Eight useful tips to make your meetings better!

I have been asked often by colleagues and participants to share useful tips for fostering deep discussion and engagement during regular meetings. Having run about a dozen courses for over 250 senior leaders from all walks of life, as well as nine courses for entire UN country teams, my team and I are well versed in a number of different methods that create a safe space for sharing and learning. These methods have helped us on numerous occasions to overcome group biases and tap into everyone’s ideas. So, without further a due here are my top eight training tips that can also apply to meetings:  

1. Think about the setting 

People are creatures of habit. We know from neuroscience that any routine generates cognitive ease; fluid connections help us to relax and go with what we know. However, if we want people to be open to new ideas, they should feel safe and comfortable and yet be open to create new neural connections. Make sure the environment is pleasant but holds surprises: convene in unusual places, transform the room into a space that the group ‘owns’ by putting up the flip charts, drawings (yes, drawings!) and other outputs they generate throughout the meeting. Creating special moments, allowing for deep sharing and honest reflection brings about emotions that anchor the memories and A-Ha moments in ways that a regular delivery, solely based on facts and figures, would never be able to do. 

2. Mix the seating arrangement and use the space provided well 

 In order to foster dialogue and discussion, ideally everybody should see everybody, or at least be easily able to turn to each other. A lecture style plenary room with screwed chairs is not conducive for this. Ideally you should have a flexible space where you can move chairs and tables around as you wish. If you can, use round tables as ‘islands’ for 4 – 8 people, depending on the size of your group. Sometimes, removing the tables and creating a circle of chairs is a good way to keep participants off their electronic devices so they can really focus on the conversation. 

Make it a rule to use the time spent together to get to know each other. In real life, we tend to gravitate toward the people we already know and trust or the people we want to be seen with. Mix up participants so that the usual suspects don’t sit together.  Use name tags to help decide the seating order. You could also give the seating tables a theme and let people draw cards that relate to the theme. In a recent training in Kuwait for public health professionals, I designated one table as the ‘doctors’ table and used the names of famous medieval doctors from the Arab World. Another table was called ‘concepts’ and recapped some of the concepts discussed during the training. 

Use the space in the room to alternate how and where participants discuss to help you keep things active and their bodies moving.  During breaks, suggest going for a quick walk outside, the more active the conversations are and the more strongly they are connected to an emotional memory or a special situation, the more likely it is that the information and lessons will be remembered. Remember that conversation around a campfire by the beach ten, twenty years ago…? Even if you don’t have the campfire and the beach at your disposal, you surely have some wiggle room on how to design your setting. 

Asking people to come up with energizers is also a great way to reveal unknown sides of your participants and team members that contribute to building trust and stronger ties.  I have experienced moments where seemingly reserved participants teach the entire group a song or a dance or run an activity I have never heard of. 

3. Set the Rules of Engagement 

Establish ground rules at the start of your meeting. Rather than dictating, ask participants how they would like everyone to behave in order to make the time spent valuable. Encourage members to come up with conducive rules. For example, respect time, listen actively, respect divergent opinions, be honest and many more.   Emphasize that everyone has something to give and receive, no one knows it all; we should let our guard down and ask questions without fear. 

You can also designate ‘eyes’ and ‘ears’ for every meeting. These are two people who take on the role of observing what is said and what they see. It will help you have an idea of how well the group is progressing toward its goal. ‘Eyes’ and ‘ears’ can also spot if people are uncomfortable with some of the methods used, so you can make the adjustments needed to keep everyone engaged, committed and focused 

4. Always clarify why you are there 

Before you start any activity, remind people why they are there. State the objectives and allow expectations to be shared.  This ensures you all are on the same page and will help avoid misunderstandings from the get-go. Ensure people are aware of who is actually there. Even if only one person is new, give them a chance to introduce themselves.  Establishing trust is key, be sure to provide opportunities to connect, by starting with understanding who is present. 

