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Your Strategy Planning Meeting Agenda (with Template)

Have you been asked to pull together a strategy planning meeting agenda? And you’re wondering what other people do in their strategic planning sessions… I’ve been there!

In this article, I’ll explain what a strategic planning meeting can cover and share a sample agenda you can customize for your strategy sessions.

Strategy planning doesn’t just happen. You can’t put people in a room and expect there to be a 3-year plan at the end of it. The conversations need a structure to help keep the pace and ensure the meeting runs smoothly. And that’s where the agenda comes in, as part of your pre-meeting prep.

What should a strategic planning meeting include?

A strategic planning meeting should include:

• A review of organizational objectives
• An assessment of how you are doing against those objectives
• Decisions around what needs to be sped up, slowed down, started or stopped in order to better align activity with the objectives.

If you think about the point of having a strategy discussion, it’s really to either define the strategy or to decide if you are on track with delivering the strategy . What you need to include in the meeting has to tie back to those points.

In other words, what do you want to get out of your strategic planning process? Is it a new strategic plan? An update to the last one because something drastic has changed? A review with some ‘light editing’ to ensure decisions are being taken that keep you on track to meet your goals?

What goes into your meeting (and therefore, your agenda) will very much depend on where you are in the strategy planning cycle.

When do strategic meetings happen?

There’s no fixed cadence for strategy conversations. Some businesses use quarterly meetings. Some might do a lot of planning during the existing structure of board meetings. As long as sufficient time is put aside for strategic thinking, you can set whatever frequency of meeting you like.

I would recommend quarterly review sessions, with a longer goal-setting session once a year, but do whatever works for you. If you are putting together your first strategy or doing a complete overhaul, you’ll need to spend a lot more time on it to get the strategic process set up and the relevant data collected.

Planning a successful virtual strategy meeting

Strategy meetings tend to be quite long. You might put a full day or even two aside for your planning, perhaps another full day the following week for the follow up.

For that reason, it’s often better to do them in-person instead of remote, but do what works best for you and the team.

Personally I would prefer to meet in person as in my experience you get better engagement with the process.

If you have to hold the workshop remotely, with people dialling in, make sure you schedule enough screen breaks. I put a break in at least after every 90 minutes — people just can’t focus for that long.

You can also use breakout rooms to set people up to work in small groups (in person or remotely using your collaboration software) so they can interact more easily.

Sample strategy planning meeting agenda template

Every effective meeting needs an agenda, and the great thing about strategic sessions is that you can tailor the agenda to cover the topics that would be the most valuable to wherever you are in the planning cycle. The strategic planning agenda below assumes you are meeting in-person, and is suitable for a strategic review session.

9.30am: Welcome

Use this time for introductions. Do an ice breaker exercise if your attendees won’t think it is cheesy (mine would).

I start by sharing the meeting objectives and making it clear this is a strategic meeting so people don’t get carried away with the detail. Discuss ways of working e.g. who is capturing what actions, what you’ll do if there is a stalemate for a decision, what decision-making tools you are using.

You might want to introduce ground rules for the session such as

• No taking calls in the room
• Take space, make space
• Share your experience

etc. I think my delegates would find this a little patronizing as they have all worked together for many years, but I can also see that there would be circumstances in which it is appropriate to refresh expectations.

If you think they would value having some guardrails for acceptable behavior during the conversations, then by all means add time for that into the agenda at this point.

10am: Big picture strategy

Present the overall roadmap, for example, a timeline for the 5 year plan. Make sure everyone is clear on where the organization is going and what big chunks make that up. For example, perhaps you have a couple of different portfolios that support the strategy.

You can use this time to talk about the current situation, the company’s strategy and how your department fits into that. This section should answer the question: where are we now?

10.30am: Coffee break

Give people time for a bathroom break and to get something to drink. Bonus points if you provide the coffee!

10.45am: Progress review

Have each executive or leader in the room share their area’s progress against their area of the strategic plan. They can bring in team members to present specific topics if that would help, and if their expertise is needed as part of the debate.

These presentations don’t necessarily need to be formal, but they should cover what objectives the department is working to, how they link to the big picture strategy and whether they are on track. Talk about whether milestones are on track to be hit. Present the budget figures related to the area and the confidence levels around meeting those.

This section of the agenda might be long, depending on how many leaders you have to get round, so adjust the rest of the agenda to fit your timings. I’d suggest everyone gets 30 minutes but it depends on what you think they have to share and how much discussion there will be about each area. If possible, timebox the updates so you keep the meeting moving.

Alternative session: Where do we want to be?

If you haven’t got strategic progress to report, use this time to:

• Brainstorm where you want to be
• Agree where you are going
• Create a vision for the next 3 years
• Document the vision and mission.

12.45pm: Lunch break

Schedule in some time to eat and return calls. I think people get back to the meeting more quickly if you provide lunch in the room.

1.30pm: Key issues

It’s worth parking the discussion of any major issues that affect multiple areas until after everyone has had a chance to present their updates, because then it’s easier to see the bigger picture and what might be affected.

Use this time to review anything that dropped out of the morning’s conversations. There might be new opportunities, challenges, resource constraints, market changes and more.

This section of your day should answer the question: what might stop us from getting where we want to go? Think about the values, skills, culture and risks that might block your progress.

2.30pm: Revise plans

After you’ve discussed the challenges or opportunities that present themselves, go back to the plans and see how that information affects what you are committing to do for the next period.

Agree changes as required. This part of your agenda answers the question: what do we need to do? If you do need to do anything differently in order to get back on track or head off in the right direction, this is where you should be discussing and agreeing.

3.30pm: Action planning

I like action planning! Strategy meetings should be all about decision-making, so you should ring-fence some time to talk about how to turn those decisions into action items . List out what needs to be done and allocate owners and timescales to each.

One thing that should definitely be on the action list is how you are going to communicate the decisions made today to everyone else in the team. Add them to the decision log . Make sure someone is responsible for creating and circulating meeting minutes .

This is an important part of the strategy meeting and it answers the question: how will we do it?

4.30pm: Any Other Business

Use this time for the ‘one last thing’ that people want to bring up. If you’ve had a parking lot up on the wall, check that all the topics have follow up actions planned so the conversations can continue outside of the room.

5pm: Wrap up and close

Finally, wrap up the meeting, draw it to a close and if you are going to meet again, put the date in the diary. Then go down the pub!

Tailoring the strategy agenda

As you’ve probably realized, there is no one-size-fits-all strategy meeting agenda that will suit every need. If you are starting from scratch and are using the time to write your strategy, you’ll need to put time aside for brainstorming new ideas, a presentation of market research analysis or feedback from customer focus groups.

If you are reviewing the projects that make up the strategy, you might bring each project manager in to present their project, before discussing as a team what initiatives need to be brought into the portfolio to ensure the strategic goals can be met.

The important thing is to always go back to the why: why are you meeting and what do you want to get out of the time? You can’t go wrong if you start there.

5 Considerations for a strategy planning workshop

So you’re ready to draw up that meeting agenda. Here’s what to consider before you get going.

1. Set the objective

I like to write the objective for any meeting at the top of the agenda. It helps focus people’s minds and keeps the conversation on track. Think about what you are meeting for and what the leadership teams are expecting to get out of it. Here are some examples:

• To define the 5-year growth plan for the organization
• To establish the projects we want to focus on to meet our strategic goals for the next 12 months
• To review the new products we intend to bring to market in the next 3 years
• To set the IT agenda for the next 24 months

You can hold strategic planning workshops for departments, teams or for the business overall. You can plan for the long term or adopt a rolling wave planning approach to plan ongoing. So which is it for you?

2. Let people know what is going to happen

Set expectations for the meeting. Let people know what contributions are expected from them. What do they need to prep in advance? Ask them for their agenda items – you might not include them as ‘real’ agenda items but it would help to know what talking points they intend to bring up.

Share any papers, timelines, business cases, strategy documents etc that make useful background reading. The more ready people are to contribute, the more you will get done during the meeting.

3. Prepare for conflict

As the meeting facilitator, you’ll have a good idea of the topics that will come up. And the potential flashpoints. For example, there are always conversations about budget. Doing anything strategic seems to cost a lot, and investing in one area means another area doesn’t get the investment.

Try to spot any sources of potential disputes in advance so you have pre-meeting conversations to manage expectations and ensure everyone comes to the session with an open mind (and the data to support their case). Healthy debates are to be encouraged!

Think about how to resolve conflict as a team if you can’t get to consensus. There are several group decision-making techniques you could try. In my experience, it’s often the most senior person in the room who makes the final call – strategy is not always a team game. It might not feel fair, but there are often political, economic, commercial and environmental reasons for decisions that might not always be clear to everyone in the room.

Whatever you think the outcome might be, have a few phrases to help facilitate the debate if it seems attendees are getting stuck. For example:

“Ultimately, it’s Fiona’s decision. Fiona, what do you want us to do?” “Let’s continue this conversation for another 10 minutes and if we aren’t able to reach a decision at that point, I suggest that Henry and Priya book some time to review and come back to us with a recommendation next week.” “IT are the guardians of that process. Do you agree to that approach?”

4. Prepare to go off script

I’ve been in strat planning meetings where we started with an agenda and then went totally off script… and the output was all the better for it. It’s great to have an agenda, and the template above gives you a starting point, but if it feels like the right thing to do is to delve into a particular area, then do it.

Strategy is too important to shortcut. If it feels like the meeting is taking longer, just say: “This feels like an important topic. Is everyone OK with staying with it for a little longer?” or “That isn’t something we were going to cover today but it sounds like it’s important that we get into it. Does everyone agree?”

Talk about what needs to be talked about. Strategy work takes time. The agenda is there as a guide but sometimes you just need to get it all out on the table.

5. Define success

What would a successful meeting look like? Sometimes it’s going to be OK to just talk and debate until you get to the heart of your strategy. Other times you might want to go all in on a brainstorming session and success will look like 20 new ideas.

It might be that you want to gain agreement on three new projects or prepare an update to go to the next board meeting. Think about what would constitute a successful outcome and try to guide people towards that.

Your next steps

• Agree the goals of your strategy meeting
• Write the agenda
• Socialize some of the ideas
• Adequately prepare for the session so you feel ready to facilitate it

In this article you learned what to include in your strategy planning meeting agenda and what considerations go into planning a successful strategy workshop. Don’t forget to grab a free action log template to record all the good stuff that comes out of your meeting. I hope it goes really well for you!

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Project manager, author, mentor

Elizabeth Harrin is a Fellow of the Association for Project Management in the UK. She holds degrees from the University of York and Roehampton University, and several project management certifications including APM PMQ. She first took her PRINCE2 Practitioner exam in 2004 and has worked extensively in project delivery for over 20 years. Elizabeth is also the founder of the Project Management Rebels community, a mentoring group for professionals. She's written several books for project managers including Managing Multiple Projects .

How to Conduct a Business Plan Meeting or Strategy Meeting

Doing a business plan meeting will help you stay on track throughout the next 12 months. Follow this strategy meeting agenda to review your business plan goals, make tweaks to your business plan direction and update timelines and accountability so that you are farther along one year from now.

Quick note: you can download a free sample business plan for several different industries from MoreBusiness.com. Then, edit the business plan to create a custom one for your company.

Table of Contents

Business Plan Meeting

While many companies hold their meetings in January, the time of year doesn’t matter. If you haven’t updated your business plan in over a year, set up a time on your calendar to do it as soon as possible.

You can have your strategy meeting offsite, like a strategic planning retreat, or in your office. Offsite strategy meetings often include team building activities as well as strategic business topics.

We hold our meetings at our office over 5 days, 2 hours per day in the mornings. After each business planning session, we take the team out for lunch (or have it catered in). This allows us to break up the day and keep the creative juices flowing. It also allows our team to keep up with their normal activities in the afternoon so client issues are addressed.

Our goal is to dive deep while having fun. Here’s how we do it. Read our strategy meeting agenda below or watch this 6-minute video:

Strategy Meeting Agenda

Every business plan meeting is broken up into specific topics that we cover. We prepare a strategy meeting agenda for everyone to follow and take notes on.

We also make it a point to connect regularly throughout the year. Doing so helps us make sure we are on track to meet each milestone and enables us adjust the plan as necessary.

1. Create a List of Accomplishments and Shortcomings

It’s important to evaluate where you have been before you can figure out where you are going. You must know what worked and what didn’t. Take an honest look at your business and create a list of what you did well (accomplishments) and what didn’t go so well (shortcomings).

We go through accomplishments first and write a large list on our white board. We take a picture so nobody has to transcribe the list while we are shouting out answers.

Inevitably, during our discussion of shortcomings, we remember other accomplishments so we have a blank space on the white board to write those down.

Encourage your staff to speak without feeling shy about the answers. How comfortable they are in sharing their thoughts is a reflection of your company culture .

2. Review Company Values

Everyone at our company has a framed list of company values in their office. The list is simple, about 4 lines. It provides a lens from which we can ensure that new goals are in line with what is important to us.

This part of the strategy meeting agenda is usually fairly quick, but it is an important reminder that sets the stage for the next series of topics.

3. Answer These Strategic Planning Questions

This is the longest portion of your strategy meeting. Talk about SWOT – strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Look at your competitors to see what they are doing better than you and how you could change to compete.

Ask questions like these and take notes without judging any comments:

• What are our biggest sources of revenue?
• What are our smallest sources of revenue?
• How much time does each revenue source take to service?
• If we stopped providing low revenue products and services, how would that impact the company? Would it free up time to focus on high revenue opportunities?
• What is our competition doing that we aren’t? If we offered something similar, how would that affect our revenue and expenses? Would it change our focus?
• What new lines of products or services should we consider adding?
• Have our customers been requesting something that we aren’t providing?
• What changes are occurring in our industry that could affect us?
• Are there any new or pending laws that will impact sales or customers? Should we lobby our legislators to change these laws?
• What are our financial goals for the next 12 months? 24 months?
• How will we get there?

Your mission at this step in the strategic planning process is to come up with key goals that make sense – and that you can measure (more on that next).

Remember to look at each item with your company values in mind. If a new product idea doesn’t line up with your values, it will not be a good fit for your business.

Next, take the time to create a list of all of these ideas and tasks.

4. Rank Each Task by Difficulty, Value and Priority

Once you have a detailed list of ideas for the next 12 months, you need to prioritize them. Every company has limited resources. If you focus on irrelevant activities, you will limit your growth. Setting priorities is an essential part of your strategy meeting agenda.

Next to your newly created list of goals, add three columns: difficulty, value, and priority. You will assign a number from 1-10 for difficulty and value and 1-3 for priority.

Difficulty : start by ranking each goal or idea in terms of difficulty to accomplish, 10 being the hardest. The difficulty should be higher for tasks that require longer time commitments to complete.

Value : rank each task by the value it brings to the company as a whole, not to an individual employee. Use 10 as your marker for having the most value. For example, if adding a new product line would create a significant revenue stream, that task would have a high rank. Look at each task as “nice to have” vs. “must have” to sort out what will provide the most value.

Priority : once you have ranked each task’s difficulty and value, you can set a priority. Tasks that have low difficult and high value should get a high priority since they are the easiest to do and will provide you with quick benefits. Give those a priority of 1. Tasks with high difficulty and low value should be marked with a priority of “Not Yet” to indicate they are not the best bang for your buck at this time.

This process enables you to determine which tasks should bubble to the top of your action item list.

5. Set Milestones and Assign Accountability

Create a spreadsheet for each quarter that lists each task and who is responsible for working on it. Add deadlines and milestones so you can tell if you are on track.

Monthly Meeting

Don’t invest all the time to hold a strategy meeting and then let your action items sit on a shelf collecting dust.

Schedule a monthly meeting to review your strategic planning goals. This means you will have just 3 meetings per quarter. Use these high level meetings to make course corrections and adjustments to your plan.

You should also meet weekly to go over specific tasks that dive into the details of each high level goal. These weekly meetings supplement that strategic topics covered in each monthly meeting.

Download MoreBusiness.com’s agenda for a  one-on-one meeting  (it’s free) to plan and track meetings with each team member.

Over time, you may find that some of the goals from your strategy meeting are no longer appropriate. Be flexible enough to recognize that you may need to make changes before your next business plan meeting.

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How to Lead A Successful Strategy Review Meeting

Ted Jackson

Ted is a Founder and Managing Partner of ClearPoint Strategy and leads the sales and marketing teams.

Transform your strategy review meetings into productive sessions with our guide. Discover how ClearPoint tools streamlines data collection, and follow-up.

Table of Contents

'Hey, are you ready for our meeting?' This is the dreaded question we hear so many times a day, in a work culture filled with meetings. You want your meeting to be the one that people don't dread. The one that has an agenda, clear goals, and everyone is prepared for. Use our guide to make sure that your strategy meetings are the ones that people look forward to (and dare we say, the ones that are fun).

After all, a key part of a successful strategy implementation process is getting everyone "rowing in the same direction." And if you’re a ClearPoint user—or considering using ClearPoint for strategy reporting—we’ve added some guidance around how to incorporate it seamlessly into your meetings, and use it to your best advantage.

ClearPoint Strategy offers a powerful platform that simplifies this process, providing tools to streamline meeting preparation, data collection, and follow-up. With ClearPoint , you can ensure that your strategy meetings are productive, focused, and drive meaningful outcomes.

See ClearPoint Strategy in action! Click here to watch a quick DEMO on the software

Part 1: an introduction to strategy review meetings.

If you want to improve performance in your organization, it all starts with strategy. Strategic objectives are vital to the success of your organization’s future. But, unfortunately, many organizations (nine out of 10 by some estimates) hold strategy review meetings and then fail to execute.

If you want to ensure the success and productivity of these meetings, you need leadership buy-in, and you’ll need to practice some specific steps. This guide delves into the five stages of holding an effective strategy review meeting:

• Defining The Process
• Meeting Preparation
• The Meeting
• Maintaining Momentum

Claim your FREE 40-page eBook to lead effective Strategy Review Meetings

What Are Strategy Review Meetings?

A strategy review meeting is exactly what it sounds like: a meeting focused entirely on strategy. It doesn’t matter what you call it (a business performance review, a data-driven review, a strategic review, a stat session, quarterly reporting, or even just a meeting with your organization’s leadership), there are factors that all strategy review meetings have in common—they are regularly-scheduled meetings that focus on using data to assess and improve progress on a number of priorities within an organization.

Oftentimes board meetings have an element of strategy review and reporting in them.

These meetings are all about strategic objectives (or goals). What is your organization trying to accomplish? Are you making progress toward these goals? What are you doing to improve your performance?

What Not To Do At A Strategy Review Meeting

A strategy meeting does not involve any discussion about operations. In strategy meetings, you should be asking questions like, “Are we showing results? Are we making an impact?” Save questions like, “What have you done this month? Are you on target to finish this project?” for an operations meeting.

In short, operations meetings measure, “Are we doing things right?” while strategy meetings measure, “Are we doing the right things?”

Why Should I Hold Strategy Review Meetings?

Did you know that leadership teams spend less than three hours a month on strategy, and nine out of 10 fail to execute? You need to beat the odds. It’ll require work, but it’s work that is well worth it.

Pre-scheduled, regular strategy review meetings (where all other topics of discussion are off-limits) can help your top management team avoid these common roadblocks. Do any of these sound like your organization?

• Top management teams spend relatively little time together.
• Agenda-setting is unfocused and undisciplined in upper management meetings.
• Top management meetings are not decision-oriented.
• Strategy and operations are usually combined into one meeting, but operations fire-fighting always crowds out strategy.

Both strategy review meetings and operations review meetings give you an opportunity to stop and look at data, but strategy review meetings take things a step further, allowing you to analyze what the data is telling you and make decisions about course-correction and adjustments.

Because it’s so easy to get caught up in day-to-day operations, strategy review meetings serve to keep strategic objectives at the center of the management process.

With strategy “at the center,” your measures reflect your strategic priorities, not just the common measures of the industry you are in. It also ensures that you fully execute on projects rather than just concentrating on your budget (without concern about whether or not projects get completed).

