to keep this thing moving on track, clarifying questions, but directing us toward the end, not looking at you while I’m talking.

Chris Goede:
I’m not even listening. Perry doesn’t like to come to meetings, period. We have this little agreement we’ve worked through as the years have progressed, but definitely not one that’s not effective, and rightfully so, because his time is valuable. Your people’s time is valuable. Your time is valuable. And so, man, the biggest. The biggest risk of every meeting is, man, are we wasting anybody’s time in this meeting? So, one of the things I want to encourage you now at number two that Perry has for us is state the purpose of the meeting. If you don’t do it ahead of time, which I prefer, that way I can.

Chris Goede:
I can get my mind in the right place, come with some thoughts prepared. That’s how I. That’s how I like to work. Um, but if you don’t, then do it early on in the meeting. Whoever’s to Perry’s point, whoever’s leading, who’s the meeting leader, man? State the purpose of that. What are we, what are we hoping to walk out of here with today? What are we going to achieve? Make sure that, um, that there are not consequences for not holding it. Like, meaning it’s got to be so important. You say, hey, you know what? We’re having this meeting, this purpose of it, and if we didn’t have this meeting today, here’s what could happen.

Chris Goede:
We don’t want that to be. And then how do we judge whether or not this is going to be success, a successful or a failure in regards to the meeting? Is it, how many to dos do we give, Chris, coming out of the meeting, is that success? You know, did we, did we not talk about the real issue? All of those things. You got to have a meeting leader, and then you got to state the purpose.

Perry Holley:
And number three would be put together an agenda. And I a part about the agenda and about stating the purpose. One thing I learned from a great senior leader once was, does everybody know the topic and the agenda to come with a point of view? So I like it. You said maybe send it out a little early. Do people know we have this meeting that’s on the calendar and we’re going to be meeting at this time on that day on this topic, I need you to come prepared for that. So if you give them a chance to do that, but having it on the agenda, you know, a common fault is to dwell too much on trivial but seemingly urgent items to the exclusion of why we’re actually here. What’s the fundamental purpose of the meeting? It’s often good to put a finishing time. You know, when are we, how long are we meeting? Which kind of begs the question about how do you deal with starting a meeting? I’ve been in some where they say we’re going to, you know, Johnny’s not quite here.

Perry Holley:
Let’s give him a minute. Or we. There’s no clear start. It kind of, we kind of dwindle in two, three minutes, four minutes, five minutes, slipping away. How do. And then there’s the late stragglers that come in. So how do I deal with this?

Chris Goede:
Well, there’s only one way to ensure a meeting starts on time, and that is to start it on time.

Perry Holley:
Now can I get a bumper sticker?

Chris Goede:
Now, hold on a minute. Now hold on a minute. I may be at fault here at times, coming in, goofing around and having conversations, but this is really a good point. What I love about this is that this is just showing respect to other people’s time. And I understand that there’s going to be certain situations. For example, uh, we have leadership team meetings here every. Every Wednesday, and it doesn’t matter where.

Perry Holley:
You’Re at in the world, every Wednesday, you kind of said, like, every Wednesday.

Chris Goede:
Remember that lesson, uh, Perry did on Tuesdays coming? I feel Wednesdays are coming. And no matter where you’re at in the world, what’s going on, you’re expected to be in that meeting virtually or in person. And it starts on time at 830 Eastern. And so I, for the most part, am a Lombardi time guy. Right? Like, you’re ten minutes early or five minutes late. And so my schedule has gotten away from me at times, and I tend to be a little bit late. I think Jake and the team here have gotten on to me about walking into the studio a little late at times. But yesterday, especially in leadership meeting, I’m always on time.

Chris Goede:
There’s going to be situations. Yesterday morning, I was at my desk working on something, and John called me and wanted to talk about something, and they just kept going and kept going. And so they started the meeting without me, which is what you want them to do. Right. I text the meeting leader, said, hey, I’m on a call. I got a hall pass because I was talking to the founder, but he’s like, great, we’re going. And I think you have to have that mindset to. I was hoping to keep talking to you.

Chris Goede:
Forget what you’re gonna say. I have a feeling. No, it’s good that.

Perry Holley:
Although now you gave me a good thing to just text you and say, ellis, I’m on the phone with John.

Chris Goede:
I’m not.