5. Solo Ideation and quick quadrants 

Very often in groups, it’s the same people who speak up and set the tone, yet the quiet ones have contributions, too.  There may also be   power imbalances at play. One way to overcome ‘group think’ and access the ideas and perspectives of all your team members is to ask people to ‘spill out’ their thoughts individually and under time pressure. Ask each participant to write everything that comes to mind on individual post-it notes as quickly as possible and without talking and stick them on a board, door or window. Use only 2 or 3 Minutes for this activity. then ask people to look at the results and cluster them in meaningful ways. You’ll be surprised how much raw material is generated. You can structure this method further by using an empathy map or other quadrants of guiding aspects.  

An empathy map essentially uses a quadrant on a flipchart. You ask people to write on post-it notes what they ‘say’, ‘do’ ‘think’ and ‘feel’ about a certain issue. The empathy map will uncover the complexity of opinions, feelings and attitudes toward the issue quickly and anonymously, allowing structured conversation. Another quadrant you could use is one that asks what the group should ‘continue doing’, ‘stop doing’ or ‘do differently’.  Remember the categories are endless and can be tailored to the conversation that you want to catalyze. The point is that you use the solo ideation as a starting point to widen perspectives, overcome hesitancy to speak, as well as ‘group think’.  

6. Alternate plenary with discussions in pairs or small groups 

 How come the most important conversations often happen in the coffee breaks? One common reason, is the setting is less formal and more flexible, so why not craft some of that flexibility into the meeting agenda, with breaks, peer strolls to ‘walk the talk’ and ‘buzz groups’ (essentially asking people to quickly turn to their neighbor/s) 

7. Voting with your feet, rolling a dice and turning people into statues 

In the same way that we have all become accustomed to the quick Zoom polls in online meetings, you can conduct a physical poll in a face-to-face meeting. The easiest way to get a sense of who is in the room, is to use ‘stand up if…’ whatever you say applies to them.  This is a great way for big groups to get a sense of who is in the room, what characterizes them and where they stand on certain issues.  You can also use this as an energizer when you sense the energy is down and you need people to move a bit to lighten the mood 

If you would like to explore more serious questions, you can conduct a physical poll. Ask your group to silently position themselves ‘where they stand’ on the topic in question. One side of the room becomes ‘strongly agree’ or ‘very much so’ and the other end is ‘strongly disagree’, or ‘not at all’. You can then ask them to freeze, see where everyone else stands; to aid discussion ask a few people to unpack why they placed themselves in a certain position. Deep debates can follow as a result and often also reveal different perspectives 

 When you can, use creativity, ask participants to draw their vision as a sailboat moving towards a shore or draw the journey or process in question through the image of a river with its source, confluences and waterfalls, or as a house that was built with various additions, deep renovations, superficial makeovers and demolitions.   

 You can use images to assess where people stand on their journey of progress along a growth path. One image we like to use is the evaluation tree with people in different places that express how far they have come along and how they feel about it. 

Finally, you don’t need to invent all of this by yourself. In any group you will find a few people who have been exposed to non-formal education that can help  Remember: using different ways of engaging is meant to get people to move out of their comfort zone, but not to put them on the spot! People have different learning styles and personal preferences and come from different cultural and organizational habits which will affect how everyone engages in the meeting. You do need to ‘read the room’ at all times to see how your group members are coming along and check if your rules of engagement need any adjustment to clarify the framework you fix yourselves as a group. 

8. Accountability  

Agreements during the meeting can quickly get blurred by daily life and pressure. Take a moment at the end to record the result of the meeting and give people some time to record their thoughts and commitments. This can again be done in multiple ways, asking them to write down commitments and take-aways, sharing the commitment out loud with all, or just sharing with their neighbor to increase accountability by saying it out loud. 

Final thoughts and Serious fun 

As you can see, none of these tips require money or sophisticated means. All that is needed is true commitment to make the time people spend with each other effective. While these methods are designed to improve training courses, they can also be used in regular meetings in order to bring out all perspectives and lead to better results. These techniques are a fundamental way to strengthen accountability within the group and remind every participant that they have a responsibility toward the result. Sometimes a very small adjustment to the way you conduct your meetings will do wonders in terms of how people think and feel, including what they say about the meeting: and - most importantly, what they do differently as a result!