From the course: Time Management Tips

Ending meetings with action

From the course: Time Management Tips

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Ending meetings with action

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- I was once working with a client who complained that it seemed like every meeting they had they just walked away and didn't really do anything about it. Does this seem like a common problem to you? I believe it is. It's so often that we have these meetings and then no action comes out of them. This can leave us feeling like it was just a wasted amount of time for us to get together. Now the value of a meeting comes from what we do as a result of them. We want to make sure that we end every meeting with clear action steps for people to take. If you're the facilitator or the leader of the meeting, it's your job to make sure that this takes place. Here are a few questions that you can ask to make sure every meeting ends with an action. Number one, what will we do? In other words, what will we do as a result of what we talked about? Let's have a discussion about it and come away with a few clear action steps. Number two, who will do it? Not everyone is going to do something about it. If there are five people in the meeting, for example, let's designate one or two people to clearly be the ones who are going to take action on it. And then, we can follow up with those people. And then number three, ask the question, when will it be done? These actions that we created for these people, let's have a deadline for them. And then if you're the leader, you can write reminders to follow up with them and make sure that they follow through. Then in the next meeting you can follow up with everybody and make sure that action took place. Hopefully by using these few simple questions, you can increase the value of your meetings.

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