No one likes boring meetings. Make the planning process thoughtful, and you’ll enjoy the process more and inspire more engagement from your team.
What if you could energize your meetings and get more engagement? When meetings become predictable and boring, they’re less productive. People naturally tune out.
There is a lot you can do to energize your meetings for more engagement. It takes time, but a little effort can make the meeting more interesting.
Here is a list of the most common meeting techniques for keeping things fresh and keeping people’s attention engaged.
1. Start with a Story
Remind the team of the purpose and meaning of their work, which is at bottom the best motivator of all. A customer story is always great to help people connect to the purpose of the organization. A story from a vendor or employee can do the same. Even a story picked from other media can work. Use any story that helps them focus on why we do what we do.
2. Start with a Public Conversation or Presentation
Invite a team member or someone from outside the team in for a short conversation or presentation of new information. Five to ten minutes works fine. It’s a great way to help the team learn about its interconnectedness with other parts of the organization and external stakeholders or even competitors and get a fresh perspective. If someone on your team has reported a key insight or event, or has recently been to a conference, give them the opening slot to bring their knowledge to the rest of the team. Whether you start with a conversation or guest speaker, the opening should be a time to bring new knowledge and perspectives to the team.
3. Have Others Run Parts of the Meeting
If you run down your data and points every week, it’s going to get old really fast. It’s far better to assign your team members part of the agenda. This achieves several things at once. First, it literally gives the team a new voice to listen to, which is inherently more engaging than listening to one person march down an agenda. Second, it engages the team because now they have to prepare something, and they will be more invested in it. If you rotate who is doing the update, everyone will perk up to see how their peers are doing and what they are doing well. Third, it shows that you are listening to your team and that their ideas matter. This validation is incredibly important. As I say often, listening is the most important sign of respect. Assigning a segment of the agenda to a team member shows you respect them enough to have the whole team listen to them. Fourth, this is a great way to help your team members grow their leadership skills and give them practice in public speaking. During preparation and in the debrief, you can offer some insights privately in one-on-ones about what is going right and what they can do better next time. It’s a great way to energize your meetings and train the next generation of leaders in your company.
4. Include Discussions as Part of the Agenda
When you have a room full of people, it’s an amazing opportunity to mine their thoughts and ideas to improve products and processes, innovate, and investigate new avenues for growth. If you use meetings just to present data, consider if sending a report would be a better use of your time and others’. Make sure every meeting has a moment where there is a robust discussion. Disseminate the agenda ahead of time and remind people to prepare and come with ideas to contribute. During this time, as the leader, try to hold back your own opinions or ideas. This will encourage your team to offer more ideas and give team members a sense that they matter. When they carry the conversation without you, they build confidence. This is inherently motivating and energizes the meeting. At the end of the discussion, be sure to thank them and then take all ideas back for your further consideration and report on any decisions the next time.
5. Add a Tips and Tricks Segment
Dedicate a weekly slot to a segment for getting insights from the team and helping them learn from each other. Try a segment where one team member can share a little shortcut or valuable tip to the team to save them time and improve their accuracy or results. Every team member should be expected to come up with something on a rotating basis. If you have a sales team, consider having a team member talk about one sales call each week where they learned something that others can use too. Not only will it be engaging and productive, but it will increase your team members’ self-esteem, their leadership development, and make them more oriented toward learning. Hopefully, it’s a fun segment too. There are few things more rewarding than a laugh.
6. Use Engaging Visuals
Sure, sometimes you need to put up a chart or data, but when you’re making a point, think about graphics that bring a bit of fun and humor in. To find images that are fun, think about analogies, emotions, and activities when you search. For example, let’s say you want to make a point about your data points going up. Follow your chart with a photo of a balloon flying high overhead, or a rocket ship taking off. Anything that goes up will do. If your product or service has improved or is showing more promise, instead of showing a happy customer, surprise the team with a happy dog or hamster. If there is something more technical, try a cartoon of a caveman inventing the wheel as an analogy for your own invention. The point of the photo is not to hit the nail on the head, but to expand how your team sees things. It takes a bit of creativity on your end, but that’s exactly what is needed to energize your meetings.
7. Show Your Own Emotions
I know we are often told to keep emotions out of the workplace, but a meeting with no emotion is a dull meeting. If you are excited about something, show your excitement. If you are passionate, show your passion. Even if there is something wrong, you need to show that you are concerned in order to engage your team’s help. You don’t want to go overboard, and you certainly don’t want to get carried away with emotion. Be sure you are showing appropriate emotions. It is totally inappropriate to call out individual mistakes or problems in a meeting or get mad at any one person. Remember that emotions are contagious, so think strategically about the emotion you want to show. If you want your team happy, concerned, energized, or empathetic, then lead the way with your own emotions.
As a team leader, the power of the agenda is yours, so use it to energize your meetings. You don’t want to wholesale reinvent the meeting week after week, but even if you have the same segments, make sure as many of them as possible are led by other team members and include at least one story or conversation that helps them see beyond the confines of the team. The more they talk, the more engaged they will be. Take time and effort to make it great. It’s worth it. Next time, you’ll see people coming into the meeting with brighter faces and more eagerness to engage.