Perry Holley:
I will be there for the next three weeks.

Chris Goede:
Yeah, that’s right. And so when I came into the meeting, I was ten minutes late. Right. And so I got called at the speed, but they did not wait, even though I was running behind because of a good reason with the hall passed. And so I need to do a better job of that, of the sub meetings that I have. Outside of that, with the leadership team.

Perry Holley:
I’m just thinking of our, like, we have a weekly team meeting. You said I come in making fun and being light and having it, but that may seem that way, but you’ve actually. Because I know there’s an agenda you’ve built, and we work on the common language of leadership. You have built level two time into the front of our meeting, and then we get level three time, which is the business of the meeting. That’s done intentionally and on purpose. So, while it may appear to. To the unknown that you’re coming in, you know, making it light and talking to people about what’s going on. How was your weekend? That actually is built into the agenda, and it’s on purpose because we’re trying.

Perry Holley:
It’s our direct team. You want us to get to know each other. You want us to have relationships do that. So I think it’s on purpose. Tell me about, who do you invite to these people?

Chris Goede:
Yeah. So, number four here that Perry’s given us is carefully consider who those attendees are of. We’ve all been in meetings that you didn’t call, and you’re in the meeting, and you’re wondering why you’re in the meeting, and you’re sitting there, and you go, I’m not adding any value to this meeting. And so you need to make sure that you’re being a good steward of their time and of the resources of the organization. And so I have absolutely seen meetings where there were too many people in there. Like, I just gave you an example. I’ve seen meetings where the right people weren’t in the meeting and not enough people were in the meeting. And so we need to make sure, because at the end of the day, what you want is you want to make sure every attendee in that meeting is contributing and participating in a way not just so their voice is heard, but because they’re adding value to the meeting.

Chris Goede:
You know, John has a kind of a thought that he shares around. He’s like, listen, I want the right people in the room. We talk about the right thing, and if you’re not adding value to the conversation, you might not be invited back to the next meeting, which just means not. He’s not being sarcastic about that meeting. He’s like, hey, if this is not the right room for you, I want you working on something else. I want to respect your time to.

Perry Holley:
Be able to kind of go back to having a point of view. He expects everybody that comes to them to that subject to have a point of view on that subject. Add value to that subject, or don’t.

Chris Goede:
That’s right.

Perry Holley:
Bother coming to do that. Yeah. Under inviting. Over inviting. Over inviting gets too many voices, too many people talking that it can be distracting. Under inviting, I can’t get the job done because I don’t have the right people in the room. The smaller the meeting is usually better, but you got to have, like you said, right people. Another, I think, is number five would be identifying a note taker.

Perry Holley:
Now, do you taking the minutes of the meeting, capturing what’s been said and that sort of thing. Do you, is it you, is it the leader of the meeting? What’s your best practice?

Chris Goede:
It depends on the meeting. So personally, I’ll just speak to how I handle it in our leadership team meeting, then I obviously take my own notes in that meeting. But we have our gentleman that runs that meeting, right? His executive partner, EA is documented and everything, and we all walk out, we get an email and here’s the action item. So everybody’s on the same page. There’s no, oh, I didn’t know that was going to be my task, leaving out of that and when I need to have it done. In our team meetings, I have an executive partner and she handles a lot of that for me. When there’s time for that in the one on ones, when I call them, then I handle a lot of that myself and documenting and what that might look like. So I think it’s important to do that depending on the type of meeting.

Chris Goede:
But to think through that before the meeting actually happens and you set it up.

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Chris Goede:
Number six is allow time for brainstorming. We were just talking about this as a team.

Perry Holley:
Yeah.

Chris Goede:
And I love that you put this in here because there needs to be some time for that, right? Some wandering, some brainstorming, some thinking about how do we do things differently. And what I would encourage you and what we’re finding is that due to us kind of staying on schedule, doing, we do our KPI’s, we, we do peer to peer kind of accountability, report your numbers, your projects, and then we’re working on some issues. And that gets us pretty close to the time of our meeting. So we’re talking about how do we set up one of those meetings? And all we do is dedicate it to brainstorming sessions that the team needs to work on going forward. What does that look like? And so I just want to make sure that everybody thinks about, how do you allow some time in your meetings to let brainstorming happen and not just completely be dealing with the urgent all the time? And one thing I’ll say about this in the brainstorming session, and even in conversations that happen around meetings, and I think that oftentimes you can be more effective in a meeting, is that as ideas are happening or brainstorming or thoughts, you get people that pile on. You get people that, I call it politicizing. At times, they hear a really good idea and just being like, no, I mean, that’s awesome, Perry. Then they go into a dissertation on why they think Perry’s idea is a good idea and that they align with that.