Typically, leadership teams and strategy offices spend one to two days a year developing strategic goals, but then go back to their jobs, where daily operations squeeze out strategy. The binder with all the strategic thinking and planning just gathers dust on the shelf. At the end of the year, organizations look back on their strategy and try to guess what they did well and what they didn’t.

They report on what they did, not what they said they would do. And by doing that, they’re missing something huge.

Let’s look at an example:

An upper-management team of a New England convenience store chain came up with a new strategy—“surprise and delight the customer.” They thought the shopping experience of their typical store was boring and that they needed to “mix things up.” So, every few days, they would reorganize their stores, thinking they were surprising and delighting their customers.

However, by looking at mystery shopper information in strategy review meetings, they learned very quickly that people hated it. Feedback they’d received indicated that the typical convenience store shopper visited that store because it was convenient—it was small and they could get in and out quickly because they knew exactly where to go.

Without regular strategy reviews, the management team would not have realized the negative impact of executing this particular strategy. It proves the old adage, “the only thing worse than bad news is bad news late.”

This story shows how important it is to check in on your strategic efforts. Of course, the realization that “our strategy isn’t the right strategy” isn’t the only reason you need to review your objectives. You may need to consider any of these possibilities: a changing environment, a new technology, budget cuts/increases, as well as a variety of other factors.

The ultimate goal is to implement your strategy. And the first step to making that happen is taking the time to review it. You know what they say, “what gets measured gets done.” But it’s not going to get measured unless it gets looked at.

That’s why it’s absolutely necessary to schedule time to look at your strategy and review it. Only then can you start having an impact.

What Are The Benefits?

Your organization has so much to gain through carrying out strategy review meetings. Here are just a few of the benefits:

Facilitating the identification and subsequent adoption of opportunities for improvement

There are a lot of good ideas that come from discussing key issues more broadly across the organization. For example, an oil and gas corporation communicated their strategy to all of their employees, and part of that strategy identified a target customer segment (middle- to upper-class women who wanted a clean, well-lit filling station and to feel safe while making purchases).

The IT department had already been innovating some near-field communication technology and developed a “speed purchase” tool to help this customer segment meet their needs by not having to pull out a wallet, which increased the speed of their purchase. It was wildly successful, and when it was implemented inside the convenience stores, it made for bigger purchases.

Providing a focused forum to identify winning and struggling areas or departments within your organization

When winning areas have been identified, best practices can be shared and implemented throughout the organization. Conversely, once struggling areas are brought to attention, you can decide if they need additional resources (either financial or human) to alter or invest in their strategy.

You can also pair similar departments to share best practices and support struggling areas.

Helping departments work collaboratively

Strategy meetings force departments to talk about key issues/thematic areas that they need to collaborate on. For example, take a soda company who has decided that by altering the look of their soda cans, they can become more efficient and save money.

Senior leadership thinks it’s a great idea and they move forward. However, the marketing department, who has no knowledge of this change, continues with their previous branding and marketing campaigns. When the error was recognized, the manufacturing changes cause the company to lose money.

A strategy review meeting could’ve helped the company avoid this mess.

Improving transparency and accountability

Strategy review meetings keep leadership informed of what is going on within every level of the organization. They cut through the inevitable force fields so leadership can engage and help mitigate those problems.

In addition, strategy review meetings help reinforce goals for the organization—they help departments feel accountable for progress toward those goals and encourage the work it takes to accomplish them.

Aligning resources and making informed budget decisions

Strategy review meetings highlight departments or programs that may need additional funding to be successful. They are also a good place to see if you are putting your money where your strategy is.

Get your FREE Strategic Plan Review eBook for better organizational direction

Are there any prerequisites for strategy review meetings.

Absolutely. You can’t move forward with strategy review meetings unless these things are in place:

• Dedicated time on the calendar.
• Willingness to learn a new process and approach.
• Resources. Strategy review meetings are not just another staff meeting. They take preparation and follow-up. You will need people and time to make them successful.
• Engaged leadership.

Engaged leadership is the most important prerequisite. We know of a 200-million-dollar operation that decided at the senior executive level that they wanted to develop a balanced scorecard and hold strategy review meetings.

They hired consultants to come in and set up the process—everything was set up for success. However, during the first three meetings, the chief executive would kick-off the meeting, but then leave. In doing this, he signaled to the rest of the organization that there were more important things than their strategy review meetings.

As a result, the process failed within six months. Leadership in the organization sets the standards for what is acceptable and needs to lead by example. Those in leadership positions in your company need to understand “what’s in it for me” and “what’s in it for us,” and commit to spending time and engaging in the meetings.

Part 2: Defining The Strategy Review Process

To ensure successful strategy review meetings, you’ll need to make sure you clearly define the process. This means determining the right meeting attendees and creating a good information-gathering process.

Make sure your meetings are timely based on your organization’s goals. Get the team to buy in to the agenda and the outcomes of the meeting. Because these meetings take time and effort, reduce the burden of the leadership team as much as possible so they’re sustainable.

Who Should Attend Strategy Review Meetings?

Getting the right team in place is extremely important to the success of your strategy review meetings—you need people who understand the organization, can speak with authority, and get approvals. Continuity in attendance is also critical.

This team will more than likely include the CEO (Managing Director, Executive Director, City Manager, etc.), and her direct reports. If you are discussing a particular project, then the project manager should be in attendance. If you are looking at new data, the data collector should be there. If there is poor or exemplary performance in a particular department, then have the director of that department attend. Just make sure you have the appropriate people for the agenda being discussed.

In most cases, you should include staff-level participants. After all, they have the subject matter expertise, and staff are often the parties truly doing the work—they can provide more context for discussions. But think of the staff members as “special teams”—they’re not in the room all the time, but are there to cover specific items as necessary.

What happens if the right people aren’t in the room?

One school district was grappling with recruiting teachers. At their strategy review meeting, they were attempting to delve into the issues surrounding this challenge—in particular, how do they develop a more substantial pipeline of qualified teachers?

The people who could have answered that question, however, weren’t there. The talent management chief and HR representative were both absent, so they couldn’t shed light on what they had tried that didn’t work or what particular challenges they needed help overcoming.

Without these people in the room, the discussion around this challenge proved useless, frustrating for all involved, and no decisions could be made.

Who Should Not Attend Strategy Review Meetings?

There are a few reasons why someone shouldn’t be invited to these meetings. Here’s a list of criteria you should run through to make sure you aren’t choosing the wrong people:

• Don’t invite someone at the wrong level of your organization that might misconstrue the discussion, or that wouldn’t be a good representative.
• Don’t invite someone who wouldn’t know what to divulge to others and what to keep to themselves.
• Don’t invite someone who can’t see the big picture outside of their project, or one who wants to discuss the details of their project ad nauseam.

At a strategy review meeting, participants do not need to know strategy specifics (like the next topic of your marketing department’s ebook). They just need to know if a particular strategy is on track and on budget. If there are problems, then they should be discussed, but the meeting participants shouldn’t get entangled in the details.

When Should Strategy Review Meetings Be Held?

As a basic rule, you should always make sure your meetings are timely. When scheduling, ask yourself, “When is new data available?”

If the meeting focuses on your fall strategy, then it should be held quarterly. If your meeting is thematic or department-focused, then it should be held more frequently—monthly or every six weeks.

In general, quarterly meetings should be held within 30 days of the end of the quarter, and monthly meetings should be held within 10 days of the end of the month.

For example, a line manufacturing organization has their meetings on the tenth day after the end of each monthly close. Data is due on day seven, a review document is sent on day eight, and the information is discussed on day 10.

The meeting isn’t focused on how many widgets have been produced—it’s more about adjusting to more profitable widgets and customers, improving the forecasting process, planning for raw material costs, and developing new partnerships in appropriate niches.

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How do i get these meetings started.

Since these meetings take time and require team buy-in, here are some tips to help get things started:

• Check out the current executive meeting calendar. See what meetings can be modified or replaced. Try your best not to add to meeting time—instead, try to make better use of the meeting time you already have. If the leadership team already meets weekly, see if you can adjust one of the meetings each month to be more focused on strategy. If the team already meets monthly, see if you can adjust one meeting each quarter for strategy.
• Ensure that the top executive is engaged in and supports the process. They need to be able to take on a leadership role during the meeting. They may need to be engaged in the preparation depending on the subject being discussed.
• Create a set of common objectives and benefits for each of the team members invited.
• Include departments in meeting design. This will ensure that it is a collaborative process and will help with organizational buy-in. The success of these meetings hinges not only on leadership engagement, but also getting an organization to work together in providing timely data reporting . Departments should feel like willing participants and see these meetings as a useful tool to improve program performance.
• Be realistic when you start. At first, these meetings will seem like a lot of work. That’s because they are. They’re both a different way of reporting and a different way of managing. But, over time, with commitment, the meetings will get better and more effective. It’s not unusual for meetings to shrink as much as 75% in length as the participants get used to the format.

It’s not unusual for meetings to shrink as much as 75% in length as the participants get used to the format.

How Should Strategy Review Meetings Be Structured?

How Can I Reduce The Burden?

These meetings are a lot of work. So, to the extent possible, put standardization processes in place. Determine a set calendar for meeting dates and reporting deadlines, and then stick to it.

Standardize forms for collecting data or invest in online reporting tools that can greatly reduce staff burden and free up time for them to do a more substantial data analysis. This will generate better discussion at your meetings.

Standardized processes can include the following:

• Data-collecting forms .
• A timeline —from sending out the data call, to the meeting invitations, to sending a follow-up note and so forth.
• Invite lists —have consistent invite lists for each meeting.
• Key contact lists —know who to contact for what in each department. Is there a contact within the department who can coordinate data collection, notify you of staffing changes if someone else should now be attending the meeting, and answer any clarification questions you have around the data or program specifics?
• A process for capturing and monitoring action items —if this follows a set model every time, you are less likely to get pushback.
• A process for data collection and report generation —after you conduct two or more meetings, this will be easier to work on automating.

If your organization is new to using strategy reporting software, then an important part of this first stage should be to consider how that software tool will be integrated into your meetings and reporting preparation.

Companies that use ClearPoint not only spend less time on reporting, but they also have more focused and productive strategy meetings than those using Excel, SharePoint, or any other reporting alternative .

Some things you can do that will set the stage for success are:

• Determine which members of your team will be using the software. Give them step-by-step instructions on how to update their data, including screenshots.
• Document the processes for updating information within ClearPoint and creating the reports needed for the strategy meeting. This is important in case of turnover or employee absences.
• Set up the various summary reports you’ll be using within your ClearPoint account. Review them with users and explain their significance.
• Determine and set user permissions based on roles and responsibilities for reporting.
• Create RAG (red, amber, green) status rules that will define how each of your elements is performing.
• Provide links to the ClearPoint login page and a link to the support center.

Part 3: Meeting Preparation

Schedule a meeting time and collect the necessary data. Make sure you receive all the data in enough time to analyze it and write a report. Then, create an agenda and send it (along with the data analysis report) to meeting attendees in advance so they can prepare. It’s important to pave a path of success starting with the first meeting—teach meeting participants exactly what strategy review meetings are, establish a tone of trust and collaboration, and adopt a decision-making process.

1. Schedule A Meeting Time & Prepare Data

Once you put your meeting on the calendar, it’s time to begin collecting data. Here are some things to think through and action steps to take as you begin the preparation process.

• Make attendance mandatory. When necessary, draft emails for leadership to send to ensure that everyone who needs to be in the meeting is there. This is where leadership commitment comes into play. A strategy review meeting without the right people in the room is an expensive waste of time.
• Limit the number of participants. Conversely, too many people can detract from the conversation. Make sure the people in the room are people who might be called on to actively participate in the meeting.
• Request accurate data in a timely manner. Inevitably, some departments will be late providing this information, or out on vacation when you need it, so make sure the meeting is scheduled out far enough in advance so that there is ample time to gather the data. (Do not reward late behavior—if you don’t have the data necessary, just skip the review and force those with the missing data to lead the discussion the second time.)
• Review data. Go through the most recent data and write an analysis about trends or emerging issues. Keeping consistent charts for presenting data is really helpful and will speed up your meeting.
• Update status indicators. Update green/yellow/red status indicators for each measure and initiative.

Make a report. Include data, your data analysis, and status indicator updates. Remember to keep your report format consistent from one meeting to the next.

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2. create an agenda, what to cover.

To ensure that you’ll be using your meeting time wisely, think through these questions as you begin to develop your agenda.

• The focus of the meeting should be on making decisions, not having discussions.
• Operations meetings should be separate from strategy meetings.
• Before you add an item to the agenda, measure it’s real value.

To help you as you’re choosing topics of discussion, ask yourself questions like:

• Why are we having this meeting?
• What do we need to have accomplished when we are done?
• What are the key issues we should cover?

Keep in mind that a strategy review meeting agenda may just look like a review of goals, measures, and initiatives, a validation of strategy, and a continuation of current strategic projects and direction. Every meeting does not have to include “bet the company” decisions.

An Example Agenda

3. Get People Ready

You’ll need to prep the leadership and attendees effectively if you want your strategy review meeting to be a success. Provide materials ahead of time so they can familiarize themselves with the content and formulate their own questions.

This means once you’ve finished writing the report of your data analysis and created an agenda, you should send them to both leadership and participants immediately. The data should be presented with recommended decisions in advance of the meeting. If everyone comes to the meeting prepared, it will allow for a more efficient use of time.

Sending recommendations before the meeting doesn’t mean a decision has taken place—it just allows the leadership team to prepare appropriately. To ensure that this is successful, consider pre-presenting and talking through the materials with leadership.

Feel free to be open about what will be discussed so that everyone is prepared and feels that the process is transparent. (This will also help to make sure that the right people are in the room.)

4. Make The First Meeting A Success

• Provide training on why you’re doing these meetings and how they should be run. (For example, share this post with the team.)
• Give an overview of the language and provide a tutorial session on performance measures because not everyone speaks that language.
• Teach or brief all participants on what strategy review meetings are and what they are not. Make sure people understand the difference between strategy and operations, and ownership vs. accountability.

- Strategy : A strategy is a long-term plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal. Strategy is differentiated from tactics or immediate actions with resources at hand by its nature of being extensively premeditated, and often practically rehearsed. Strategies are used to make the problem or problems easier to understand and solve. Organization strategy typically describes a future state, as well as the process of getting to that place. Some people describe it as a destination, as well as a description of the road to take in order to get to the destination.

-Operations : The daily and weekly job of ensuring that your standard procedures are operating as expected.

-Ownership : In regard to strategy review meetings, this is the person that is responsible for knowing and understanding particular objectives or goals. They would be responsible for reporting about the progress being made to achieve the objectives and the actions being taken to close gaps.

-Accountability : This term usually goes hand-in-hand with “ownership,” and implies that a person is not only responsible for knowing and understanding particular objectives or goals, but is also responsible for the achievement of key measures. This is not always the case in a strategy review meeting because many of the goals require multiple people and teams across the organization to work well together to achieve the goals.

• Consider scripting the first meeting, or having an outside facilitator sit in the first few meetings to ensure the process works (even if decisions aren’t made or the discussion is not high quality yet).

Setting the right tone is extremely important—it should be one of trust and collaboration. Establish principles to build that trust. For example, trust can be built by providing a framework for the review process and collaboratively agreeing on the principles by which the review would operate.

Decision-Making

There are two extremes in a decision-making process. One is when those on a leadership team talk, come to a consensus on the issue, and then move forward. The other is when a CEO or director makes a decision—he or she might use input from the leadership team to inform the decision, but the final decision is made by an individual.

What is your decision making process? Would everyone in your organization agree or is the process unclear?

Whatever the case, make sure you adopt a common decision-making process. Below is an example of one that could be held in your organization. Be especially cognizant of how step four works (making a decision).

ClearPoint ’s strength is in preparing the reports that serve as the basis for strategy meetings.

Preparing, requesting, and reviewing data is easier in ClearPoint than any other strategy software available. Set up the various automations that will save you time:

• Automatic data uploads pull data from your specified sources on a schedule.
• Automatic reminders nudge users to update manual data, projects, and qualitative information.
• Automatic evaluations objectively assess your strategic elements based on your predetermined criteria (whether you’re on or off target)
• An automatic report generator produces your monthly reports on schedule.

Design your meeting agenda in ClearPoint in the format of a summary report, with each item on the agenda hyperlinked to the associated report for easy access to the data.

Schedule automatic sending of pre-reads to anyone taking part in the meeting, so participants can prepare their thoughts ahead of time. Reports and agendas can be exported as PDFs, posted on intranets, or even printed as hard copies. Having that distribution flexibility makes it possible to get more people involved in strategy and leadership decisions; it also keeps information consistent and organized across many divisions.

The bottom line: ClearPoint’s automation features save a ton of time—you can create and distribute reports just a few days after month-end. Compare that to the time it would otherwise take to manually collect data and build new PowerPoint decks meeting after meeting, and you can easily see how beneficial it is to use software!

Part 4: The Meeting

Encourage candid dialogue and critique in the meeting itself—people tend to want to focus on the positives, but discussing the negatives is critical. Take notes about everything discussed, including action items, so that the meeting is productive. It’s important to use your participants’ time wisely, so don’t be afraid to keep everyone task-oriented. (Use that agenda you created!)

In order to stay on track, do a “pulse check” every so often—if your conversation has gotten off-topic or more in-depth than you thought it would, consider saving it for another meeting and moving on.

Meeting Tips

• Look at yourself critically. People want to put a positive spin on things. Don’t. If there is negative information, it should be included and even a focus of the meeting.
• Use participants’ time wisely. Keep meetings to an appropriate length. Use “bullet formatting” instead of narrative to elucidate important points.
• Use facilitation techniques. Don’t let the meeting agenda get derailed.
• Have a “parking lot” for issues that arise that may warrant further discussion but are not appropriate for this meeting.
• Stick to the agenda at all times if possible. Try to adjust for a future meeting, but not the current meeting. Remember, you are changing behavior and teaching people to use time effectively.
• Promote candid dialogue. Encourage people to speak up. Make sure they know that this is not meant to be punitive, but a collaborative process driving a continuous dialogue. This may need to be prompted in the first few meetings.

Someone should always be jotting things down. You need to be capturing action items, recommendations, and decisions during the meeting.

There are two types of action items—those that are already approved by the leadership, and those which are potential action items that will be identified for the future. The potential actions items need to go to leadership for approval, which takes time and planning. Those action items might be relevant for discussion and consideration at future review meetings.

Once the meeting is through, review action items as a whole to ensure consensus and assign responsibility and due dates. Make sure you have accountability for every action item before leaving.

Stay On Track

What do you do if your meeting derails? Try scheduling breaks and determine if the content you are working on is appropriate for this particular meeting.

Do a “pulse check” every so often. Are we going to make a decision now, or should we have a separate meeting? Is this something we should table or ask a smaller team to make more progress on before it comes back to this team of people? Some difficult decisions could be worth sending your agenda off track. However, if you think you have an additional half hour of discussion left and you don’t think you’re going to make progress, then it’s not worth it to keep discussing it.

If you know your leadership team gets distracted regularly, try starting the first meeting with two questions: “What typically derails these meetings? How can we prevent that during this meeting?” This will give the facilitator permission to keep the meeting on track.

ClearPoint helps keep the discussion focused during strategy meetings. We recommend using conference room screens to project and easily view summary reports, which you can then use as a visual for your various discussion points as you run the meeting.

In addition:

• Take advantage of the fact that all your strategy data is housed in ClearPoint. You can quickly and easily drill down into supporting data to help explain performance if questions come up.
• Take meeting notes directly in ClearPoint as they are discussed, capturing action items, recommendations, and decisions.
• Review the action items at the end as a group to ensure consensus, assign responsibility, and attach due dates.

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Part 5: the follow-up.

The meeting can’t be a success without following up afterward to make sure action is taken on the decisions that were made. Distribute the notes you took during the meeting to both the meeting participants and anyone else in the organization who needs them.

