Effective Meeting Prep – 6 Ingredients for a Successful Meeting

The Essential Meeting Roles

Every successful meeting starts with meeting preparation. There are three main functions of meeting prep.

1. Sharpening your meeting objective
2. Identifying your best participants
3. Ensuring everyone is prepared

Today I want to talk about the second function, identifying your best participants. or the ingredients for a successful meeting. You always want your meeting objective to dictate this process. Often, people get into the habit of inviting the same people over and over to meetings without really linking the meeting objective to the participant list. Since this step is often glazed over, I thought it might be helpful to identify the 6 essential meeting roles. These roles will help facilitate the desired outcome of any meeting, whether they be face-to-face, audio conferences, web conferences, or video conferences. As you prepare for your meeting, look over these roles and make sure each role is filled by your meeting participants.

6 meeting roles

1. Leader/Host/Chairperson – The meeting leader plans and coordinates the meeting. This person sharpens the meeting objective, puts together the agenda, negotiates meeting time, books the venue or selects the meeting means, invites proper attendees, invites helpful speakers and presenters and gathers all necessary resources. The leader manages the meeting process by assigning and communicating meeting roles and expectations.

2. Facilitator/Moderator – The facilitator helps the group through the agreed meeting process and focuses the group on the meeting objective. This person listens actively, asks questions, paraphrases, checks for common understanding, tracks discussions, synthesizes ideas, offers clear summaries, and designs meeting activities with the meeting objective in mind. The facilitator can either be a leader of the group with decision making authority or a neutral third party brought in to maintain focus when the meeting objective is particularly important. Teamings does offer Meeting Facilitation & Optimization Services for more successful meetings.

3. Attendees/Participants – Attendees have a special role to play in each meeting – to be present and fully engaged. They are responsible for coming prepared to each meeting. They can contribute items to the agenda, undertake assigned tasks and report progress. Most importantly they contribute to team discussions, brainstorming sessions, strategic planning and special projects.

4. Support/Meeting Room Manager – Every meeting needs some type of administrative support. Ideally, this support shouldn’t come from the leader or facilitator as they have content and process to focus on. Support roles include technological support (link to meeting room manager blog), venue management, time keeping and minute taking.

5. Speakers/Presenters – Speakers contribute to the content of a meetings. They dedicate time and energy planning and practicing speeches and presentations. They incorporate ways to engage with attendees.

6. Relevant Resources – Resources provide information necessary to support and help guide decisions. These can be industry experts, department heads or anyone else who has the information you need to meet your objective. They answer questions and provide input throughout the meeting.

These are the 6 ingredients to a successful meeting. There are 6 roles, but that doesn’t mean 6 different people will conduct these roles in every meeting. Multiple people can fill each role, just as one person can perform multiple roles for simple meetings. The key is to ensure each role is filled in a way that will best achieve your meeting objective. If your objective is simple, the leader can also be the facilitator, presenter and meeting room manager. If your meeting objective is complex and impactful to your business, you may want to have each role filled by at least one distinctive person. Decide what you want your outcome to be and plan accordingly .

Meeting preparation is key to a successful meeting. As you sharpen your meeting objective and make sure everyone is prepared for your meeting, make sure you are inviting the best participants. Everyone in the meeting should have a role that contributes to your desired outcome. Take the time to identify everyone’s role and your meeting will be better for it.

For more on meeting prep, read Effective Meeting Prep – How to sharpen your meeting objective.

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