Chris Goede:
And then we’re four or five minutes into the same point that we’ve already put up, you know, on, on the board and say, we’re going to come back to this because Perry thought it was a good idea. So when that happens, when comments have already been made, try to limit the amount of, I guess, duplication of conversation that’s happening in the meeting.

Perry Holley:
And that’s why the meeting leader is so important, is that you don’t have the runaway, you know, somebody that’s filibustering for their point. And they keep going on and on. And I was watching on this great example of this on newscast, they have a very timed, they have a panel discussion. They got three panelists, and the, and the newscaster is leading this discussion, and you get somebody that goes a little long. And I noticed that the newscaster goes, and he acts like he’s starting to say it, but they know that’s a signal. And I actually heard one of them say that he had a signal. If he, if he reaches and touches, like, pulls on his ear, you’re going over. So they have some agreements about where I’m going to rail you in when I need to reel you in to do that.

Perry Holley:
Number seven was, again, about letting people talk on that subject, was, while you have the loud one, the one that wants to be heard, do you draw out the silent? They could be being silent. It could indicate agreement. It could be indicating fear. There could be a power dynamic in the room. They don’t want to put it out there to do that. The silence of defiance. There’s a silence of hostility. I’m not going to help you out.

Perry Holley:
I mean, there’s all kinds of things that go on there. So I just think as, again, as the meeting facilitator, as you’re. The idea of facilitation is. I’m reading the room while things are. While the meeting is progressing, I’m reading the room, who’s in, who’s out, who’s talking, who’s participating, who’s not? And why is somebody over sharing? Is somebody not talking at all? Do I want them there? I also said, protecting the weak. Is that junior members of the team. It could be a power dynamic. They’re afraid to speak.

Perry Holley:
They could be. It could look bad. Encouraging when people are speaking, encouraging the clash of ideas. I wonder. You were dealing with a lot of dynamics with the multiple parts of the company. Is it would be a much faster meeting if we all disagreed and got out of here?

Chris Goede:
Sure.

Perry Holley:
But would it be, would it get us where we want to go? What’s your thought about? Do you invite dissension? Do you invite other alternatives? Do you try to get people. I’ve been in meetings where you have, but I mean, is that a regular thing for you?

Chris Goede:
Yeah, I would say absolutely. You want that. And you have to make sure as the meeting leader that it’s done respectfully. That’s my biggest thing is let’s make sure that we respect one another in that. But I do encourage, and I love this statement, this is a phrase comes from you, just the point of view, right? Like, everybody’s on the team for a reason. Now you’re going to have some that have different personalities that are going to talk more, that are going to share their emotions and feelings more than others. But they, the ones that don’t, also need to understand that when we leave that room, we are all in alignment together of what we’re trying to accomplish as a team. If not, I do need you to at least communicate in that, whatever your communication style is.

Chris Goede:
And you brought up a good point. Right. There’s a lot of power dynamics. Perry and I and Susan Davis do a lot of work around facilitation training and stuff. And when you do that, there are power dynamics that happen in a room. Same thing with meetings. You’re really facilitating a meeting more than leading a meeting. And you want to facilitate because you want to pull out the best of the room.

Chris Goede:
You want the room to make the team better and not shut down. And I love this. You talked about silence. We need to. And we talk about this, especially at the leadership level, is that, hey, if you’re silent, then this is affirmation that you’re okay with the direction that we’re going or what is happening or whatever it might be. And so I absolutely do encourage it. You just to your point, you got to understand who’s in the room and then encourage them to speak up. That may even be where you pull them aside, you know, a couple days before the meeting, say, hey, I really want to hear from you on this topic.

Chris Goede:
On Monday, when we meet, then they may feel a little more comfortable, and I’ll be like, hey, Perry, what? What do you think about this? And then you’re not gonna see it. Yeah. Then you’ve had some time to prepare, and you feel comfortable thinking and talking about it.

