Quick follow-up to the post on the best way to start a meeting: answer three questions before you walk in. Why it matters, what happens if it goes well, what happens if it doesn’t. That’s the front end. This one’s for the other end.
Before you end the meeting, pause with five minutes left.
I set an alarm on my phone for different sections of the offsites and weekly syncs I lead, with clients and in the businesses I run, because I will forget. We’ll run straight to the top of the hour and rush out to the next thing, usually another meeting.
So with five or ten minutes left in your weekly meeting, your one-on-one, whatever it is, go around the room and say: “Everyone walk us through what you took away from this meeting and what you’re going to do by when.” Make sure there’s a clear list of who’s doing what by when.
Three things happen when you do this.
One, you create accountability
Not just for having the conversation and making the decision, but for the decision getting moved into action. You’re also giving people space, before they rush into the next thing, to document what they need to do, so fewer things slip through the cracks or get forgotten or reprioritized around.
And the meeting itself becomes more important every week, because people know you’re really going to do the things you talked about. It isn’t half-baked conversation you come back to every week with updates that don’t move anything. You condense meetings down to real decisions, and then down to real action steps.
Two, you learn what people are hearing
When you ask everyone to run through theirs, you get a sense of what they’re taking away from the meeting and what they might be missing, which may have to do with how you’re driving decisions to clarity. That’s good information for you. You also get a sense of how they’re prioritizing.
Three, you level people up
You’re not going around the room assigning tasks and having to remember what everyone’s supposed to do for them. You’re asking people to remember their own things and keep up with the projects around them and the inevitable changes to their priorities and schedules. That takes something off your plate, the job of being the person who delegates and clarifies every task for every person, and it teaches your team to do it for themselves.
We call it good end-of-meeting discipline. Start every meeting by setting stakes, end every meeting by pushing it to real clarity and accountability, and your meetings will be better than 99.9% of the meetings out there. They might become your favorite part of work. They might become your team’s, too.
— Craig