And set up a process for tracking action items and due dates so things don’t slip through the cracks. Throughout the process, think critically about your measures.

You Aren’t Done Yet

• In order for strategy review meetings to be a success, you can’t just walk away when the meeting is over. There are several follow-up steps you need to take.
• It’s important to distribute notes to meeting attendees within 24 hours of the meeting—this is when decisions are fresh and enthusiasm is high. Don’t miss this window of opportunity! Actions happen most often after meeting minutes are released.
• Make sure you’re communicating with everyone necessary. Depending on the meeting and the content, you may want to send a second set of meeting notes to the rest of the organization to ensure that key decisions have been communicated.
• Next, set up a process for tracking action items and due dates. Reach out to responsible parties to do a status-check on action items or send reminders a week or two before they’re due.
• Finally, at start of the subsequent review meeting, review and recap each of the action items.

Think Critically About Your Measures

• Remember to use your meeting to re-assess your performance measures. Which measures are working well and should be kept? Which performance measures should be dropped or replaced because they aren’t really telling us how the objective is doing?
• Manage any changing of measures to be proposed outside of the meeting and run future meetings with the current and the proposed to get consensus that the proposed is providing better information than the current, not just a rosier picture for the person accountable for the measure.
• Try to make sure targets are not constantly changing during the year, but do note underperformance or major shifts in the assumptions around the initial target setting process. (If targets are constantly changing, then the organization loses focus and any sense of urgency or realism to a strategic planning process.)

At the end of the meeting, review the list of action items you created in ClearPoint . Distribute the notes you took during the meeting to both the meeting participants and anyone else in the organization who needs them, within 24 hours (when decisions are fresh and enthusiasm is high!). Make sure the relevant people can access the data in ClearPoint as they work to complete their action items before the next meeting.

Part 6: Maintaining Momentum

Sustainability is about culture change. You need to generate an understanding of the process and get buy-in—make sure everyone involved understands what the process is and why you’re doing it. (Especially leadership.)

Work on continually improving and streamlining your processes in order to reduce the burden on everyone involved; make the procedure for each meeting repeatable.

Keeping Momentum Is About Establishing Good Habits

Your goal should be making the strategy review process a part of your company’s “business as usual.” Keep the meetings relevant and leadership engaged.

How do you ensure that senior leadership engagement? First and foremost, make sure decisions get made in your meetings. The meetings need to be focused solely on strategy with active and candid dialogue in order to get things accomplished. Other than the meeting itself, leadership involvement isn’t particularly time-intensive, so capitalize on the time that they are involved.

Then, make sure results happen based on the decisions you make so leadership can see that it is making a difference.

Identify lessons learned and how to improve the process going forward. Again, make sure your meetings stay relevant. Rate the quality of each meeting after it’s finished—what would you change? How could you do it better? Listen and react quickly as a meeting facilitator. Work carefully with the top executive to ensure you are delivering value.

You also need to generate an understanding of the process and get buy-in—make sure everyone involved understands what the process is and why you’re doing it. Allow them the opportunity to give feedback/make recommendations. This process is meant to be helpful for everyone, so make sure to work with each department to ensure that the process will also meet their needs.

Make The Process Repeatable

In order to make strategy review meetings sustainable, they can’t be a burden. So make sure they aren’t! A great analyst and reporting staff can make this seamless. Giving access to information on mobile products, sending automated emails, and pre-reading of the highlights are critical.

Follow these steps to streamline your meeting process.

• Ensure a timeline.
• Automate data requests.
• Use technology to standardize the format of your data. A consistent set of charts means that time in meetings will be spent wisely.
• Allow visibility between meetings.
• Don’t allow leadership to miss meetings —make these strategy meetings the most important review meeting each month.
• Ensure you have a clean history of meeting actions and that there is follow-through.
• Constantly check on the value of the meetings. (You may even want to give a simple survey about the meetings after they’re through—have attendees rate the meeting on a scale of 1-5. Ask them what they would change.

ClearPoint makes it significantly easier to maintain the momentum of strategy reporting over the long term. To take full advantage of the software—and ensure you reach your goals:

• Utilize the numerous automation features to reduce the burden of reporting (which means you can focus on strategy instead)
• Allow visibility of strategy data between meetings, to maintain enthusiasm around goal-setting and achievements
• Consistently highlight the links between department and individual performance and organizational goals
• Continuously evaluate your reporting process and meeting effectiveness

Use a Three Year/Five Year Strategic Plan to keep your momentum when going for long term goals

Part 7: mistakes to avoid when leading strategy meetings.

To ensure the success of your strategy review meetings, avoid having the wrong people in the room and unengaged leadership. Stay away from time-consuming prep, but make sure that everyone is prepared enough for the meeting to be effective.

It’s easy to get wrapped up in “the big picture,” so remember that you also need action items and measures you can manage as takeaways from your meetings. And, of course, always follow up. Follow-through on action items is critical to these strategy meetings making a difference in your organization.

Common Roadblocks To Avoid

• Unengaged leadership : We can’t mention this one enough. If your leadership isn’t engaged, then your attendees won’t be either. The future success of your meetings depends on leadership buy-in.
• Poor data quality or poor response to data call : The data won’t be perfect at first—just make sure it evolves. You may have to push departments to provide data at first. It’s okay if participants feel that they don’t have sufficient data—use these meetings as a forcing mechanism for them to start collecting it.
• An improper balance between intermediate outcome measures and output measures : You need to be looking at outcomes and “the big picture,” but you also need action items and measures you can manage.
• Time-consuming prep : Streamlining every process and making things repeatable is crucial.
• The wrong people in the room : Remember, meeting attendees need to understand the organization, be able to speak with authority, and get approvals.
• No follow-up : If there isn’t any follow-up, you’ve just wasted everyone’s time! Follow-through on action items is critical to these strategy meetings making a difference in your organization.
• No valuable discussion : This meeting is not a “show and tell” for everything a department is doing. It is meant to have targeted discussions around key success or problem areas.

Behaviors That Will Derail Your Meeting

People can be as challenging as the process. Don’t allow these few behaviors to get in the way of meeting progress.

• Complexity —don’t allow presenters to get entangled in the details. Keep the conversation at the right level by limiting the agenda and having a facilitator manage what is presented.
• “Siloed” —only present information that is relevant to the strategy for the people in the room. There is no need for a business unit to present information that is not connected to the enterprise strategy.
• Doubting numbers —do not allow any fighting about the numbers. They are what they are. Make it a point to clean up the source for the next meeting, but do not waste time during your current meeting fighting the data. Your meeting isn’t about details—it’s about strategy.
• Forgetfulness —do not tolerate executives ignoring their prep work. Show it as blank and let the CEO or equivalent manage the non-performer. Heap praise on those that are doing great work and contributing. Do everything you can to reward good behavior.

Because ClearPoint was designed specifically to solve the problems that stand in the way of strategy execution, using it will help you avoid most of the mistakes above (with the exception of engaged leadership—there’s not much we can do there!).

ClearPoint :

• Ensures the continuous availability of accurate data. Since ClearPoint can pull data automatically from your various repositories, it makes quick work of gathering the quantitative data your team needs to make decisions. It also helps you get the accompanying qualitative data by sending automated reminders to data owners. Both types of data can be viewed together in ClearPoint for easier decision-making.
• Reduces the manual burden of strategy reporting. We’ve automated 70% of the process, so you can produce reports in a more timely manner—and with fewer man-hours.
• Encourages more productive strategy meetings. Use ClearPoint to create better, more targeted reports. They are easier for participants to understand and follow, and help maintain focus on overall strategy (rather than on operations or individual efforts). It also supports meeting follow-up.
• Provides a balanced view of big-picture organizational goals and measures, projects, and action items. All the data you house in ClearPoint is considered “strategic,” which means it should relate to projects that will help you accomplish your larger goals. The way ClearPoint is set up makes it easy to both keep track of key measures and actions, and how they tie into the big picture.

Don’t just take our word for it—read some of our customer stories to see the positive impact ClearPoint has had on their strategy execution efforts!

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Part 8: important points to remember.

If you want to improve performance in your organization, it all starts with strategy. Strategic objectives are vital to the success of your organization’s future. But, unfortunately, many organizations (nine out of 10 by some estimates) set bold strategic goals and fail to execute.

If you want to increase the odds of success, then you need to have effective and regular strategy review meetings. You’ll need leadership buy-in, and you’ll need to practice some specific steps. There are five stages of holding an effective strategy review meeting: defining the process, meeting preparation, the meeting itself, follow-up, and maintaining momentum.

1. Defining The Process

To ensure successful strategy review meetings, you’ll need to make sure you clearly define the process. This means determining the right meeting attendees and creating a good information-gathering process. Make sure your meetings are timely based on your organization’s goals. Get the team to buy in to the agenda and the outcomes of the meeting. Because these meetings take time and effort, reduce the burden of the leadership team as much as possible so they’re sustainable.

2. Meeting Preparation

3. the meeting.

Encourage candid dialogue and critique in the meeting itself—people tend to want to focus on the positives, but discussing the negatives is critical. Take notes about everything discussed, including action items, so that the meeting is productive. It’s important to use your participants’ time wisely, so don’t be afraid to keep everyone task-oriented. (Use that agenda you created!) In order to stay on track, do a “pulse check” every so often—if your conversation has gotten off-topic or more in-depth than you thought it would, consider saving it for another meeting and moving on.

4. Follow-Up

The meeting can’t be a success without following up afterward to make sure action is taken on the decisions that were made. Distribute the notes you took during the meeting to both the meeting participants and anyone else in the organization who needs them. And set up a process for tracking action items and due dates so things don’t slip through the cracks. Throughout the process, think critically about your measures.

5. Maintaining Momentum

Sustainability is about culture change. You need to generate an understanding of the process and get buy-in—make sure everyone involved understands what the process is and why you’re doing it. (Especially leadership.) Work on continually improving and streamlining your processes in order to reduce the burden on everyone involved; make the procedure for each meeting repeatable.

It is possible to have regularly-scheduled, productive strategy review meetings within your organization. Follow the steps outlined in this guide, and you’ll see what a huge impact it can have on the success of your company!

Maximize Your Strategy Meetings with ClearPoint Strategy Software

Are you ready to lead more effective strategy meetings? ClearPoint Strategy offers the tools you need to streamline your meeting preparation, execution, and follow-up.

Our platform provides real-time data visualization, automated reporting, and seamless collaboration features to ensure your meetings drive actionable results. Don’t just meet—achieve.

Book a demo today and discover how ClearPoint Strategy can transform your strategy meetings into powerful sessions that propel your organization forward.

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How can i ensure that the right people are in the strategy meeting room.

To ensure that the right people are in the strategy meeting room:

- Identify Key Stakeholders: Include individuals who have a significant impact on strategy development and implementation. - Define Roles and Responsibilities: Clearly outline each participant’s role and contribution to the meeting. - Invite Decision-Makers: Ensure that decision-makers and those with authority are present to facilitate effective decision-making. - Consider Cross-Functional Representation: Include representatives from different departments to provide diverse perspectives. - Communicate Expectations: Brief attendees on their expected contributions and the meeting’s objectives in advance.

What are some ways to keep leadership engaged in strategy meetings?

To keep leadership engaged in strategy meetings:

- Set Clear Objectives: Define the meeting’s goals and expected outcomes beforehand. - Facilitate Active Participation: Encourage leaders to share their insights and actively participate in discussions. - Use Data and Insights: Present relevant data and insights to support strategic discussions and decisions. - Highlight Impact: Emphasize how strategic decisions will impact the organization’s overall goals and success. -Follow Up: Provide regular updates on progress and follow up on action items to maintain engagement.

How can I make sure data is collected and analyzed in a timely manner?

To ensure data is collected and analyzed in a timely manner:

- Establish Clear Processes: Set up standardized processes for data collection and analysis. - Use Technology: Implement data management and analytics tools to streamline data handling. - Assign Responsibilities: Designate specific team members to be responsible for data collection and analysis. - Set Deadlines: Establish clear deadlines for data submission and analysis to ensure timely availability. - Regular Reviews: Conduct regular reviews of data collection and analysis processes to identify and address any bottlenecks.

What are some best practices for creating an agenda for a strategy meeting?

Best practices for creating an agenda for a strategy meeting include:

- Define Objectives: Clearly outline the meeting’s purpose and goals. - Prioritize Topics: Focus on high-priority strategic issues and limit the number of topics to avoid overload. - Allocate Time: Assign specific time slots for each agenda item to ensure a balanced discussion. - Include Preparation Materials: Provide relevant materials and data in advance for participants to review. - Set Action Items: Identify expected outcomes and action items for each agenda point.

How can I avoid getting bogged down in the minutiae of operations during a strategy meeting?

To avoid getting bogged down in the minutiae of operations during a strategy meeting:

- Set Clear Objectives: Focus on strategic goals and objectives rather than operational details. - Create a Focused Agenda: Limit the agenda to high-level strategic topics and avoid operational discussions. - Assign Operational Issues: Delegate operational issues to separate meetings or specific team members. - Use a Facilitator: Have a meeting facilitator to steer discussions back to strategic topics when necessary. - Encourage Strategic Thinking: Promote a culture of strategic thinking by encouraging participants to focus on long-term goals and impacts

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How to Run a Productive Monthly Business Plan Review Meeting

Noah Parsons

5 min. read

Updated April 2, 2024

Most people think that meetings are a waste of time. They’re right.

Too many meetings are run poorly, have no real objective, and waste employees’ time—which kills productivity.

There’s tons of advice and information on how to run better meetings and cut down on useless meetings that are making your organization move slower. I absolutely encourage you to  be ruthless in your pursuit of fewer and more efficient meetings .

But, here at Palo Alto Software, we’ve found one meeting that is simply indispensable. It only takes an hour each month, keeps the management team up to speed on everything that’s going on in the company, and helps us plan and manage in a lean and effective way.

This meeting is our monthly plan review meeting. The meeting has been a fixture of our management strategy for years and is simply one of the most effective ways for us to continue to grow the company and adjust our course as necessary.

For us, business planning isn’t just a one-time or annual event. Instead, it’s an ongoing process where we are constantly reviewing our process and adjusting course as necessary while ensuring that we’re  staying on track toward our larger goals .

We treat planning not as a document, but as a management tool  that helps guide decisions and strategy.

Here’s a quick overview of how we structure our monthly plan review meetings and what’s worked for us over the years.

1. Let’s do the numbers

We always start with the numbers first . How did we do last month compared to our forecast? How did we do compared to the same month last year? What does our year-to-date performance look like?

We always spend time drilling into the numbers, beyond the top-line revenue and expenses, to better understand the drivers behind our performance. Did all product lines perform well? Or did some underperform? Did we spend as planned, or were there some areas that we overspent in?

Most importantly, we review our cash position and  cash flow . Did we collect money as planned? What is our cash flow forecast for the next few months?

While financial reports can be reviewed outside of a meeting, reviewing them together as a team encourages questions and discussion around our revenue and spending.

• 2. Are we there yet?

Once we review our financial performance, we review our “ major milestones ”—the big tasks we had hoped to get done in the past month and our plans for the next month.

We discuss how various teams might be working with each other on different projects and talk about the specific milestones that we have planned. Are these still the tactics that we want to work on that will help achieve our goals? Do we need to shift priorities? Is there new learning and information that would have us change our schedule?

By reviewing major initiatives on a monthly basis, we can stay agile  and make changes as needed. As we learn more about our customers and our market, we might shift strategies and develop new milestones.

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• 3. Long-range goals and strategy

Next, we review our long-range strategic goals. While this doesn’t change too often in our situation as an established company, new startups might shift their strategy frequently as they search for a business model that works.

For those early-stage startups, this step of the meeting may be the most important step and take the longest. For more established companies, this part of the meeting might typically only take a few minutes.

Instead of delving deep into a 40-page business plan document to review our strategy, we review our lean plan, or our one-page business plan. It covers our company identity, the core problem we solve for our customers, our solution, competition, and  sales and marketing strategy . It’s  all on one page so it’s easy to read, review, and change quickly .

• 4. Issues to process

Finally, anyone on the team can bring forward any issues that they want to discuss. This could include new opportunities to consider, prioritization of product features, potential partnerships, or internal HR issues.

Everything is fair game and we try to come up with resolutions and next steps for any issue that’s brought up.

We’ve found that this type of open-ended discussion really helps generate new ideas and brings different perspectives from managers of different teams.

I believe that all companies would benefit from a monthly review of their business. These types of meetings keep everyone on the same page, help share information about progress, and turn planning into a tool that helps teams make informed decisions.

To make a monthly strategy meeting successful, you also need to follow a few guidelines:

1. put the meeting on the calendar.

It’s important to make it a formal event that’s on the schedule. It can’t be optional and it has to be at a regular time so that everyone always knows when the meeting is.

For us, we started out with the meeting on the 3rd Thursday of every month. As our bookkeeping and accounting processes have become more efficient, we’ve been able to move our meeting to the 2nd Friday of the month.

2. Follow a repeatable agenda

While different topics will come up for discussion, it’s important that your plan review meeting has a repeatable agenda.

That means making sure that you have your numbers ready for review and that your team has updates on their goals.

3. Be prepared to change the plan

These plan review meetings aren’t just about staying the course and blindly following the plan. Instead, they are about adjusting the plan. Perhaps you’ll discover that you should be investing more in marketing, or that you’re going to be able to expand and hire faster than you originally planned.

The plan review meeting is about making adjustments to your goals and strategies based on what you’ve discovered in the past month.

Noah is the COO at Palo Alto Software, makers of the online business plan app LivePlan. He started his career at Yahoo! and then helped start the user review site Epinions.com. From there he started a software distribution business in the UK before coming to Palo Alto Software to run the marketing and product teams.

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• 1. Let’s do the numbers

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Meeting agenda examples: How to plan, write, and implement

Your agenda tells your team what to expect during a meeting and how they can prepare for it. Ideally, you’ll use your agenda to connect your team with the meeting’s purpose, assign tasks or items to team members, and designate a realistic amount of time to each agenda item. A great meeting agenda maximizes the meeting’s effectiveness and keeps your team on track.

An effective agenda communicates the purpose of your meeting, gives your team the chance to prepare their agenda items, and keeps everyone on track.

Whether you’re preparing for your next board meeting, staff meeting, or business meeting, we’ll help you write an agenda that will maximize your meeting’s potential.

What is a meeting agenda?

A meeting agenda serves as a structured roadmap for your meeting, detailing the topics and activities planned. Its primary role is to provide meeting participants with a clear framework, outlining the sequence of events, the leader for each agenda item, and the time allocated for each task. By having this agenda as a guide both before and throughout the meeting, it helps to facilitate an efficient and productive flow of discussion.

How to write a meeting agenda

Crafting a meeting agenda is a key step in ensuring a focused and productive meeting. Here's how to do it effectively.

1. Clarify meeting objectives

The first step in writing a meeting agenda is to clearly define any goals. In clarifying the goal, be as specific as possible. This specificity helps guide the discussion and ensure that the meeting remains focused. It also helps stakeholders prepare for the meeting.

For example, if the goal is to finalize the budget for the next quarter or discuss new business, participants would come prepared with relevant data and insights.

A well-defined goal also helps set the meeting's tone and align everyone's expectations. This clarity leads to a more structured discussion and a more productive meeting overall.

2. Invite participant input

Inviting input from participants before finalizing the agenda is a critical step in creating a comprehensive and inclusive meeting plan. This involves reaching out to potential attendees and asking if there's anything specific they would like to discuss or add to the meeting agenda.

For example, if you're planning a meeting for a project team, you could send an email asking each member to suggest topics they feel are important to address. This could reveal issues or ideas you hadn't considered, ensuring a more well-rounded agenda.

Incorporating participant input not only makes the agenda more comprehensive but also increases engagement. When team members see their suggestions included, they feel valued and are more likely to participate actively in the meeting. It also ensures that the meeting addresses the concerns of all attendees.

Gathering input can be done through various channels, like email, shared docs, or team collaboration tools. The key is to make it easy for meeting participants to contribute and to ensure their suggestions are considered and, where appropriate, included in the final agenda.