Perry Holley:
Yeah. I don’t wanna miss your point about alignment, that you can dissent all you want. You can even argue. You can state your case. Decision will be made.

Chris Goede:
Yeah.

Perry Holley:
And when we leave the room, even if it didn’t go your way, you do not get to go out and undermine, backstab, back channel, and make us all look bad. I wouldn’t. I wasn’t for that. No. No. You are in alignment. Once we leave the room, you’ve had your voice. We went another direction.

Perry Holley:
You’re in alignment with us, and that just shows great leadership. That’s good. Doing that. Finally, number eight, about. In the meeting with action items. I think you’ve said this, that how you guys do that, and there’s a note taker. There’s minutes, and then there’s actions, but sometimes these get kind of short shifted. How much your best practice?

Chris Goede:
Listen, I was in a meeting today before Perry and I got in the studio, and it was a great meeting. We talked about a lot of things. We got to the end, and they’re like, all right, we’ll see that. I was like, well, wait a minute. Wait.

Perry Holley:
What are we.

Chris Goede:
What are we. What are we doing with what we just talked about our next steps, because the only way that as a team. And I love. And I’m gonna talk about this in my closing remarks here in just a minute. I love building a system to where the team can hold each other accountable. Hey, listen, you know, Perry, Susan, Chris, whatever it might be, okay. We talked about this today. Great.

Chris Goede:
What are. When we get back together, two days, four days a week, what is it that Chris should have done? What does the Perry should have done? And you got to have action items. Otherwise, I mean, what did you get together to meet about besides just. Yeah. To talk about, which we don’t. Perry and I don’t mind that, either. But you got to have some type of very enjoyable. You got action items.

Perry Holley:
Yeah.

Chris Goede:
That’s right. Maybe that’s why he. Perry doesn’t come to a lot of my meetings, because.

Perry Holley:
Not a lot of fun.

Chris Goede:
He’s like, I don’t want any more responsibilities. Well, listen, as I do wrap up, here’s what I was going to say. Create a system. This is what has helped me more than anything is that create a system. And Perry’s laid out and eight things here that I think can help you build a system to run a meeting. 30 minutes, 45 minutes, 60 minutes meeting. I would encourage you guys to try to keep them as short as possible. I know a lot of teams that they go in and everybody stay standing.

Perry Holley:
Yeah.

Chris Goede:
Remove the chairs, move the chairs, you know, and let’s. Let’s get here and let’s figure it out. So create a system that works for you and your team that you can stick to, and then communicate that system to the team so they don’t feel like, man, Chris woke up on the wrong side of the bed today. I was trying to communicate. We moved right next to the next point. No, no, no. This is the system. This is how we’re going to work through that.

Chris Goede:
And I put in here, even down to time blocks, because sometimes we’ll just stop conversations. Okay, well, we got to move to the next one because we’re either at time or I know that it’s going to be a much longer conversation in order to get to the point where we can assign action items. And then this is something that we learned through eos and some other meeting systems is. Man, how do you identify in these meetings the top three issues you guys need to tackle as a team?

Perry Holley:
The rocks.

Chris Goede:
The rocks. Yeah. Like, how and collaboratively come together. Like, we’re going to work through this and we’re going to address issues that are keeping us from achieving or things that we want to achieve. What is the next baby step that we need to take action item to be able to do that? Identify them, hash them out, assign some action items, and keep it into the system of the meeting. And I think you’re going to see a different result in your meetings and engagement level in your meetings as well. Because I’ll have team members over the years, you know, they don’t say anything about it, and then I’ll have something to be like, man, that was a really productive meeting. Well, you want everybody wanting to come to your meetings, right? Like, that’s what you should get to.

Chris Goede:
And I’m still working on that with Perry. So when I get there, I’ll let you know.

Perry Holley:
Good luck.

Chris Goede:
Yeah.

Perry Holley:
Great stuff. As a reminder, if you’d like to learn more about our offerings, if you want to get the learner guide for this episode, if you would like to leave us a comment or a question. If you want to learn about we have other podcasts as well. Podcast family if you want to learn about those, all that can be [email protected]. podcast we love hearing from you, and we’re very grateful that you spend this time with us. That’s all today from the Maxwell Leadership executive podcast.

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