In this week's newsletter

• How I made meetings less frustrating
• Warm-up and check-out questions you can use today
• Resource: your meeting objectives cheat sheet
• Your weekly bird break

Several years ago I was extremely frustrated by how slowly a project was moving. I would set a meeting to move the project forward and in the meeting we’d spin on questions about key assumptions that we’d already covered. For months!

I said to a peer coaching group at the time: “I’m so tired of talking about the work instead of doing the work.”

My coach said: “What if ‘talking about the work’ is a critical part of doing the work in your leadership role?”

I began to realize that building trusting relationships on the project team, ensuring all key stakeholders understood the project’s purpose, and understanding what was getting in the way of progress were all critical aspects of moving the work forward.

In the next meeting, instead of pushing for a decision, I set a personal objective to better understand how a key stakeholder defined some of the jargon they frequently used. That meeting made them feel seen and heard and gave me the tools to communicate better with them in the future.

From there, my barometer for a successful meeting shifted. Instead of judging meetings by project milestones alone, I started looking at progress on these critical relational and contextual inputs for advancing work, too. Do we trust each other more? Are we more aligned on why this work matters? Do we better understand obstacles? Are we able to speak the same language about this project?

When I started defining meeting success based on where we actually were and on things I could actually control, I became much less frustrated.

Ask yourself

Try it and let me know what changed when you walked in with this intention.

Meeting Minute

​Warm-up question​

Nothing tells you if your objectives make sense for the group faster than asking this question.

If you’re aligned? Great.

If you’re not? This is your moment to reset expectations for the group about what will and will not get done today OR pivot your plan to meet the group’s needs.

​Check-out question​

Think you were crystal clear and the group knows what to do next?

Double check by asking people to respond to this in the chat or by raising fingers to correspond with the response.

Get some 2s and 3s?

Ask what questions people have or follow-up with folks one-on-one to seek feedback.

​Resource: Quality Meeting Objectives​

Most of us have heard we need to have clear objectives for our meetings, but what does that actually look like?

Every meeting benefits from two types of objectives, and some meetings need more than one of each:

1. Shared These are shared with attendees before and at the beginning of a meeting. This objective helps you prepare, guide the discussion, and gives the group the ability to hold yourselves accountable.
2. Personal These are not shared. They sharpen what success actually looks like for this meeting and guide how you show up as a leader. Think: every person speaks at least once or strengthen my working relationship with a key stakeholder.

There are three criteria for a quality meeting objective:

• Outcome-focused - Name what will be true when the meeting is over, not just the topic.
• Specific - Define exactly what success looks like so you know how you need to lead and whether you got there.
• Realistic - Make sure it’s achievable with the time and people in the room.

Check out my resource on Quality Meeting Objectives for more details, examples, and tips for setting quality objectives.