3. Outline key questions for discussion

Making a list of important things to talk about is important for keeping the meeting on track and focused. Start by identifying the main meeting topics that need to be addressed and framing them as questions.

For instance, if the meeting is to discuss the progress of an ongoing project, key questions might include:

What are the current roadblocks in the project?

How are we tracking against the project timeline

What resources are needed to maintain the pace of work?

These questions serve as talking points and a guide for the discussion, ensuring that all relevant topics are covered. They also help in structuring the conversation, making it easier for participants to prepare and engage effectively.

4. Define each task’s purpose

Each task or topic on the agenda should have a clearly defined purpose. This transparency helps participants understand the importance of each discussion point and how it relates to the overall goal of the meeting.

For example, if one of the agenda items is to review recent client feedback and performance metrics, the purpose might be to identify areas for improvement in customer service. By stating this purpose, participants can focus their thoughts on this specific objective, leading to a more targeted and fruitful discussion.

Defining the purpose of each task also helps prevent the meeting from going off track. When participants understand why a topic is being discussed, they are less likely to veer off-topic, making the meeting more efficient.

5. Allocate time for agenda items

Effective meeting management requires allotting time for each item on the agenda. This includes determining the amount of time needed for each meeting topic or task and scheduling the meeting appropriately.

For instance, if you have five items on your agenda, you might allocate 10 minutes for a brief update, 20 minutes for brainstorming, and 15 minutes for discussing action items. This time allocation should be based on the complexity and importance of each topic.

Effective time management requires being realistic with your time estimates and factoring in extra time for unforeseen conversations or inquiries. This approach helps in keeping the meeting within the scheduled time frame, respecting everyone's time, and maintaining focus.

6. Assign topic facilitators

Assigning facilitators for each topic on the agenda can greatly enhance the effectiveness of the meeting. A facilitator’s role is to guide the discussion, make certain that the conversation stays on track, and that all voices are heard.

For example, if one of the agenda items is to discuss sales strategies, you might assign this topic to a senior salesperson. Their expertise and familiarity with the subject can help steer the conversation productively.

Facilitators should be chosen based on their knowledge of the topic and their ability to manage group discussions. They should also be briefed on their role and the expectations for the discussion.

7. Write the meeting agenda

Finally, compile all the elements into a structured and comprehensive agenda. The agenda should include the meeting’s goal, a list of topics to be discussed with their purposes, time allocations, and assigned facilitators. This structure provides a clear roadmap for the meeting, ensuring that all important points are covered.

Share the agenda with all participants well in advance of the meeting. This allows them to prepare and ensures that everyone is on the same page. A well-written agenda is a key tool in running an effective and productive meeting.

Tips to create an effective meeting agenda

Let’s start with some of our favorite tips on creating great meeting agendas so you can make the most of yours:

Create and share your meeting agenda as early as possible. At the very latest, you should share your meeting agenda an hour before the meeting time. This allows everyone to prepare for what’s going to happen. Your team can also relay questions or additional agenda items to you for a potential adjustment before the meeting. Besides, when your team members have a chance to properly prepare themselves, they’ll have a much easier time focusing during the meeting.

Link to any relevant pre-reading materials in advance. This can be the presentation deck, additional context, or a previous decision. Everyone arriving at the meeting will be on the same page and ready to move the discussion forward rather than asking a ton of questions that take up relevant time.

Assign facilitators for each agenda item. Remember that feeling of being called on in school when you didn’t know the answer? It’s a pretty terrible feeling that we’re sure you don’t want to evoke in your teammates. By assigning a facilitator for each agenda item before the meeting, you allow them to prepare for a quick rundown of the topic, questions, and feedback.

Define and prioritize your agenda items. Differentiate between the three categories of agenda items: informational, discussion topics, and action items. Clarifying the purpose of each agenda item helps your team member understand what’s most important and what to focus on. You’ll also want to prioritize which items are most important and absolutely have to be discussed during the meeting and which ones can be addressed asynchronously, should the clock run out.

Use your meeting agenda during the meeting to track notes and action items. That way, all of the meeting information is in one place. If anyone has questions about decisions or action items from the meeting, they have an easy place to find it. Bonus: Do this in Asana so you can assign out action items and next steps to ensure nothing falls through the cracks. Asana also integrates with Zoom and pulls in your Zoom recording or meeting transcript directly into the meeting agenda task.

Create flow by categorizing your agenda items. To maximize productivity, you’ll want to create a meeting agenda that flows well. Batch similar items together and ensure they can build off of one another. For example, list any informational items before the discussion items so your team has all of the information going into the discussion.

Allocate enough time for each item on your agenda. Nobody will complain about a meeting that runs short—keeping everyone longer than anticipated isn’t as much fun. Plan sufficient time for each agenda item by calculating an estimated time and adding a couple of minutes as a buffer. This will help with keeping your team on track and moving on from a topic when the time runs out.

By sticking to these best practices, you can ensure that your meeting agenda is a reliable tool and does the job—before, during, and after your meeting.

Why are meeting agendas important?

Whether you work from home and take virtual calls or sit in the office and meet in person, meetings can be incredibly draining. Beginning with some small talk may be nice to get to know each other better or catch up on what everyone did this past weekend but it certainly isn’t goal-oriented or productive. A meeting agenda can help your team maximize the potential of each meeting you hold.

Our research shows that unnecessary meetings accounted for 157 hours of “work” in 2020, compared to 103 in 2019. Considering a 40-hour work week, that’s almost four weeks of wasted time. This is where your meeting agenda comes in. If you’re doing it right, writing your meeting agenda is the first and best indicator of whether or not your meeting is actually necessary. If you find that everything on your meeting agenda can be discussed asynchronously , you can cancel the meeting and share your message in a time-saving email.

That isn’t to say all meetings should be replaced by emails. If you’re sure that the meeting is justified and necessary in order to drive your team’s progress, have that meeting. However, always make sure that you create an agenda before getting together so your team members know what you’ll be discussing and why the meeting matters.

Here are a few more great reasons to have meeting agendas:

Your agenda allows everyone to prepare for the meeting. Ideally, every item on your agenda will have a dedicated topic facilitator. When everyone going into the meeting knows what their responsibilities are in advance, they have time to prepare and will be more efficient during the meeting.

It shows you’re considerate of your team’s time. When your team receives a well-thought-out meeting agenda, they’ll immediately see that the meeting is actually necessary. Besides, it’s also a roadmap that will keep you on track during the meeting and ensure no time is wasted.

An agenda sets clear expectations of what will and won’t be discussed. Think of a meeting agenda as a way of setting boundaries and ensuring that only topics on the agenda will be talked about. If anything comes up during the meeting that needs to be discussed, write it down in your minutes and return to it later. Either at the end of your meeting—if you got through it faster than expected—asynchronously, or in the next meeting.

It keeps your team on track. Your meeting agenda will prevent your team from drifting off—whether that’s discussing non-agenda topics (like the barbecue at Kat’s place last night) or taking too much time for an item that had specific time allocated.

Your agenda will provide purpose, structure, and opportunities to collaborate. With a clear plan for everyone to follow, your team will go into the meeting knowing the purpose and goal of the meeting. Your meeting agenda also allows your team to direct their attention toward opportunities to collaborate, whether that’s during a brainstorming session , a town hall, or your daily standup.

Track next steps and action items so nothing falls through the cracks. Keep your agenda open during the meeting to capture any next steps or action items . By adding them directly into the agenda, these items won’t be forgotten when the meeting ends.

Meetings are great opportunities for your team to bond but the time spent on small talk can be worked into the first few minutes of the agenda rather than surfacing every now and then during the meeting, disrupting the flow and productivity or your team’s discussion.

Meeting agenda examples

We’ve discussed what makes a good meeting agenda and what you should avoid doing but, as always, it’s easiest to learn from a real life example. Let’s take a look at a project kickoff meeting agenda created in Asana:

As you can see, each item has a timebox and a teammate assigned to ensure everyone knows when it’s their turn and how long they have to lead their discussion or give their presentation. The agenda also has relevant files attached and is shared with all team members for visibility and better collaboration.

Meetings are a staple in the professional world, each with its own unique focus and dynamics. Understanding how to tailor your meeting agenda to the type of meeting you're conducting is key to ensuring effective communication and teamwork. Here are some common types of meetings and examples of how to structure their agendas.

Team meeting agenda

Team meetings serve as a platform for team building, decision making, and brainstorming. They can vary in frequency and duration but are essential for ensuring alignment and forward momentum. Effective team meeting agendas should include recurring items for regular meetings and space for new, ad-hoc topics. It’s also vital to track next steps and responsibilities assigned during the meeting. An example of a 45-minute team meeting agenda might cover metrics, a round-table plan, identification of blockers, and recognition of team members' contributions​​.

Daily Scrum meeting agenda

Daily scrum meetings, or stand-ups , are brief, focused gatherings aimed at keeping the team aligned during a sprint. These meetings typically cover blockers, a recap of the previous day’s work, goals for the current day, and progress towards sprint goals. The agility of these meetings helps in maintaining momentum and addressing issues promptly.

Project kickoff meeting agenda

Project kickoff meetings bring together cross-functional teams to start a new project. These meetings set the tone for the project and align everyone on objectives and expectations. The agenda should cover the project brief, roles and responsibilities, meeting cadence, actionable next steps, and a Q&A session to clarify doubts and ensure everyone is on the same page​​.

Retrospective meeting agenda

A retrospective meeting is a type of recurring meeting focused on reflecting on a past period of work, usually at the end of a project cycle or sprint. Its main purpose is to share information among team members about what worked well and what didn't. During the meeting, the entire team discusses various meeting topics, including successes, challenges, and blockers that impacted their work. This process helps in identifying areas for improvement and developing strategies to address any issues. Retrospective meetings are vital for continuous team development and ensuring better outcomes in future work cycles.

One-on-one meeting agenda

One-on-one meetings , whether they are between a manager and a direct report, peer-to-peer, or skip-level, are crucial for discussing work projects, roadblocks, and career development. They are foundational for building trust.

A good agenda for these meetings should balance topics like motivation, communication, growth, and work-related discussions. Avoid status updates; those are better suited for stand-up meetings. Sample questions for a weekly one-on-one might include assessing highlights and lowlights of the week, discussing any blockers, and inquiring about work-life balance​​.

Remote one-on-one meeting agenda

Remote one-on-one meetings require a slightly different approach, with a focus on rapport-building and clear communication. Since physical presence is lacking, these meetings benefit from a shared online agenda accessible to all participants. Key points could include checking in on general well-being, discussing current work assignments, and addressing any immediate concerns or assistance needed​​.

Skip-level meeting agenda

Skip-level meetings, involving senior managers and employees not in their direct report chain, offer a chance to connect across organizational levels. These meetings are ideal for discussing broader career development and providing feedback to senior leadership. Agenda items might cover clarity on company strategies and goals, personal professional objectives, and suggestions for organizational improvements​​.

Leadership team meeting agenda

Leadership team meetings are vital for strategic decision-making and issue resolution at the highest levels of an organization. An effective agenda for such meetings might include personal updates, reviewing key metrics, sharing wins and insights, discussing important messages, addressing pressing issues, and allocating time for an open discussion or "hot seat" session where specific topics are addressed in-depth​​.

Each type of meeting, be it an all-hands gathering, one-on-one discussion, performance review, or team brainstorming session, requires a thoughtfully crafted agenda to avoid unproductive meetings and keep discussions on track.

By using these meeting agenda examples, you can ensure that each meeting, regardless of its format, contributes meaningfully to the organization's goals and enhances teamwork and collaboration.

Running an effective meeting

It’s one thing to have an amazingly organized and detailed agenda that your team can reference before the meeting—using it as a tool during the meeting is a whole other ballpark. These tips will help you make your meeting agenda as useful during the meeting as it is as a preparation tool

Stick to your agenda. The best agenda becomes useless if you don’t stick to it during the meeting. Try not to bounce back and forth between agenda items but rather stick to the priorities you established earlier.

Stick to your timeboxes. It absolutely helps release some tension and lighten the mood if you have a bit of small talk or a quick check-in at the beginning of your meeting. That’s why you should allocate three to five minutes to this—and stick to the timeframe. Pictures of Kabir’s son’s adorable Halloween costume can be shared elsewhere so you have enough time to reach your meeting’s goals now.

Designate a note taker. At the beginning of the meeting, designate a note taker who will write down any questions, feedback, tasks, and ideas that come up during the meeting. You can rotate this position so everyone on your team gets to contribute at some point. Ideally, these notes are taken in the same place as the meeting agenda—this will make it a lot easier for team members to follow the notes and link them to agenda items. Notes can also be directly entered into Asana for real-time updating and tracking

Follow up after the meeting. Typically, the note taker will be responsible for following up with the meeting notes afterward. The notes should include any decisions that were made during the meeting, tasks that need to be completed, and questions that remained unanswered. If possible, assign teammates and add due dates to action items to keep accountability high. To ensure that these action items are tracked and completed, they should be promptly added to our Asana project management tool.

Make the most out of every meeting

With Asana, you can keep your meeting agenda, meeting minutes, and meeting action items in one place. Effortlessly share the agenda with your team and assign agenda items in real time so nothing falls through the cracks.

Streamlining your meetings with one central tool will reduce the amount of work about work your team faces, connect everyone to the purpose of the meeting, and allow for productive meetings everyone enjoys.

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How to Facilitate a Successful Strategic Planning Meeting [Best Practices + Templates]

Written by: Raja Mandal

A strategic planning meeting isn't like your typical meeting where you sit around the table and discuss what happened last week.

It’s an event when leaders come together to assess the organization's current state, set long-term goals and create a roadmap to achieve them. As a meeting host, it's your job to make sure these high stake gatherings are productive.

According to Gartner, organizations that effectively unlock the capacity to implement new growth strategies increase their bottom line by 77% .

But where do you begin? How do you ensure that everyone is on the same page and that the meeting lives up to its billing?

This article will walk you through the steps of successfully running a strategic planning meeting and help you get the most out of it.

Let’s start!

Table of Contents

What is a strategic planning meeting, what is the purpose of a strategic planning meeting, benefits of a strategic planning meeting, how to run a strategic planning meeting.

• 10 Templates to Use for a Strategic Planning Meeting
• A strategic planning meeting is an opportunity for you and your team to gather and discuss your business's future and the steps needed to grow.
• A strategic planning meeting aims to assess the current position, set long-term goals, create a success roadmap, and bring diverse perspectives together.
• The seven steps of running a successful strategic planning meeting include defining the purpose, inviting the right people, developing an agenda, conducting a SWOT analysis, setting long-term goals, developing strategy roadmaps and using the right tools.
• Follow the six best practices to run a successful meeting; prepare background materials, set ground rules, encourage active participation, stay focused, manage time, document and share outcomes, and evaluate and reflect.
• Use Visme's easy-to-use tools and templates to create the visuals you need to run the meeting successfully. Sign-up for Visme to get started.

A strategic planning meeting is a gathering of stakeholders in an organization to create a strategic plan that outlines the organization’s goals and objectives and the strategies and tactics required. It's a time to assess the company’s current state, identify areas for improvement, set short and long-term goals and create a roadmap to achieve them.

During a strategic planning meeting, leaders from different departments or areas of an organization come together to share their insights and expertise. This collaboration brings together diverse perspectives and creates a more comprehensive plan.

The meeting may also include external stakeholders, such as customers or partners, to provide additional feedback.

Once the strategic plan is in place, it's essential to communicate it to the entire organization. This ensures that everyone is aligned with the organization's goals and understands their role in achieving them. Regular check-ins and progress reports can also keep the plan on track.

We know that the purpose of strategic planning is to set goals for the future and plan how to achieve them. But what does that mean in practice? How do you create a clear picture of where your company is headed?

Here are the purposes of a strategic planning meeting that you can use to guide your meetings:

Assess the Organization’s Current Position

One of the primary purposes of a strategic planning meeting is to evaluate the organization's current state. This involves reviewing its performance, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This information helps leaders identify improvement areas and create a plan that aligns with the organization's broader mission and vision.

Use the SWOT analysis template below from Visme’s library to capture and visualize the data you found in the meeting.

Set Long-Term Goals

Another crucial purpose of a strategic planning meeting is to establish long-term goals. These goals should be achievable, measurable, and aligned with the organization's mission and vision. They help provide direction and focus for the organization, ensuring all efforts are aligned towards a common purpose.

If you need help setting and reaching your goals, read this comprehensive guide on setting SMART goals . Also, here’s a SMART goal-setting template you can use to make your own.

Create a Roadmap for Success

Once the long-term goals are established, a strategic planning meeting is an opportunity to create a roadmap for success. This involves identifying the strategies and tactics required to achieve the goals, as well as the resources and timelines needed to execute them.

The roadmap should be realistic and actionable, providing a clear path to achieving the organization's objectives.

For example, suppose your strategic planning meeting is about redefining your marketing strategy. In that case, the roadmap should outline how your organization will move from its current approach to a more effective one.

Here's a roadmap template that you can customize to make your own.

Bring Together Diverse Perspectives

A strategic planning meeting provides an opportunity to bring together leaders from different departments and areas of the organization. This collaboration leverages the diverse perspectives and expertise of everyone involved, creating a more comprehensive plan that is better aligned with the organization's mission and vision.

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Let’s discuss the benefits of a strategic planning meeting to assess whether your organization would benefit and make the sessions more effective and productive.

Also, you would understand why many organizations invest time and resources in strategic planning meetings.

1. Increased Clarity and Focus: Leaders can ensure that everyone is aligned and working towards a common purpose by setting long-term goals and creating a roadmap for success. This clarity and focus help to improve decision-making, increase productivity and ultimately drive results.

2. Improved Collaboration and Communication: Leaders from different areas of the organization come together to discuss a plan for the future. This collaboration helps to leverage diverse perspectives and expertise, creating a more comprehensive plan that aligns with the organization's mission and vision. Additionally, the strategic planning meeting allows leaders to communicate the plan to the entire organization, ensuring everyone is on the same page.

3. Better Resource Allocation: You can identify the resources required to achieve the organization's goals. By creating a comprehensive plan, you can better allocate resources, such as budget and personnel, to ensure they are used effectively and efficiently.

4. Increased Adaptability: A strategic planning meeting is not a one-time event. It's essential to check in on progress and make adjustments as needed regularly. This ongoing adaptability helps to ensure that the organization remains aligned with its long-term goals, even as circumstances change.

Now we will explore seven key elements that, when combined, create the perfect recipe for successful meetings.

From defining your meeting's purpose and goals to using visual aids and brainstorming tools, we'll provide practical tips and strategies to elevate your meeting game.

1. Define the Purpose and Goals of the Meeting

This is the obvious first step to running a strategic planning meeting. Nobody wants to host a meeting they don’t know the purpose and goals of. It would be a horrible day at work for any professional at any organization.

Ask yourself why the meeting is being held and what you hope to accomplish by the end of it. This could range from updating team members on project progress to brainstorming new ideas.

Once the purpose is clear, set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals for the meeting. These goals will guide the discussion and help participants focus on the objectives.

For best results, share the purpose and goals with all attendees beforehand so everyone comes to the meeting prepared and engaged.

If you have difficulty achieving goals, maybe you aren’t setting them right. Use Visme’s SMART goal-setting templates to set achievable goals. Here’s an example template.

2. Invite the Right People

A critical aspect of any successful meeting is inviting the right people. This means including stakeholders and decision-makers directly impacting the meeting's goals and purpose. Additionally, consider inviting subject matter experts or team members who can contribute valuable insights and perspectives to the discussion.

To ensure optimal engagement and productivity, avoid inviting too many attendees. This can lead to unproductive discussions and hinder decision-making. Before sending out invitations, consider each person's role in the meeting and how they can contribute to achieving the set goals.

3. Develop an Agenda

An agenda serves as a roadmap for your meeting, providing structure and direction. Start by listing the topics to be covered in order of importance or relevance. Allocate time slots for each topic, keeping in mind the overall duration of the meeting. Include breaks and time for Q&A or open discussion.

