Meetings Kit
Making the most of meetings at The Sheffield College.
*Disclaimer - It isn't a complete kit and will grow, reduce and be refined as the year progresses.
You can read about the origin of the 'Meetings Kit' at the link below and then you'll find some other items to provide further food for thought.
It is probably true.. that we spend a significant amount of time in meetings and yet they vary greatly in terms of their impact. The way groups interact, their culture, structure, quality of interaction, expectations and the groupthink dynamics mean that meetings can be prone to encouraging poor decisions, wasting precious time, limiting progress and not delivering the ambition of the people attending.
and.. we are prone to accepting the norm and becoming conditioned to how meetings run and teams interact in our organisation.
It is also probably true.. that there are some excellent teams who squeeze the very best out of their precious meeting time, planning and executing team/group interaction to ensure high impact that secures improvement. It is also probably true.. that highly effective groups, teams and meetings do not happen by chance – they are highly engineered, developed over-time and are based on a set of key principles that need to be developed…because details matter, it’s worth getting it right.
We've all been there: wasting precious time in a meeting that is headed nowhere fast. There are lots of reasons this happens, but often it comes down to a lack of preparation.
Think about it: You can send an agenda in advance, you can provide all the resources your team needs for a productive meeting, but this won't do any good unless people take time to review and think things over ahead of time.
The idea that your people prepare well before every meeting is great, but let's get real: It's simply not going to happen.
And that's what makes the following tactic such a game-changer.
Start with Silence.
- It’s only the most talkative people who are heard
- I need more time to think
- I’m not sure why I’m here
- I’m not sure why we are having this meeting
A thinking meeting is a technique for overcoming some of these barriers to making a meeting effective. The thinking meeting uses techniques that ensure that everyone is heard and that all the participants are engaged in the meeting. Here is how you can run a thinking meeting.
My aspiration for meetings is a campfire - as an outdoor instructor we used to 'wash up' or debrief that day over a brew and the stove. This had a number of effects:
// The noise of a gas stove has a wonderful effect on wellbeing.
// Drinking tea is good.
// The main learning points of the day were shared and we put tweaks in place to improve the experience the next day.
// We decided which aspects of the learning we needed to hang on to like limpets.
Meetings being hijacked are a nightmare, however teachers talking about teaching both formally and informally is an aim worth fighting for. Here are some ways in which this can be made to happen...