Effective Meeting Prep – Making a great agenda

Ensuring everyone is prepared for your meeting

Lately, we’ve been discussing Meeting Preparation. 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

Now that you have a sharp objective and know who will be doing what at your meeting, you are well on your way to hosting an effective meeting! Your next step is to make sure everyone involved is prepared to engage at your meeting so that you can make the most of your time together.

Hopefully while sharpening your objective, you were able to narrow down the best medium for your meeting. Whether you are having an audio conference, video conference, web conference or face-to-face meeting, you should create and share a meeting agenda.

Creating and sharing a meeting agenda in advance has many benefits:

• Communicate your meeting objective in a clear, meaningful way.
• Inform members of discussions to come, kick-starting their brains into thinking about those topics so they can be better prepared and thus more engaged.
• Provide a reminder of past action items in case your participants have yet to complete their actions.
• Ensure adequate consideration of all issues, events and projects.
• Keep the discussion focused and on track.
• Show that you are committed to making effective use of your team’s time and resources.
• Give participants the ability to decline a meeting. If they know they cannot contribute to the achievement of the objective, they should have the ability to opt out. You don’t want to waste your time or theirs.

The meeting agenda should include:

• The meeting objective
• An upfront contract or meeting guidelines

o Here you expressly layout exactly what you expect from your meeting attendees. Let them know they should be prepared to discuss and offer suggestions. Request that all other communication (e-mails, phone calls, private discussions, ect) be put off until after the meeting. Having an upfront contract lets the attendees know what you expect of them and that you take this meeting seriously.

• The roles your participants will fulfill during the meeting
• A list of topics to be discussed
• Time allotted for each topic/ speaker
• The notes, action items and/or minutes from the last meeting
• A list any materials they need to review before the meeting

If needed, review this agenda with your guest speakers and/or facilitators. When sending the agenda to all participants, allowing enough time for their own meeting prep to take place.

If you want to have a successful meeting, your first step is preparation. By sharpening your objective, identifying the right people to invite and making sure everyone is prepared, you can make sure your next meeting is an effective use of everyone’s time.

“There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work and learning from failure” – Colin Powel.

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