Share the agenda with attendees in advance, giving them ample time to prepare their thoughts and contributions. This will help the meeting run smoothly and ensure that all key points are addressed.

While setting up the meeting agenda, it’s easy to forget the small details. This easily understandable concept map template will help you plan the agenda. Customize it using Visme’s concept map maker to fit your needs.

4. Conduct a SWOT Analysis

A SWOT analysis is a strategic planning tool that helps identify an organization's or project's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Incorporating a SWOT analysis into your meeting can help participants better understand the current situation and make more informed decisions.

Begin by having attendees brainstorm and discuss the internal strengths and weaknesses of the project or organization. Next, analyze the external opportunities and threats that may impact success. Encourage open and honest discussion, leading to a more accurate and comprehensive analysis.

Use our online SWOT analysis generator to capture and visualize the findings of your analysis. Find hundreds of SWOT analysis templates in Visme’s library and choose the one that matches your intent.

Here’s an example template to get you started.

5. Set Long-Term Goals

During the meeting, engage attendees in a discussion about the organization's future and the desired outcomes in the long run. Use the insights gained from the SWOT analysis to set realistic and achievable goals that align with the organization's vision and mission.

Ensure that the long-term goals are SMART and consider how they relate to the short-term objectives discussed earlier in the meeting. This will help create a cohesive strategy for success.

One example of setting a SMART long-term goal for an organization is to increase revenue by 25% within the next three years by expanding into new markets while maintaining our current customer base.

The goal is specific, outlining a measurable target for revenue growth through a percentage increase. It is achievable by considering both expansion and retention of customers, relevant to the organization's mission and vision and time-bound with a three-year timeline for achievement.

6. Develop Your Strategy Roadmap

With clear long-term goals in place, it's time to develop a strategic roadmap outlining the steps and milestones necessary to achieve them. This roadmap should include each step's key initiatives, responsibilities, resources and timeframes.

Encourage collaboration and input from all attendees to create a well-rounded and comprehensive roadmap. Once completed, share the strategy roadmap with relevant stakeholders to ensure alignment and commitment.

Read this comprehensive article on 11 roadmap templates and find the perfect one for your meeting.

7. Use Visual Aids and Brainstorming Tools

To enhance engagement and collaboration during your meeting, incorporate visual aids and brainstorming tools. These can include whiteboards, flowcharts, digital collaboration platforms and mind-mapping software.

Visual aids help participants better understand complex concepts while brainstorming tools encourage creative thinking and idea generation. By employing visual aids and brainstorming tools effectively, you can foster a more dynamic and interactive meeting environment that leads to better outcomes and more innovative solutions.

Choose the tools that best fit the needs of your meeting and attendees, and ensure all participants are comfortable using them.

If you are conducting the meeting online, using a whiteboard is the best way to keep everyone on the same page. Use Visme’s free online whiteboard tool to brainstorm your agenda, plan your meeting and successfully run the meeting.

The tool comes with many types of templates, such as mind maps, concept maps, flowcharts, storyboards and more. Furthermore, you get advanced yet easy-to-use features to improve collaboration, such as hand-drawing capabilities, notes, shapes, adjustable canvas and more.

And the best part is that you get access to every Visme feature, from animated graphics and illustrations to charts and graphs on the whiteboard.

11 Templates to Use for a Strategic Planning Meeting

To help you make your meetings more productive and efficient, we'll introduce you to 10 essential templates for your strategic planning meetings.

These templates cover various aspects of the planning process, including meeting agendas, project updates, sales strategies and more.

1. Meeting Agenda Whiteboard Template

Let’s begin with this meeting agenda whiteboard template. It visually represents the agenda, with different sections for each item. The whiteboard layout makes it easy to add, move and remove items as needed.

The “Agenda” section lists topics, presenters, dates and times. Learn about who will give presentations and what you can expect from them. The other sections briefly introduce the experts and information, such as organizations, places and objectives.

The template ensures that all necessary topics are covered during the meeting and that time is used effectively. It also allows for easy collaboration and brainstorming, as all attendees can see the agenda and contribute their ideas.

Visme’s collaborative design features will make your collaboration and brainstorming sessions more effective and streamlined. It will allow you to tag your team members, review, respond to and resolve comments, pin annotations, add sticky notes and more.

With the live editing feature, any collaborator can make changes to a design project and the changes will appear live.

Watch the video below to learn more about Visme’s collaboration features for teams.

2. Meeting Notes Whiteboard Template

With its sleek and modern design, the meeting notes whiteboard template is perfect for capturing and organizing the most important ideas and action items discussed during the meeting.

The complementary color combination and the presentation of the content in sticky notes give the template a neat and clean look. This will make it easy for participants to follow along and understand the most important points discussed during the meeting.

You can customize almost everything in this whiteboard template. Change the fonts, colors and text, add design elements and do whatever you need to create your own meeting notes whiteboard.

3. Project Status Report Template

The project status report template helps project managers keep track of their project status or progress. Make the most of the charts, graphs and tables in the template to display data for your project status report.

Use the line graph to demonstrate marketing expenses, bar graphs to exhibit online sales and the table to showcase your overall marketing performance.

With Visme, you can choose from 20+ types of charts and graphs for data visualization and 30+ data widgets to show your project progress.

For example, you can use a radial gauge to showcase how much progress your team has made and how much work still needs to be done.

If your meeting agenda includes assessing the current marketing strategy, you can use this template to show the project status report. However, you can customize this template and many other report templates from Visme’s library to present during the meeting.

Need help writing your project status report? Read this article on writing a project status report and learn more about it.

4. Team Plans and Status Reports Infographic Template

Whatever you’ve discussed in your meeting should be organized in a centralized document that everyone can access. This infographic template does exactly that. The project timeline section lets you outline the different phases of your project, and the bottom section acts as a checklist for the project status.

Customize the template with Visme infographic maker and replace the design elements such as illustrations, shapes and icons to fit your topic. Visme comes with 10,000+ vector icons , 3D graphics , animated illustrations and more that you can use to decorate your infographic.

5. Radar Chart Template

During the strategic planning meeting, you may need various data visualization tools to represent complex data in an easily understandable manner. This radar chart template is one of them. You can use it to present your company’s regional sales data.

To customize this template’s design, change the text and color scheme and add new design elements such as legible fonts, high-resolution photos and icons.

Visme has a shortcut feature that helps you find everything in Visme with just a press of the keyboard. Just type the “/” key on your keyboard, and a menu will pop up with everything you need.

6. Gantt Chart Infographic Template

Imagine you have been tasked with arranging a team-building retreat for your company. Your goal is to deliver a memorable experience for your colleagues by organizing engaging workshops, team-building exercises, and well-planned activities.

However, without a well-defined and comprehensive plan, you might overlook crucial aspects of the retreat, such as transportation and accommodations, or face difficulties in meeting deadlines.

The same goes for planning a strategic planning meeting. You need a clear and concise action plan to ensure everything runs smoothly and you achieve your objectives. This is where a program planning Gantt chart template comes in handy.

The Gantt chart visually represents a project's timeline, tasks and deadlines. With this template, you can organize all the necessary tasks and milestones in a clear and logical sequence.

So, if you want your strategic planning meeting to succeed, include a Gantt chart template in your toolkit.

7. Product Roadmap Whiteboard Template

Are you holding the strategic planning meeting to launch a new product or service? If yes, then you might be interested in this product roadmap whiteboard template. It comes with a modern design with bold colors and shapes that make it easy to read the content.

And since it’s in whiteboard format, you can bring everyone together to work on it and adjust the roadmap accordingly.

Use Visme's AI image generator to create stunning images, icons, illustrations and other graphics for your product roadmap. This will enhance the visual appeal of your product roadmap, making it more engaging and easier for your team members to comprehend.

8. Organizational Chart Template

In a strategic planning meeting, an organizational chart template is invaluable. It helps participants understand the company's structure and where they fit in. It enables you to identify potential communication gaps, overlaps or bottlenecks hindering the company's growth.

Depending on your company's specific needs, you must add, remove or modify positions and roles within the chart. Visme’s user-friendly interface makes it easy to perform these changes.

You can also customize the design and layout of the chart to fit your company's branding or style. Include your brand colors , brand fonts , company logo and more with Visme’s brand design tool .

Read this article about setting up your branding kit in Visme, or

9. Sales Strategy Presentation Template

This template is a powerful tool that can help you create an impactful sales strategy presentation quickly and easily. It includes all the essential elements of a successful sales presentation, including sales highlights, quarterly metrics, pitfalls and more. With this template, you can save time and effort in creating your presentation while ensuring that all critical elements are included.

It’ll help your participants understand the sales strategy and how it aligns with the company's overall goals and objectives. It enables team members to identify opportunities and challenges and develop action plans to achieve their sales goals.

You can easily customize the template to fit your needs and preferences by adding your company's branding or additional slides. It's also easy to update and modify as the sales strategy evolves.

Check out Visme’s dynamic fields feature . With this feature, you can create a sales strategy presentation that is not only visually stunning but also up-to-date and accurate. For example, you can use Dynamic Fields to automatically update your sales numbers, market data, or budget figures in real time, eliminating the need for manual updates.

10. Go-To-Market Strategy Presentation Template

Navigate the complex landscape of market entry by providing a clear and concise plan of action.

With this go-to-market strategy presentation template, you can identify your target audience, tailor your messaging, and outline the channels and tactics to reach them effectively. It provides a structured approach to launching your product or service, ensuring a successful and profitable entry into the market.

This template serves as a visual aid to guide your team's discussion and decision-making during a strategic planning meeting.

Customize the presentation with Visme’s presentation software . You can share, download or present directly with Visme’s presenter tool.

Visme’s presentation tool is loved by users from across the globe and is considered to be more powerful than other available tools.

Hear it from one of our loving users Jessica L. | Small-Business Owner.

"No need to go back to PowerPoint. Visme makes project presentations easy and fast. Lots of useful templates and excellent graphics. I enjoy the features they continue to add and update often. They make project work easy"

11. General Six-Pager Memo Plan

An Amazon 6-pager is a document that Jeff Bezo introduced to help improve and streamline Amazon's internal communication, guide meetings and help with team decision-making processes.

If you'd like to emulate the same strategic planning that Amazon implements, you can use this Amazon 6-page memo. It's customizable and can be used for a wide range of industries. It has a modern layout, which is fully customizable.

This template includes all the sections needed, such as an introduction, goal, business state, strategic priorities and more. Make this template yours by adding your logo and rebranding it with your company colors and fonts.

Best Practices for a Successful Strategic Plan Meeting

To ensure your strategic plan meeting is productive, follow these best practices before, during, and after the meeting.

Made with Visme Infographic Maker

Before the Meeting

1. prepare background materials.

Develop and distribute background materials that provide context and information relevant to the strategic plan meeting. These materials might include a summary of previous strategic plans, a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis, or an overview of the organization's current situation.

By sharing these materials in advance, participants can familiarize themselves with the context and be better equipped to contribute to the discussions. This means sharing reports, business cases, project plans, and more.

2. Establish Ground Rules

Set ground rules for participation and communication to ensure a productive and inclusive meeting environment. These may include guidelines on active listening, staying on topic or respecting differing opinions. Communicate these rules to all participants ahead of the meeting and encourage everyone to follow them during discussions.

During the Meeting

3. encourage active participation.

Facilitate open communication and collaboration by encouraging all participants to share their ideas, insights, and perspectives. This can be done by creating a comfortable environment and using engaging techniques such as brainstorming, round-robin discussions, or small group activities.

It's crucial for the meeting leader to actively listen to participants, ask open-ended questions, and provide positive reinforcement to foster a sense of inclusivity.

4. Stay Focused and Manage Time

Keep the meeting on track by sticking to the agenda and putting time constraints.

Establish time limits for each topic and use a timer to ensure discussions stay focused. As the meeting facilitator, be prepared to intervene if the discussion veers off course and redirect the conversation back to the primary objectives.

After the Meeting

5. document and share outcomes.

Record the meeting's main takeaways, decisions and action items, and distribute these to all participants. This documentation should be clear, concise, and well-organized, making it easy for everyone to understand their responsibilities and deadlines. A shared document can keep everyone accountable and informed about progress.

Using Visme’s meeting minute templates is one of the best ways to take notes during the meeting. Take important notes about what was discussed, what actions were taken, future plans and anything else you find essential.

Here’s an example meeting minute template that you can use:

6. Evaluate and Reflect

After the meeting, take time to evaluate its effectiveness and identify areas for improvement. Solicit participant feedback to gain insights into what worked well and what could be improved. Reflect on this feedback and implement changes for future strategic plan meetings to ensure continuous improvement in the planning process.

Once the meeting is over, use an evaluation report to summarize the meeting's outcomes and better understand its effectiveness. Visme offers a variety of evaluation report templates that are customizable to fit your specific needs. Here’s an example template that you can use right now:

Frequently Asked Questions

Here are some of the most frequently asked questions to provide you with additional information.

Q. What Do You Discuss in a Strategic Meeting?

In a strategic meeting, you should discuss your organization's long-term goals, objectives and priorities. Review your current status, identify opportunities and threats, analyze internal strengths and weaknesses and develop action plans to achieve the desired outcomes.

Also, touch on key topics like vision, mission, values, competitive landscape, market trends and resource allocation.

Q. What Are the Objectives of a Strategic Planning Meeting?

The primary objectives of a strategic planning meeting are to establish a shared vision, set long-term goals and objectives, identify opportunities and threats and determine priorities.

These meetings are also important for allocating resources and creating actionable plans to drive organizational growth, competitiveness and sustainability.

Q. What Questions Should I Ask in Strategic Planning?

When engaging in strategic planning, ask questions that help clarify your organization's vision, mission, and critical success factors. Some questions include: What is our overarching purpose? Who is our target audience? What sets us apart from our competitors? What vulnerability?

By asking these questions, you'll better understand your organization's strategic position and the steps needed to succeed.

Q. What to Expect at a Strategic Planning Meeting?

You can expect a well-organized agenda, lively discussions, and collaborative decision-making at a strategic planning meeting. Participants will evaluate the organization's present situation, brainstorm possible solutions, prioritize initiatives and formulate action plans.

Additionally, the meeting may incorporate team-building activities and offer opportunities for feedback.

Q. How Do You Run a Strategy Review Meeting?

To run a successful strategy review meeting, plan a clear agenda and prepare materials from the previous strategic planning meeting. Find ways to adjust the plan, assign new tasks and take other necessary steps to meet your organization's goals.

Q. What is a Strategic Planning Session Checklist?

A strategic planning session checklist includes key steps such as setting objectives, selecting participants, preparing materials, designing an agenda and arranging logistics. Additionally, it covers post-meeting tasks like distributing minutes, monitoring progress, and evaluating outcomes.

You can use checklist templates from Visme’s library to prepare your own to make sure you don’t miss out on anything.

Maximize Your Meetings & Project Planning with Visme

A successful strategic planning meeting is a critical tool for any organization that seeks to achieve its long-term goals and objectives. By following the steps outlined in this blog, you can effectively plan and facilitate a strategic planning meeting that leverages the diverse perspectives and expertise of everyone involved.

From defining the meeting's purpose and objectives to setting realistic goals and objectives, Visme's templates and features can help you create compelling visual aids that communicate the plan and engage participants.

With Visme's collaboration features and sharing options, you can efficiently work with all stakeholders in real-time and share your strategic plan beyond the confines of the meeting room.

However, running a successful meeting is just the beginning. To successfully run and grow your organization, you’ll need to create a lot of visual content. Visme has specific solutions for all your team members, from marketing collaterals and sales assets to internal content and brainstorming using whiteboards .

Sign-up for Visme teams today to make your meetings more productive and achieve your business goals.

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About the Author

Raja Antony Mandal is a Content Writer at Visme. He can quickly adapt to different writing styles, possess strong research skills, and know SEO fundamentals. Raja wants to share valuable information with his audience by telling captivating stories in his articles. He wants to travel and party a lot on the weekends, but his guitar, drum set, and volleyball court don’t let him.

How to Run Effective Planning Meetings [Planning Meeting Checklist]

A planning meeting refers to a gathering convened to discuss plans for a new project. The attendants discuss the scope, goals, budget, and timeline of the project, ensuring they understand the work involved and commit to completing it within the budget and time allocated.

Estimate the cost of your meetings with a built-in calculator in Google Calendar, so you can right-size every meeting.

There are several types of meetings in an organization. Status update, problem-solving, collaboration, and planning meetings are just some of them. Each of them has different goals and structures and is conducted differently .

To run an effective meeting, you need to be aware of what type of meeting you want to run and how to run it. In this guide, learn and access everything you need to run effective planning meetings.

What is Covered:

What Is a Planning Meeting?

Strategies for leading a planning meeting, what should you do at a planning meeting, planning meeting agenda.

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Key Elements of a Planning Meeting [Checklist]

A planning meeting that doesn't fully meet its goals could be detrimental to the organization. In the best case, the organization won't implement the poorly planned project. In the best case, it could result in thousands or even millions of dollars in losses. That is why before calling the meeting, you need to plan for it.

Planning for a planning meeting involves more than just notifying the attendees and booking a venue. For it to be productive and efficient, you need to prepare and clearly understand the three key elements below.

Vision, Goals, and Objectives

What are you trying to achieve? What solutions are you meeting to discuss and what problems do they solve? By answering these and similar questions, you will establish your vision, goals, and objectives, which is important for a productive meeting .

A vision provides a direction for your goals while objectives define your goals. By clearly defining them, they will help you not only during the meeting but also during the implementation of the plan. They also ensure the project is in line with the overall objectives of the business and justify undertaking the project.

Critical Success Factors

A critical success factor is something important that the project must accomplish for it to achieve its goal. As a simple example, if it's a bridge development project, the critical success factors are high-quality building materials and an experienced contractor. If either of them goes wrong, the bridge will not be built well.

Critical success factors qualify the vision, goals, and objectives of the project. They allow the team to focus on what is most important towards the achievement of the set goals and prevent the project from going off track. That is why you need to identify them before setting the actual meaning.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Once you have identified the critical success factors, you need a way to measure them. You can measure them with KPIs. A KPI is a quantifiable measure of performance over time for a specific objective. They provide the team with targets to work towards and milestones to gauge progress.

That is why you need to determine the project's KPIs. Without specific, measurable targets that the team works towards, the planning meeting and the project are less likely to succeed.

By addressing the three key elements above, you will be able to plan an effective planning meeting. If the need arises, you can create a planning committee to help you.

What Are the Goals of a Planning Meeting?

The goals of a planning meeting need to be clearly defined to be able to gauge whether the meeting was successful or not. They also signal that the meeting has ended once they have been achieved.

Although different organizations have varying objectives for each planning meeting, the meeting cannot be completed if:

• You don't have a compelling business case that justifies undertaking the project.
• You haven't clearly defined the critical success factors and key performance indicators.
• You don't have at least a rough outline of the plan to follow to achieve the objectives of the project.
• Involved parties aren't clear on their involvement, duties, responsibilities, and how different teams will coordinate.
• It isn't clear what resources you have and there is no plan to acquire the ones you don't have.
• Though not necessary since not all issues can be tackled immediately, you don't have a list of questions that should be answered or researched/investigated first.
• The attendants don't fully understand the scope of the plan. You can check this by soliciting feedback after the meeting.

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For the meeting to be effective, it needs to be led well. Here are a few strategies you can use to run effective planning meetings.

1. Get Everyone on the Same Page

Don't assume that everyone is updated on the progress. Even if they are involved with the project, they could be unaware of important details. As such, start by briefly going over the project and its progress and answer any questions about it.

As a manager or leader in your organization, you serve as the connection between various stakeholders and the higher-ups. So, if there has been any feedback or information you have received concerning the project, use this opportunity to pass it to the participants.

2. Assign Pre-work

Pre-work is any task, activity, or documentation that should be reviewed or completed before the planning meeting. Apart from the agenda, you should assign prework to encourage preparation and engage the employees. Think of the agenda as the travel itinerary and the prework as the preparation taken before leaving on the trip.

To make the meeting more productive, rich, and efficient, you can ask the participants to provide suggestions or key solutions to the project before the meeting.

3. Involve the Participants

You shouldn't be the only one talking the entire meeting. Instead, assign topics, roles, and updates that most or all the participants can research and share. Even before structuring the meeting, you can get them involved by reaching out and asking them if there is anything they would like to be discussed. Not only will they be more prepared for the meeting, but also you will experience a higher engagement and ward off potential issues before they arise.

By getting them involved, they feel more appreciated and are more likely to pay attention making the meeting more productive.

4. Make It Actionable

To get immediately into action as the meeting starts, you should send the agenda alongside the prework. It allows the participants to understand beforehand what the meeting is about so you can immediately focus on the actions to take and decisions to make. Also, ensure you stick to the agenda.

5. Invite Fewer People

Ensure the meeting is attended only by the necessary people. The meeting won't take longer than it is supposed to and you will save time for your staff. They will spend time more efficiently by focusing on more essential work.

With just the key stakeholders, you will also be able to run it more efficiently.

6. Start and End on Time

Most attendants usually set aside something else to come to the meeting. You should respect their time and adhere to the time you specified. If any issues don't need to be tackled immediately, you can shelve them and revisit them later in other meetings.

7. Make the Objective Clear

Not everyone clearly understands the objective of the meeting. So, when the meeting commences, make clear what you have convened to achieve in a single sentence. Something like "At the end of this meeting, we will have…".

By setting the objectives clearly, you increase the likelihood of achieving them.

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To ensure the meeting is effective, there are several things you should be doing during the meeting. Some of them include:

1. Assign Tasks

There are lots of things that need to be accomplished for the project to be a success. As a good leader, you should know who can best handle each task. During the meeting, as you lay down the plan, assign these tasks to the appropriate people. Involve everyone in the delegation by letting them volunteer according to their skills. If some tasks are not volunteered for, everyone should work together to determine who can handle them the best way.

However, you should ensure they are available throughout the project duration by taking account of vacations, holidays, and other projects.

2. Ensure the Objective Has Been Met

You should end the meeting only as soon as the objective has been met. As above-mentioned, you should open the meeting by letting the participants know what they are there for. By doing that, they will be able to work towards it within the allocated time.

3. Address Key Issues and Give Updates or Feedback

Key issues are things that need to be addressed before the planning or the project takes off. These obstacles must be cleared during the meeting. If there are any updates or feedback from any related project or issue, present them to the participants.

4. Only Cover the Necessary

You should use the time of the meeting effectively by covering only what is necessary to create and polish the plan. Going out of the overarching topic will prevent the meeting from achieving its goals and objectives.

Fortunately, if you have a meeting structure or plan, you only need to stick to it and ensure everyone else does the same.

5. Take Minutes

Have someone officially record what takes place during the meeting. Writing minutes is important because they serve as a reference for people who weren't in the meeting. They can also be used to create the official plan among other uses such as keeping track of the members' contributions to the plan.

6. Reach a Group Consensus

After you have created the plan, ensure everyone is okay with all the details. Everyone should thoroughly review and confirm the plan. However, you should find the right balance because everyone has their own opinion.

7. Plan a Follow-up Meeting

As the meeting ends, you should set a date for the next meeting to address the questions and issues you can't at the moment. It can also be to check how well the implementation is going and whether to take corrective action.

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An agenda indicates what will be covered in the meeting. It ensures everyone knows what is happening and what will happen next so they can adequately prepare and keep the meeting on track. Holding a planning meeting without an agenda will result in a meeting that spirals out of control and takes too long to end, or fails to address all aspects of the plan. An effective agenda should:

Define the Meeting's Logistics

The agenda should provide information on the location and time of the meeting. If it is an online meeting , it should include the necessary information such as login details.

List the Attendees and their Roles

List down the people who will attend the meeting. If there are too many attendees, you can list only the most important ones and the roles they will be playing. If there is anything they are supposed to research or carry, highlight them.

Identify the Project or Information that the Meeting will focus on

List all the important details and aspects that need to be addressed during the meeting in order of importance. To ensure you adhere to the time, indicate how much time will be spent on each issue. You can allocate more time to some.

Send a Meeting Agenda before the Meeting

Send the agenda to the attendees an appropriate number of days before the meeting. If they need to complete some research, send it a couple of days or weeks to the meeting. If they don't, at least a full day before it.

Use the Prepared Agenda to Lead the Actual Meeting

What's the point of creating an agenda if you didn't plan on using it? During the meeting, use the agenda to lead and control. Ensure the time allocated to each aspect is adhered to and you don't stray too far away from the plan.

Planning meetings are vitally important. They give the group a clear direction on the scope of the project and the steps necessary to finish a project.

But running one is a huge responsibility. There are far too many details to consider, barriers to overcome, and objectives to accomplish. One mistake and the meeting will not achieve its objectives. But what if there was a simpler way?

Fellow allows you to be more organized, aligned and prepared for a more productive planning meeting. You can prepare for the meeting in just one click, capture, assign, send, and track tasks, and collaborate without communication breakdowns. It also allows you to connect your meetings to 50+ popular work apps and keep your notes and tasks tied to your calendar so you can find what you need quickly.

Don't let unproductive meetings slow you down

See the impact of fewer, shorter meetings, increased accountability, and enhanced productivity with Fellow.

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How to conduct a business meeting (with best practices)

1. Project status update

2. planning, 3. brainstorming, 4. problem-solving, 5. decision-making, 6. company-wide announcements, 1. define the goal, 2. choose the meeting participants, 3. schedule the meeting, 4. prepare an agenda, 5. send necessary materials early, 6. start and end on time, 7. set ground rules, 8. conclude with clear next steps, 1. designate a meeting facilitator, 2. designate a note-taker, 3. encourage active participation, 4. close the feedback loop, 5. follow up on action items, be more confident in business meetings by learning with online english tutors.

The average employee attends anywhere from 11 to 15 meetings per week. If each is 30 minutes long, then you could be spending at least five and a half hours in meetings every week!

That’s a lot. And if those meetings are poorly organized, it could lead to a lot of wasted time.

It’s important to have a few key elements in place to run an effective business meeting, including setting a goal and defining the agenda.

Strong business communication skills are also a must-have since you need to understand the broader context of each meeting. You should also be able to communicate well even in stressful situations.

This article will teach you how to run a business meeting with confidence so you can become an important decision-maker on your team.

6 types of business meetings

The structure of each meeting is different depending on its purpose. Here are some of the most common business meetings you might encounter.

During a project status update meeting, team members share the progress, challenges, and plans related to a specific project. It should include updates on key tasks and metrics. Team members should also propose solutions to roadblocks.

Project status update meetings ensure everyone is on the same page. They also allow the team to deal with issues and keep the project on track.

Actively participating in a project status update meeting helps you:

• Talk about your contributions to your project
• Share and solve any challenges
• Ask teammates for help
• Contribute to decisions

During a planning meeting, you’ll discuss important tasks and goals related to a new project.

The purpose of this meeting is to assign responsibilities and set timelines. You’ll also talk about the budget and any potential challenges. This is also a great time to establish clear communication channels to avoid confusion.

When you participate in a planning meeting, you’re able to:

• Contribute ideas
• Improve your understanding of the project’s goals
• Clarify your responsibilities so you can be successful in your role

A brainstorming session is where team members come up with ideas and share them freely. The purpose of a brainstorming session is to encourage open discussion and creative thinking to solve a specific problem.

The focus is on getting many different kinds of ideas without immediately judging or criticizing them. At the end of a brainstorming meeting, you’ll have a couple of options to analyze further.

When you take part in a brainstorming session, you’ll:

• Improve your creative-thinking skills
• Collaborate effectively with the rest of the team
• Learn about new approaches to solving problems

During a problem-solving meeting, a team tries to solve a specific issue. This could be poor financial performance, employee burnout, or any other business problem.

The goal is to analyze a problem, identify its cause, and think of solutions. By the end of the meeting, you should have an action plan in place to solve the problem.

The benefits of participating in problem-solving meetings include:

• Collaborating with team members
• Getting feedback on your solutions
• Practicing creative thinking

The point of a decision-making meeting is to discuss options and choose a course of action for a specific project or business goal. For example, you could organize this meeting to decide on your marketing budget for the next quarter.

During this meeting, you’ll reach an agreement on an important decision, allocate resources, and make sure everyone is on the same page.

Participating in a decision-making meeting will help you:

• Stand out by contributing your insights.
• Improve communication with your team members.
• Learn how to evaluate different options.

The purpose of a company-wide announcement meeting is to share information with all employees simultaneously. Usually, the company leadership uses the meeting to talk about important changes or initiatives that will impact the entire organization. This improves transparency.

Company-wide announcement meetings usually aren’t collaborative. Unless you’re a part of the leadership team, you probably won’t actively participate in the meeting.

But you can write down your questions during the meeting and talk about them later with your manager. This will clear up any possible confusion and allow you to better understand what’s going on in the company.

How to conduct a business meeting

Planning a business meeting can seem intimidating. But once you get the formula down, you’ll be able to effortlessly plan and execute meetings. Follow the steps below to get started.

The first step to running a business meeting is defining its goal. Ideally, you should identify one goal you want to achieve. Setting a goal will keep your discussion on track as everyone will understand the meeting’s purpose and can work toward it.

Here are some examples of meeting goals:

• Brainstorm new marketing ideas for Q4
• Provide updates on project development
• Introduce a new employee to the team

When the meeting starts, remind everyone of the meeting’s purpose. Here are some helpful phrases to define your goal in your business meeting :

• The primary objective of this meeting is to…
• We aim to accomplish…
• Our goal for this session is to…
• This meeting is focused on…
• By the end, we should have a clear understanding of…
• Together, we will address…

The next step is to decide who you’ll invite to the meeting. You should invite every person who is essential to achieving the goal of the meeting. These people are often known as stakeholders.

Consider roles and expertise to create a well-rounded group. This ensures you’ll include important perspectives, which will also support good decision-making. Check out the video below for more tips on choosing meeting participants:

If you have any doubts, it’s best to reach out to your manager and get their input on who to invite.

Once you select the participants, it’s time to invite them to the meeting.

Use a calendar tool to check the participants’ schedules and pick a time that works best for everyone, taking time zone differences into account. You can then schedule the meeting.

If you don’t have access to everyone’s calendars, you can use a tool like Calendly to simplify scheduling. It connects to your calendar and allows other participants to see when you’re available.

One thing you should avoid doing is asking the participants to let you know when they’re available. As the meeting organizer, it’s up to you to handle scheduling. Placing this responsibility on the participants isn’t good meeting etiquette. Plus, it will waste a lot of time as you go back and forth with each person.

Here are some phrases you can use when sending the meeting invite:

• Please let me know if the proposed meeting time doesn’t work for you.
• Please RSVP by [date].
• We will be using [platform] for the virtual meeting, and the access details are…
• The meeting will take place in person at [location] on [date] at [time].

If you’re using video conferencing software like Zoom or Google Meet, make sure everyone can easily join the meeting room. This will help you avoid any disruptions before your meeting even starts.

A meeting agenda is a plan that lists the topics you’ll discuss during the meeting. It helps everyone know what to expect so they can come prepared.

The agenda usually explains the meeting’s goal, items to cover, and who will lead each discussion. You can also decide how much time you’ll spend discussing each point.

Here’s an example of what to include in your business meeting agenda:

• Name of the meeting
• Participants
• Purpose of the meeting
• Agenda item #1: Discussing [topic], 15 minutes, led by [participant name]
• Agenda item #2…
• Wrap up: Agree on next steps and set a timeline

The key to a successful business meeting is preparation. That’s why it’s important to send the agenda and any materials ahead of the meeting. It gives everyone a chance to review the information, note down questions, and think of ideas.

If you’re sharing documents using a tool like Google Drive, double-check the sharing permissions to make sure everyone can access the documents.

Here are some helpful phrases in English for business meetings to use when sharing materials:

• Please find the attached [documents] we’ll go over during our meeting.
• Please review the attached documents ahead of the meeting because we’ll discuss them in detail.
• I’m sending [documents], which we’ll cover during the meeting. Please let me know if you can’t access them.

When you’re punctual in business meetings, it shows respect for everyone’s time. You’ll appear professional and well-organized.

Here are a couple of phrases you can use to start the meeting:

• Thank you all for being here today.
• Let’s start with introductions.
• I’d like to start with a quick overview of today’s agenda.

The following phrases will help you conclude the meeting:

• Thank you all for your time today.
• I appreciate your participation and engagement.
• If no one has any other comments, we can wrap this up.

During the meeting, keep tabs on the clock to make sure you’re following the agenda. If a discussion is going off-topic or taking up too much of the allotted time, you can say:

• In the interest of time, let’s come back to this topic later.
• This is an important topic, but I want to make sure we have enough time to cover everything on our agenda today. Let’s come back to it at a later time.

Practicing these phrases will help you learn how to run a team meeting that’s efficient and productive.

Setting rules allows you to have an efficient meeting. It sets expectations on how participants are supposed to interact.

You should forward these rules to all participants in an email before the meeting. It’s also helpful to go over them at the start of the meeting.

For example, you could say:

• Before we dive in, let’s quickly review the process for this meeting.
• We’ll answer any questions at the end of the meeting.
• Feel free to write your comments and questions in the chat, and we’ll get to them later.
• Feel free to interrupt me if there’s something you want to add.
• We encourage everyone to actively participate.
• Let’s keep an open mind and respect everyone’s input.

The final step of a business meeting is to summarize the discussion and let the participants know what’s coming next. This will clear up any potential confusion.

Here are some phrases you could use:

• To recap our discussion today…
• Today, we decided on [specific points].
• As a next step, we will…
• Our next meeting is on [date]. By then, let’s prepare…

It’s also a good practice to send an email after the meeting with these points. That way, the participants can refer back to your email in case they need a refresher.

5 tips for business meetings

Many people walk away from business meetings thinking, “That could’ve been an email!” If you want to avoid this, implement these five best practices.

A meeting facilitator leads the meeting. Their job is to track the time and make sure everyone follows the agenda. They facilitate discussions and encourage participation.

After the meeting, they also send a follow-up email with a summary of the meeting.

Without a meeting facilitator, there’s a higher chance that your meeting will go off track, and you won’t achieve what you set out to do.

Volunteering to be the meeting facilitator could seem scary. But it’s a fantastic way to grow professionally and improve your confidence in the workplace.

A note-taker writes down important information during the meeting. They record the key points participants make when discussing different strategies, solutions, and plans.

The note-taker allows everyone else to be fully engaged with the discussion instead of focusing on notes . After the meeting, they share the notes (sometimes called “meeting minutes”) with anyone who needs them.

While this sounds like boring work, it will help you practice active listening. Plus, it will improve your summarizing skills.

Every meeting should leave room for questions and comments. Participation makes a meeting more interesting and encourages more people to share their ideas.

To encourage participation, let everyone know at the start of the meeting how they can get involved in the discussion. For example, you can tell the participants to interrupt if they have a suggestion or idea during brainstorming.

Also, ask specific questions and show that you’re interested in the response. You can do this by nodding or smiling when someone else is talking.

Lastly, don’t forget to thank everyone for contributing while wrapping up the meeting.

Closing the feedback loop means collecting feedback and then using it to make positive changes .

Imagine you’re working for a social media advertising agency. During a project update meeting with one of your clients, they complained that their account manager takes too long to respond to their emails.

To close the feedback loop, you could suggest using Slack or Teams as your primary communication channel instead of email. Meanwhile, you could also ask the account manager to answer the customer’s messages within two business days.

During your next meeting or in a follow-up email, you could then update the client with the changes you’ve made. This will ensure that the feedback you collect during meetings has an impact on the way you do business.

When you assign action items during a meeting, you should also follow up via email to confirm all the details. This re-confirms everyone’s assignments and prevents any confusion about responsibilities from creating roadblocks.

The action item follow-up email should include:

• A description of the task
• The deadline
• The name of the person or team responsible for completing it

If there are multiple action items, then it’s helpful to label them as “high” or “low” priority.

With these business meeting tips, you’ll organize engaging and effective meetings in no time. But you also need good communication skills to participate in important meetings with confidence.

Preply’s online business English tutors will help you improve your language skills with personalized lessons tailored to your interests. Tutors are available in every time zone, so you can easily find someone who can work with your busy schedule.

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Nadiia is a Marketing Specialist with 7 years of experience in digital communications. In the past, she co-founded an educational organization for teachers in Ukraine and helped educators all over the country integrate blended learning methodology in their classrooms. Nadia speaks English, French, Ukrainian, and is currently learning Spanish on Preply.

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How to hold a strategic planning meeting: A simple, step-by-step guide for facilitators

If you’re running or facilitating a strategic planning meeting, there are many factors to consider.

It’s much more than just bringing everyone together to have an open discussion — and it doesn’t just happen on its own, either.

There are several steps you can take to ensure that your strategic planning meeting runs smoothly, but it all starts with preparation.

Today, we’ll explore a few ideas to help you hold a successful session, starting with the basics.

Try Miro’s Strategic Planning Template

• What is strategic planning?

Strategic planning is the process of analyzing a current situation within your organization and making sure it’s aligned with your specific objectives. If it isn’t, you and your team must develop a plan to “correct the path.”

So, why is strategic planning important?

In short, strategic planning helps you get from where you are today to the future you want. It’s a way of breaking down big, daunting goals into manageable steps that address your current situation and guide your work.

Here’s where strategic planning meetings come into play.

Meetings are the cornerstone of the strategic planning process.

These meetings are typically held by facilitators , but anyone can lead a strategic planning meeting.

We’ll provide you with specific instructions to hold a successful meeting a bit later, but first, let’s answer a crucial question.

What is the purpose of a strategic plan meeting?

Broadly speaking, a facilitator will use meetings to either:

• Gather specific information and feedback from team members, executives, and stakeholders.
• Help team members work together to solve problems, think strategically, and create new ideas to improve the organization.

These meetings aim to provide clarity in decision-making.

This is not a typical meeting where participants spend time reporting out. Strategy planning is all about brainstorming and collaboration .

This way, you can develop solutions to tangible problems in your organization and set the tone and strategic direction for your team.

Who needs to be included?

The best way to ensure that you get all of the most relevant voices in the room is to create an invite list.

Include people from each relevant department, if possible.

This way, you can cover a more complete spectrum of your company’s operations and activities.

You’ll want to include upper management, but don’t stop there.

Bring in members of the sales department, investor relations, human resources, and any other relevant departments or stakeholders.

You might also consider inviting people from outside of the organization who can provide a fresh perspective.

This is particularly useful for organizations that are doing business in a new market or have started offering new products.

• Best practices for running a successful strategic planning session

Now that you understand the importance of effective strategic planning meetings, the question becomes, how do you actually hold one?

Let’s cover a few of the best practices:

Build buy-in before the meeting starts

First, you’ll want to build buy-in with everyone involved.

Keep what you’re doing top-of-mind, whether that’s through casual conversations or company-wide memos.

In addition, make sure to have a clear agenda prepared, so everyone knows what they can expect out of the meeting. Start by defining the goal, then detail how you’ll get there.

Also, get all the materials you need together in advance.

That may look like coordinating with IT to make sure everyone has access to company software, sending out pertinent documents in advance, or mapping out who will be speaking at the meeting.

Make sure to communicate your expectations clearly so that everyone knows what is expected of them and why.

You’ll want to spend time in your planning stages to keep the tone positive, while at the same time being realistic about what’s possible.

Ultimately, your goal should be to align the team around a shared vision and mission so that you can move forward with a shared perspective.

Now, how can you communicate this agenda?

We suggest you use a centralized space where everyone can see your agenda.

For example, you can use Miro’s Agenda template to create and share your agenda with participants.

You can also use the template to keep notes during the meeting and add refinements later.

This way, everyone can see what’s been discussed and the next steps for moving forward.

Remember; this should be a collaborative effort, so consider asking for ideas from everyone about what they’d like to see covered.

Just don’t forget to actually take those ideas into consideration.

Develop a transparent strategic planning process

During the strategic process, you’re inviting employees to have meaningful discussions around the company’s vision statement, strategic goals, and strategic objectives.

It’s important to have a roadmap in place for how you will facilitate the process so that employees know what to expect.

Your meeting should be an open, engaging discussion with transparent dialog. During the meeting, everyone should get a turn to talk.

Make sure you have a clear process that allows everyone to participate and feel heard, no matter what their role is.

In the planning stage of a meeting, it’s important to have as much input as possible.

You can involve everyone by holding a virtual brainstorming session with this brainstorming template . Once you create a board, you can invite people to collaborate in real time.

This template helps you create a more engaging and collaborative session while allowing every person on the team to contribute their thoughts.

Create an agenda and stick to it

We all know what happens when an agenda is not set or adhered to.

Creating an agenda for your meeting helps you and your participants stay on track. This agenda should include topics, questions, milestones, and people.

Milestones are the larger topics that will be broken down into smaller questions, and these questions should flow to the ultimate goal of narrowing down your strategic priorities.

You can create milestones by putting together a list of discussion questions that will help your participants get on topic and help you check in with the group.

Your agenda might include an opening discussion, a brainstorming session on ideas, and a closing review of the next steps.

When developing your agenda:

• Keep it short: The last thing you want is your meeting to drag on for no good reason, so try to limit each agenda item to ten minutes or less. The whole meeting should only take an hour or two, at most.
• Be selective: Don’t include too many topics or ideas that will bog down your meeting.
• Create a contingency plan: You never know what might happen during your meeting, so always have a backup plan in case your agenda falls through.
• Plan for breaks: For longer meetings or workshops, set aside at least half an hour to take a break, such as during lunchtime.

Make it interactive

As much as possible, you’ll want to make this a collaborative effort, so it’s important to get everyone involved.

For example, you might want to break the group down into smaller sub-teams to brainstorm opportunities for new product features.

You could also task each group with creating a list of opportunities for particular departments within your company.

The point is that you’ll want to encourage open and honest dialog about challenges your company is facing and, where possible, break down any barriers that might stand in the way of progress.

Make sure to collaboratively create strategy documents, provide regular updates on progress, and discuss strategic issues in real time.

This way, you can work side-by-side to improve your performance, no matter where in the world your team members happen to be.

• How to run a strategic planning meeting in 7 steps

To get the most out of each session, you should prepare thoroughly — from the agenda to who you’ll involve and how.

Whether you’re holding a remote, hybrid, or in-person meeting, this process will help you out.

1. Define a clear outcome for the meeting

A strategic planning meeting can go totally off-the-rails if it’s held without a defined objective. That’s why the very first step is to define a clear, tangible goal for the meeting.

For example, your objective might be to better align social media with your marketing strategies .

In this case, your meeting might include a discussion on the purpose of social media, its role in the planning process, and how to better align your social media campaign with your organizational goals.

If your goal is to develop a new product , your meeting might look different.

Consider discussing who the target audience would be and how you can get in front of them. You could also discuss how the product should be positioned in the marketplace and what strategies you’ll use to get it there.

You can also set specific strategic planning meeting themes as part of your objectives, such as business growth or innovation.

The point is to be as specific as possible with your goal. That way, it’s easier for everyone to stay on task and make the right decisions.

2. Break the ice

A strategic planning meeting can be a big undertaking, so it’s important to break the ice by engaging participants in some friendly conversation.

You may want to ask participants what they think of the company’s latest direction or engage them in a fun icebreaker activity. You can also ask them what they think of the new business strategy and how they would implement it.

Or you could ask participants to complete an activity that allows them to interact with one another and develop a better understanding of each other’s unique skills.

For instance, you could assign participants to form teams, and then ask them to create a project plan to solve an issue the company might be experiencing.

You can also break the ice by having participants introduce themselves.

If you’re holding a remote or hybrid meeting, you could have participants discuss what they think in a private online chat room, or you could use an instant messaging program for the same purpose.

Make sure they feel comfortable sharing their thoughts and ideas with each other before starting the main agenda.

The bottom line? The more connected the group is prior to the meeting, the more effective the meeting will be.

3. Set clear expectations

Once you know what you want out of the meeting, the next step is to communicate any expectations of participants, such as things they should prepare in advance of the meeting.

Here are some useful guidelines to keep in mind when you’re setting expectations:

• Provide details: The more detail you provide, the clearer it will be as to what’s required.
• Assign roles: Make sure everyone knows their role and responsibilities within the meeting audience.
• Use timelines: Use timelines to remind everyone of what needs to be completed before the meeting and send reminders if necessary.
• Communicate effectively : Encourage participants to talk with their teams about the fact strategy planning is happening. They may want to set up smaller meetings to gather input for the strategy planning workshop or to share the outputs after the meeting to give employees a chance to ask questions.

4. Set ground rules for behavior

Before the meeting starts, make sure everyone knows the rules.

This is especially important when working with external stakeholders.

For example, you might say something like:

“The goal of this meeting is to develop the strategic plan for the next quarter. We want to minimize distractions, so please don’t check your phone during the meeting.”

Another good idea is to let participants know how they’ll be evaluated. For example, if you’re trying to make progress on a project, you might say something like:

“Let’s try and reach a consensus on the first three points. If we can do that, we’ll consider the meeting a success.”

If you’re dealing with a remote or hybrid team, you should take the time to define online behavior standards. For instance, you could say something like:

“If you have a question, please type it in the chat window. Using outside chat programs is not permitted during the meeting.”

This way, you’ll have everyone invested in the outcome.

5. Identify potential challenges

Before the meeting starts, it’s always good to identify potential areas of conflict that might derail the process.

For example, what would happen if someone had to leave halfway through? Will the meeting continue without them, or will you reconvene once they’re back?

You should also consider how to handle difficult participants. Can you remove a difficult participant from the meeting before they hijack all of your time?

What happens if a disagreement comes up and it’s not resolved?

You should prepare for all these things in advance and have a plan ready if they do happen. For example, consider using a countdown timer for specific agenda items or presentations, so that time is allocated fairly.

If you identify potential challenges early on, you can keep an eye out for them as the meeting proceeds.

6. Encourage full participation

Remember that you’re asking people to spend time — and sometimes travel — to participate in your meeting.

It’s essential that everyone feels like they have the opportunity to participate. The best way to do this is by mentioning at the beginning of the meeting that you’d like everyone’s input throughout.

Make sure to keep an eye out for people who aren’t speaking up. If it seems like they may have something to contribute, ask them for their thoughts on the topic.

Also, make sure everyone knows that participation is critical. If you need to take a vote on something, remind people what the vote is about and why it matters.

Finally, make sure you’re speaking in terms that everyone in the room can understand. If there are people who are new to the organization, spend a moment explaining any acronyms you use.

This will allow everyone to feel like they can give their input with ease, leading to a more successful meeting.

7. Use visuals and brainstorming tools to communicate ideas

Having everyone on the same page is critical, even if they can’t be in the same room.

Here’s where visuals and collaboration platforms come in handy.

Using collaborative tools, like our brainstorming templates helps you organize work and removes some of the stress of coming up with ideas on the spot.

It also encourages people to provide input and makes them feel like they have a stake in the outcome.

For instance, you can use Miro’s Reverse Brainstorming template to come up with innovative ideas and display them in real time. You can save the meeting content on the board too, so you can send it to participants after the meeting.

This can be especially useful if you have multiple participants in different locations involved at the same time. They may not be able to physically attend the meeting, but they can still provide valuable input.

Also, we provide you with a fully customizable strategic plan template .

You can adapt this template to fit your exact business needs and standardize your meetings with ease.

• Sample agenda for a strategic planning meeting

You need to make sure your strategic planning meeting agenda is detailed and thorough enough to keep you on task.

Start with an overview of what you’ll be discussing, then move into individual department updates. This is where you highlight progress against targets.

Finally, spend some time outlining your organizational goals moving forward and, of course, always leave time for questions.

To help you better understand what a strategy planning session might look like in the real world, here’s a sample agenda:

• 10am–11am: Welcome and meeting goals
• 11am–12pm: Leadership team updates
• 12pm–1pm: Department updates
• 1pm–2pm: Lunch break
• 2pm–3pm: Analyze challenges and problems
• 3pm–4pm: Ideate solutions
• 4pm–5pm: Discuss and gain consensus on solutions and goals
• 5pm–6pm: Assign tasks and responsibilities for strategy execution
• 6pm–7pm: Q&A
• It all comes down to solid preparation and visuals

The best way to ensure your meeting runs smoothly and effectively is to prepare it with anticipation. By creating a clear agenda, you’re able to get the most out of your session.

Also, the use of visuals and brainstorming tools helps you collaborate with your team and communicate your critical points more effectively.

You can hold your planning meetings in a more visual way by creating a board and sharing with your team.

Also, you can use the strategic planning meeting template to get started with fewer headaches.

Want an action-oriented framework to help your team continuously improve?

Try the strategic planning template, miro is your team's visual platform to connect, collaborate, and create — together..

Join millions of users that collaborate from all over the planet using Miro.

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Business Meeting Planning Checklist: How to do it right and fast

There is one universal trait that unifies all types of meetings – people spend their time communicating to find a solution for the problem or achieve certain goals. You must prepare whether you are planning a meeting with new business partners or doing a routine gathering of the team members engaged in a project. Careful planning is the key to conducting efficient meetings that solve problems. Our business meeting planning checklist is designed to help plan meetings quickly and correctly.

Meeting preparation: Why would I waste time on that?

You might think that this process is very tiresome and complicated. It can be when you have loads of materials to prepare, key aspects to emphasize, etc. But keep your main goal above it all – if everything goes as planned, you will get to work faster and finish your current tasks sooner. Also, when it comes to how to prepare for a meeting , there are many things to consider, including building a hierarchy of the tasks at hand, setting time limits for discussing each one of them, and quickly assigning duties within the team. To make this process less tiresome and complicated, creating a business meeting planning checklist is ideal for meeting preparation.

There are tons of articles and materials explaining how to prepare for a meeting, but most of them describe typical psychological tips. Modern times require technical solutions such as automation of the information gathering routines, advanced meeting planning software , etc. When everything is implemented right, you will be saving a lot of time in the long run. Your meetings will become shorter, and you will need them less because everything will be structured and precise.

Every meeting should have its set duration based on the number of questions to discuss. This way, you won’t have to waste time on “talking” instead of “doing.” When your time bank is empty, and you still haven’t come up with a good idea, better cross out the question from the agenda for now and discuss it at the next meeting. Remember that it gets hard to find an adequate solution when everyone’s fixated on the same thing. Such little tips can also give a good insight on how to prepare for a meeting and keep your workflow efficient.

When it comes to business meetings involving several departments and multiple participants, you will need to plan even more to make every minute count. Going to a serious event without meeting preparation is the first step to failure. Here is a short-list of “nice-to-haves:”

• Checklist for the meeting.
• Prepared agenda.
• Information to support and develop the agenda.
• Distributable feedback forms to gather reviews from meeting attendees

The most important idea you must understand is that the time spent preparing is an investment. Any meeting preparation must be well-balanced so that you won’t spend hours preparing for short gatherings. Optimize your time as it is the most important resource we have in our possession. Incorporate additional planning meeting tools into your strategy to improve your time-management skills, boost working productivity, and even save some money on canceled meetings you no longer need. This alone is already a good enough motivation to learn how to prepare for a meeting.

Our Complete Business Meeting Planning Checklist

Without a well-thought-out structure, your session with the team will slide into chaos, leaving you with questions unanswered and time wasted. Furthermore, an unsuccessful meeting can interrupt the normal workflow by shifting the focus to less relevant aspects (in the current scenario). That is why you need to plan your meetings.

Every host wants to be sure that their meetings are efficient but not very time-consuming. Here we gathered the most popular tips from managers in small business and big corporations. Consider reading them to understand how to organize a meeting.

• Coordinate schedules: When you are hosting a meeting, coordinate the schedule of all meeting members.
• Prepare materials: as the meeting organizer, prepare all the needed materials to share with the team.
• Determine the purpose: Set the main goals for the session. For example, decide whether you want to inform the employees about the newest updates or need to get a solution for the concrete problem.
• Develop an agenda: Develop the appropriate agenda depending on the previous paragraph. If you intend on having a meeting that will require more time than usual, inform all attendees beforehand. Don’t forget to include bathroom breaks and time for refreshment breaks.
• Arrange a place to meet: Make all necessary arrangements to reserve a meeting room big enough to host attending people comfortably. Be sure that the schedule is suitable for all main speakers expected to participate in the meeting.
• Time & Location: Share information about the time and location of your meeting.
• Double-check the equipment you will be using during the session. A digital presentation, for example, will require a laptop, powerful projector, and a big screen. All these devices must be ready before you start, so all you will need to do is connect your computer and push the button to start presenting.
• Prepare visuals: Prepare other visual materials, print them if necessary. It is also recommended to bring handouts with the most important information, so every participant will have a chance to make their notes in a structured way.
• Simulate the beginning of the meeting: This tip is optional, but we still recommend following it. When all preparations are done according to the business meeting planning checklist, do a quick test to simulate the beginning of the meeting. Hassle-free start allows you to get right to the point of the meeting faster.
• Send a reminder: The day before the meeting, send a reminder to all attendees. Everyone needs to be at the location before the meeting, organize them gently.

Download our Full Business Meeting Planning Checklist

According to the statistics, there is one reason across the board that consumes and wastes working time on all kinds of projects like no other. It is called “too many meetings” (learn more about how to reduce unnecessary meetings ). Research shows that employees and managers in big corporations participate in 70 meetings monthly spending more than one-third of their time talking and listening instead of doing actual work.

Don’t get the wrong idea here. Meetings are important, and you need them to keep your team updated. The problem is having ineffective meetings. However, there is a simple and elegant solution to this. Download our business meeting planning checklist free of charge. Following these guidelines will help you conduct more efficient meetings that will save your resources, time, and money.

It is a good example proving that you can keep everything neatly organized. By performing the recommended actions from this meeting checklist, you will optimize the meeting routines for your team. So, no one will be feeling exhausted from emotional burnout after discussing the same project over and over again. Print our checklist or save it on your mobile device for the next meeting and see for yourself. In the long run, the effectiveness of your meets with the team will increase inevitably. Sign up for the free trial of yoyomeeting for a more advanced approach inside your Outlook 365.

Friendly advice and our conclusion

Now you understand the importance of planning and meetings preparations. To make things easier for you, we have the tool that will be of great help in your business and daily routines. It is a universal instrument for managing meetings in all aspects imaginable. Facilitate the creation of meeting minutes, meeting agendas, and assign action items with the yoyomeeting add-in for Office 365.  Start your free trial now!

Improve your meetings with yoyomeeting for Outlook

With all these tips, you might be already great at planning a meeting. But to make life easier, you might want to read how our meeting management software can help with the meeting management process .

Apart from the Outlook add-in, we offer a lot more content on meeting management with hacks on how to improve your meeting culture. So follow us on Facebook  or connect to our   LinkedIn company profile  to stay in the loop and to get the latest on meeting management excellence.

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Meeting Planning Steps: How to Plan a Meeting

It’s understandable why people often moan at the prospect of a meeting. They can be long and not very effective uses of one’s time. But meetings are important. They’re a great way to communicate with a group and get that group to work better together. To remove the stigma attached to meetings, learn meeting planning.

What Is Meeting Planning?

Meeting planning sets the agenda for the meeting. It includes who will be in attendance, when and where the meeting will take place as well as what will occur during and after the meeting. It structures the meeting to avoid wasting anyone’s valuable time and can also create guidelines for when one can speak, who will lead the meeting and who takes the meeting minutes.

Using ProjectManager , award-winning project management software, can not only capture the meeting agenda and share it among the attendees but list the action items created during the meeting. These tasks can be added to a task list, kanban board or calendar view, assigned to individuals with due dates, priority and notes. You can even attach files to the task so when everyone leaves the meeting, they can hit the ground running. Get started with ProjectManager today for free.

Why Is Meeting Planning Important?

Meetings are a great vehicle for delivering information efficiently to a group of people. There are other ways, of course, such as email or documentation, however, a meeting provides a space for questions and feedback . This ensures that everyone is on the same page before the meeting breaks. Meetings can also help build bonds in teams that will foster greater collaboration.

Meetings are key means to communicate in projects , but they often waste time, not add efficiency. Jennifer Bridges, PMP, shows you how to plan a productive meeting.

Here’s a shot of the whiteboard for your reference!

Meeting Planning Steps

When planning for a productive meeting you have to ask yourself the who, what why, where and how questions more commonly associated with journalism. Here are the steps to effective meeting planning:

1. Determine the Purpose of the Meeting

Don’t set up a meeting without first understanding why there should be a meeting. If there’s no good reason to meet, don’t meet. But if there is, then that purpose should be clearly defined and focused. You don’t want to bite off more than you can chew in a meeting.

2. Set Goals for Your Meeting

Meetings should get a group of people from one point to another, whether that’s just making them clear on some topic or assigning work to individuals. Make sure you have a goal in mind before setting up the meeting. That way you can make sure that goal has been accomplished before the meeting breaks.

3. Identify Who Should Attend the Meeting

Not everyone needs to attend every meeting. Don’t invite people that have no interest in involvement in what the meeting is going to discuss. Keep the attendance of those who are involved in some manner with the subject of the meeting.

4. Notify Attendees in Advance

The meeting should be announced with enough time so that everyone can make sure they have scheduled time on their calendar. Never spring a meeting on people without notice. They might not be able to attend and, even if they can, they’ll be upset by the abruptness. It shows a lack of concern for their time.

5. Prepare the Content for Your Meeting

Have an agenda written prior to the meeting. This will provide an outline of what will be discussed during the meeting. If you need any supporting documentation to hand out, be sure to have it printed prior to the meeting. The last thing you want to do is be unprepared. It’s not professional.

6. Define the Duration of Your Meeting

Meetings can have a tendency to go on and on. To avoid a meeting that never ends, set a time limit. How much time do you realistically need to do what the meeting calls for? That’s the duration of the meeting.

7. Create a Meeting Agenda

We’ve already mentioned the need for an agenda. Now you can write it. Start with an icebreaker to get everyone comfortable and then list the topics, including any takeaways or action items that will need to be completed before the next meeting.

8. Write Meeting Minutes

A secretary should be selected to keep meeting minutes, which are a short summary of the main points made during the meeting. This can include what was said by the meeting leader and those in attendance as well as any action items that will be executed before the next meeting.

Lastly, it’s important to create meeting minutes to make sure you and your team members don’t forget key points about your meeting. Our free meeting minutes template is a great tool to help you with this process.

Do all these things and team members won’t moan every time you call a meeting, but actually, get marching orders and feel excited about what to do next.

Challenges of Meeting Planning

Meetings can be the bane of a team member’s existence, Jennifer said. It’s not that project meetings aren’t important, it’s just that they are sometimes more of a problem, such as:

• Having the wrong people in the wrong meetings
• Having a lack of communication about the meeting
• Having a lack of clarity during the meeting
• Having a lack of planning for the meeting

That last item, Jennifer noted, if planned properly will resolve all the other issues she brought up. That’ll make a productive meeting and a happy team. Monitoring the health and happiness of your team may not seem like a priority, but if you want to have a successful project you have to do just that.

Free Meeting Planning Templates

ProjectManager has many free project management templates for Excel and Word that you can download right now. There are templates that cover every phase of a project, including these three that can help you have a more successful meeting.

Meeting Minutes Template

To make taking minutes easier, use our free meeting minutes template for Word. If has space to capture who was in attendance, the meeting agenda and any takeaways from the meeting as well as when the next meeting will occur.

Action Plan Template

Most meetings end with action items that are assigned to those in attendance to complete before the next meeting. Use our free action plan template for Excel to list all these tasks, who’s assigned, the timetable for completing them and more.

Task Tracker Template

Once you have started to execute the tasks on your action plan, it’s important to use our free task tracker template for Excel to make sure they’re done as scheduled. You can monitor the status of your work and make sure you’re staying on track.

If you’re looking for more guidance or you’re interested in trying project management software, take a free 30-day trial today!

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The 16 Types of Business Meetings (and Why They Matter)

It’s not that the advice is wrong, per se. It’s just not specific enough.

• Introduction
• Background: The thinking behind the taxonomy
• Cadence Meetings
• Catalyst Meetings
• Meetings to Evaluate and Influence
• Table: Summary of Types
• Example: How Different Types of Meetings Work Together

For example, it’s not wrong to tell people they need an agenda with clear outcomes listed for every topic. It just doesn’t apply to a lot of situations. An exquisitely detailed agenda for the one-on-one with my boss? For the sales demo? For our morning huddle? Yeah, I don’t think so. For the board meeting or the requirements analysis meeting? Absolutely.

Sometimes an organization has a pervasive problem with meetings. People complain that there are too many meetings, nothing gets done, it’s wasted time, it’s all power and politics instead of productivity—and they start to look for solutions. They find lots of generic advice, and they find lots of this kind of drivel:

Crushing morale, killing productivity – why do offices put up with meetings? There’s no proof that organisations benefit from the endless cycle of these charades, but they can’t stop it. We’re addicted. by Simon Jenkins for the Guardian September 2017

This article is wildly popular. Over 1000 people who hate having their time wasted in meetings paradoxically had extra time they could spend commenting here to express their agreement and outrage.

Mr. Jenkins has clearly struck a nerve. It’s the kind of pandering that drives clicks and sells ads, which makes that a job well done for the Guardian. But it’s also nonsense.

There’s no proof that organizations benefit from meetings? You can only say something like that when you’re speaking too generally for anyone to know what you’re talking about. Because otherwise – did you hear that, sales teams? There’s no proof those client meetings help your company. Go ahead and cancel them! Hospital workers, stop wasting your time in those shift-change meetings! You should know what to do without talking to each other so much – go heal people already! Boards? Board meetings are for losers. Just use chat and email to manage all your governance duties.

When you get specific about the kind of meeting you’re talking about, the generic “meetings waste time” or “you must have 5 people or less” statements become ridiculous, and people who complain about meetings in general sound like childish whingers.

A meeting is not a meeting.

Want to skip the background information? Jump ahead to the taxonomy.

This doesn’t mean that meetings in general work great and that there’s no problem to solve here. It just means that there isn’t a singular meeting problem that has a simple meeting solution .

This is a challenge for us!

At Lucid, we work to help our clients get meaningful business results from their meetings, and to do this, we have to get specific. The coaching we provide for our committee clients is not the same advice we give to leadership teams .

Mr. Jenkins correctly points out that when you invite 20 people to a meeting designed for 5, it doesn’t work anymore. Well, duh. His conclusion is that meetings don’t work. A more useful conclusion is that if you’re going to invite 20 people, you should run a meeting designed to work for 20 people. That’s entirely doable, but it’s also a very different meeting.

In brief: the solution to a meeting problem depends on the kind of meeting.

Which raises the question: what are the different kinds of meetings? If it isn’t useful to provide guidelines for all meetings, is it at least possible to establish useful guidelines for a certain type of meeting? Or do we really need to look at each and every single meeting as if it was totally unique and special?

This question has driven much of our work over the past 10 years.

We found that there is a core structure underlying all successful meetings , acting as a kind of skeleton. Every meeting needs bones, but after that, the kind of animal you get on top of those bones can vary wildly. A fish is not a bird is not a kangaroo, despite the fact that they all have a head and a tail.

We found that meetings work together , and that looking at individual meetings in isolation leads to misunderstandings. It’s like studying a single bee; the drone’s dance doesn’t make a lot of sense unless you know that there are other bees watching. Meetings are designed to beget action that is evaluated and built upon in subsequent meetings, and the sequence and cadence at which these meetings occur drives the momentum of that action. Looking only at a single meeting means you miss the clues that lead to the honey.

We work with facilitators and experts to design agendas and guidebooks for running specific meetings . We’ve seen where the structures look the same, and where they differ. There are lots of specific ways to run a status meeting, but even though there’s a lot of variety between them, every status meeting still looks way more like every other status meeting than it does like any strategic planning session. Mammals are more like other mammals than any of them are like an insect.

And of course we work with clients and hear concerns about all those things that the experts don’t talk about, like how to lead a decent meeting when the group thinks meetings aren’t cool, or how to prepare in advance when your goal is to “wow” everyone during the meeting. We know people worry about how to walk those fine lines between inclusiveness and efficiency, and between appropriate framing and facilitation on the one hand, and manipulation on the other. We hear how they experience specific meetings in the context of getting real work done and can see how priorities shift between getting the content right and getting people connected.

A Taxonomy for Meetings

From all of this, we’ve developed a taxonomy for meetings that we use to help answer these questions:

• Assessing Meeting Performance Maturity : Which kind of meetings does an organization run, and which ones does it need to know how to run well? How well does it run those meetings?
• Meeting Design : If I need to design a new meeting, is there a core pattern I can build on? What factors of the design have the greatest impact on the success of this kind of meeting?
• Meeting Problem Diagnoses: If there is a problem with a meeting, are there common requirements for that kind of meeting that I can check first? Are there things going on in that meeting that might work in other meetings, but are incompatible with success in this one?
• B.S. Filter: Is the advice I’m hearing or reading relevant to the success of this meeting, or is it meant for another sort? Or worse, is it generic B.S.?

Background Work: Forming the Hypothesis

We’re not the first to propose a meeting taxonomy. If you search for “types of meetings” and if you read any books on meetings, you’ll find many ways to break down meetings by type. Most lists include between 4 and 6 different types; things like Issue Resolution meetings and Decision Making meetings.

To build our taxonomy, we started with a set of 6 types and a list of all the different kinds of meetings we could think of, then tried to match them up.

This was frustrating. No matter which list we started with, within a few minutes we always found an example that didn’t fit.

For example, Google used this list of the 6 Types of Meetings from MeetingSift as the definitive list for years. It’s very similar to many other lists out there.

• Status Update Meetings
• Information Sharing Meetings
• Decision Making Meetings
• Problem Solving Meetings
• Innovation Meetings
• Team Building Meetings

So – you tell me. Which one of those does the board meeting fit into? How about the project retrospective? The answer is that meetings like the ones that you might actually find on your calendar can fit into several of these types.

Whenever we found a meeting that didn’t fit, we set it aside and asked “Why?” What is it about that meeting which meant it should be treated differently than these others?

Because we are focused on driving tangible business results, we found we needed to get more specific. In the end, we found that there were three major factors that impact how to approach a meeting.

• The Meeting Intention
• The Meeting Format

The Expected Participation Profile

Our current taxonomy uses these factors to describe 16 distinct meeting types and gives a nod to a significant 17th that falls outside of our scope.

The Differentiators: Intention, Format and Participation Profile

Before we dive into the specific types, let’s take a look at the factors that make them distinct in more detail.

Meeting Intention

The intention behind a meeting is most often expressed as the meeting’s purpose and desired outcomes. In other words, why do people run this kind of meeting? What is it meant to create?

There are two major outcomes for any meeting: a human connection and a work product. We found that many attempts to categorize meetings dealt only with the work product, which often led to bad advice.

For example, the intention of a decision-making meeting is:

• A decision (the work product) and
• Commitment to that decision from the people in the room (a human connection outcome)

It is very easy to run a decision-making meeting that achieves 1 (a decision) but fails to achieve 2 (commitment), and therefore will fail to deliver the expected business result. If you have ever been in a meeting where you’re discussing a decision you thought had already been made, you know this to be true.

Our taxonomy attempts to look at both kinds of outcomes when describing the meeting intention.

When we first started looking at meeting format, we used a standard breakdown of “formal” and “informal” to help distinguish between the board meetings and the team meetings, but we abandoned that pretty quickly because it didn’t hold up in practice.

In practice, we found that while boards have rules that they must follow by law, and they do, this didn’t necessarily mean that the majority of the meeting followed any very strict structure. Many board meetings actually include lots of free-form conversation, which is then briefly formalized to address the legal requirements.

By contrast, we would have considered an Agile team’s daily stand-up meeting to be an informal meeting. Heck, we run those and I don’t always wear shoes. But despite this casual, social informality, the daily stand-up runs according to a very clear set of rules. Every update includes just three things, each one is no longer than 2 minutes, and we never ever ever problem solve during the meeting.

It turns out that formal and informal told us more about a participant’s perception of social anxiety in a meeting than it did about the type or format of a meeting. I experience stand-ups and interviews as informal, largely because I’m in charge and am confident of my role in these meetings. I doubt everyone I interview considers it an informal chat, though, and I imagine our stand-up may feel pretty uptight to someone who wasn’t used to it.

Instead of formal and informal, we found that the strength of the governing rituals and rules had a clearer impact on the meeting’s success. By this measure, the daily stand-up is highly ritualistic, board meetings and brainstorming sessions abide by governing rules but not rigidly so, and initial sales calls and team meetings have very few prescribed boundaries.

This still didn’t quite explain all the variation we saw in meeting formats, however. When we looked at the project status update meeting, we realized it shared some characteristics with the board meeting, but these project meetings aren’t governed by rules and laws in the same way. And while the intention for project updates is always the same—to share information about project work status and manage emerging change—there’s a ton of variation in how people run project status updates. Some teams are very formal and rigid, while others are nearly structure-free. This means our “governing rituals” criteria didn’t work here.

The format characteristic all project status update meetings do share, and that you’ll also see with board meetings, is a dislike of surprises. No project manager wants to show up to the weekly update and get surprised by how far off track the team is, or how they’ve decided to take the project in some new direction. Board members hate this too. For these meetings, surprises are bad bad bad!

Surprises are bad for project updates, but other meetings are held expressly for the purpose of finding something new. The innovation meeting, the get-to-know-you meeting, the problem-solving meeting all hope for serendipity. Going into those meetings, people don’t know what they’ll get, but they try to run the meeting to maximize their chances of something great showing up by the time they’re done.

So, when categorizing meetings based on the meeting format, we looked at both:

• The strength of governing rules or rituals
• The role of serendipity and tolerance for surprise

Last but not least, we felt that who was expected to be at a meeting and how they were meant to interact had a major impact on what needed to happen for the meeting to succeed.

The question behind these criteria is: what kind of reasonable assumptions can we make about how well these people will work together to achieve the desired goal?

Remember: every meeting has both a human connection outcome and a work outcome.

This has many significant design impacts. For example, in meetings with group members that know each other already, you can spend less meeting time on building connections. We don’t do introductions in the daily huddle; we assume the team handled that outside the meeting.

In meetings where the work product is arguably far more important than the human connection, it’s not always necessary for people to like one another or even remember each others’ names as long as the meeting gets them all to the desired goal efficiently. A formal incident investigation meeting does not need the person under investigation to know and like the people on the review board to achieve its goal.

By contrast, some meetings only go well after the team establishes mutual respect and healthy working relationships. The design of these meetings must nurture and enhance those relationships if they are to achieve the desired outcomes. Weekly team meetings often fail because people run them like project status updates instead of team meetings, focusing too heavily on content at the expense of connection, and their teams are weaker for it.

After much slotting and wrangling, we found there were three ways our assumptions about the people in the room influenced the meeting type.

• A known set of people all familiar with one another. Team meetings fit here.
• A group of people brought together to fit a need. Kickoffs, ideation sessions, and workshops all fit here.
• Two distinct groups, with a clear us-them or me-them dynamic, who meet in response to an event. Interviews fit here, as do broadcast meetings and negotiations.
• The expected leadership and participation styles. Every type of meeting has a “default” leader responsible for the meeting design; usually the boss or manager, a facilitator, or the person who requested the meeting. Most also have an expected interaction style for participants that, when encouraged, gets the best results. Some meetings are collaborative, some very conversational, like one-on-ones, and some are very formal – almost hostile. Still others, like the All-Hands broadcast meeting , don’t require any active participation at all.
• The centrality of relationships. Finally, we looked at whether the meeting’s success depended on the group working well together. Nearly every meeting that teams repeat as part of their day-to-day operations works best when team members get along, and becomes torturous when they don’t. Outside of regular team meetings, there are also meetings designed explicitly to establish positive relationships, such as the first introduction, interviews, and team chartering workshops. In all these cases, a successful meeting design must take relationships into account.

Criteria We Considered and Rejected

There are lots of other factors that influence how you plan and run any given meeting, but we felt that they didn’t warrant creating a whole new type. Here are some of the criteria that impact meeting design, but that we didn’t use when defining types.

Location and Resources

Face-to-face or remote, walking or sitting, sticky notes or electronic documents; there’s no question that the meeting logistics have an impact. They don’t, however, change the underlying goals or core structure for a meeting. They simply modify how you execute it.

A design workshop for creating a new logo will deal with different content than one for developing a new country-sponsored health plan or one for creating a nuclear submarine. At the human level, however, each of these design workshops needs to accomplish the same thing by engaging the creative and collaborative genius of the participants in generating innovative solutions. Similarly, project meetings in every field look at time, progress, and budget. The content changes, but the core goals and format do not.

This one is like logistics. You absolutely have to change how you run a meeting with 20 people from how you led the same meeting with 5. But again, the goals, the sequence of steps, the governing rituals – none of that changes. In general, smaller meetings are easier to run and more successful on a day-to-day basis. But if you legitimately need 20 people involved in that decision, and sometimes you do, that is an issue of scale rather than kind.

Operating Context

What comes before the meeting and what’s happening in the larger ecosystem can have a huge impact on how a team approaches a meeting. A decision-making meeting held in times of abundance feels radically different than one you run to try and figure out how to save a sinking ship . Even so, the underlying principles for sound decision-making remain the same. Some situations absolutely make it much harder to succeed, but they don’t, in our opinion, make it a fundamentally different kind of meeting.

Now, given that extended lead-up, what types did we end up with?

The 16 (+1) Types of Meetings

I’ve broken our list into three main groupings below and provided details for each type. Then, at the end, you’ll find a table with all the meeting types listed for easy comparison and a spreadsheet you can download.

Quickly, here’s the list. Details are below.

Team Cadence Meetings

• Progress Updates

One-on-Ones

• Action Review Meetings

Governance Cadence Meetings

• Idea Generation Meetings

Planning Meetings

• Decision Making Meeting

Sensemaking

• Introductions

Issue Resolution Meetings

• Community of Practice Meetings

Training Sessions

Broadcast meetings.

Want to learn more about this chart? See the follow-up post on the Periodic Table of Meetings .  

Cadence Meetings We Review, Renew, Refine – Meetings with Known Participants and Predictable Patterns

As we do the work of our organizations, we learn. The plans we made on day one may work out the way we expected, but maybe not. New stuff comes up and before too long it becomes obvious that we need to adjust course.

Organizations use these meetings to review performance, renew team connections, and refine their approach based on what they’ve learned.

All of these meetings involve an established group of people, with perhaps the occasional guest. Most happen at regular and predictable intervals, making up the strategic and operational cadence of the organization.

These meetings all follow a regularized pattern; each meeting works basically like the last one and teams know what to expect. Because the participants and the format are predicatable, these meetings often require less up-front planning and less specialized facilitation expertise to succeed.

The meeting types in this group are:

• Ensure group cohesion
• Drive execution
• the Weekly Team Meeting
• the Daily Huddle
• the Shift-Change Meeting
• a Regular Committee Meeting
• the Sales Team Check-In Meeting

Expected Participation Profile

These meetings are typically led by the “boss” or manager, but they can be effectively led by any team member. The best results happen when everyone invited engages collaboratively. Healthy relationships are important to meeting success.

Meeting Format

Team cadence meetings follow a regular pattern or standard agenda, which can be very ritualistic. Team meetings should surface new information and challenges, but big surprises are not welcome here. (Unless they’re super awesome!) These meetings are about keeping an established team personally connected and moving towards a common goal, and not about inspiring major change.

To learn more, visit our Team Cadence Meetings Resource Center.

Back to the list of types ⇧

Progress Checks

• Maintain project momentum
• Ensure mutual accountability
• the Project Status Meeting
• the Client Check-In

Project managers and account managers lead these meetings, and everyone else participates in a fairly structured way. In many ways, these meetings are designed to inform and reassure people that everyone else on the team is doing what they said they’d do, or if not, to figure out what they all need to do to get back on track. Functional relationships matter, but it’s not as important to the overall result that these people enjoy each other’s company. Because these meetings are mostly designed to “make sure everything is still working”, which matters to project success and the organization’s ability to plan, they can often be very boring for the individual contributors who already know what’s going on with their work.

Project updates follow a regular pattern. Some are very strict, others less so; this varies by the team and the kind of work they do. Surprises are entirely unwelcome. Any major surprise will cause a meeting failure and derail the planned agenda.

To learn more, visit our Progress Check Meetings Resource Center.

• Career and personal development
• Individual accountability
• Relationship maintenance
• the Manager-Employee One-on-One
• a Coaching Session
• a Mentorship Meeting
• the “Check In” with an Important Stakeholder

These meetings involve two people with an established relationship. The quality of that relationship is critical to success in these meetings, and leadership may alternate between the participants based on their individual goals. While these meetings may follow an agenda, the style is entirely conversational. In some instances, the only distinction between a one-on-one and a plain ol’ conversation is the fact that the meeting was scheduled in advance to address a specific topic.

One-on-ones are the loosey goosiest meetings in this set. Experienced and dedicated leaders will develop an approach to one-on-ones that they use often, but the intimate nature of these meetings defies rigid structure. People tend not to enjoy surprises in one-on-ones, but they infinitely prefer to learn surprising news in these meetings rather than in a team or governance cadence meeting. If you’re going to quit or fly to the moon or you’ve just invented the cure to aging, you’re way better off telling your manager privately before you share that with the board.

To learn more, visit our One-on-One Meetings Resource Center.

Action Reviews

• Learning: gain insight
• Develop confidence
• Generate recommendations for change
• Project and Agile Retrospectives
• After Action Reviews and Before Action Reviews (Military)
• Pre-Surgery Meetings (Healthcare)
• Win/Loss Review (Sales)

These meetings are led by a designated person from the team. When run well, action reviews demand highly engaged and structured participation from everyone present. Because action reviews are so structured, they don’t require the individuals involved to be great friends. They do, however, require professionalism, focus, a commitment to building psychological safety, and strong engagement. Action reviews that happen too infrequently or too far away in time from the action tend to become more conversational and less powerful.

Action reviews are highly ritualistic; these are the kind of meetings that inspire the use of the word “ritual”. The action review is a tool for continuous learning; the more frequently these are run and the tighter the team gets, the faster they learn and improve. Teams can and will change how they run these meetings over time based on what they’ve learned, and this avid pursuit of change for the better is itself part of the ritual. Action reviews take surprise in stride. The whole point is to learn and then refine future action, so while huge surprises may cause chagrin, they are embraced as lessons and used accordingly.

Can you tell these are some of my favorite meetings?

To learn more, visit our Action Review Meetings Resource Center.

• Strategic definition and oversight
• Regulatory compliance and monitoring
• Board Meetings
• Quarterly Strategic Reviews
• QBR (a quarterly review between a vendor and client)

The teams involved in governance meetings are known in advance but don’t necessarily work together often. Nor do they need to; these aren’t the kind of meetings where everyone has to be pals to get good results. These meetings are led by a chair or official company representative, and participation is structured. This means that while there are often times for free conversation during a governance meeting, much of the participation falls into prescribed patterns. These are often the kind of meetings that warrant nicer shoes.

Governance cadence meetings are highly structured. When run professionally, there is always an agenda, it is always shared in advance, and minutes get recorded. Governance meetings are NOT the time for surprises. In fact, best practice for important board meetings includes making sure everyone coming to that meeting gets a personal briefing in advance (see Investigative or One-on-Ones) to ensure no one is surprised in the meeting. A surprise in a governance cadence meeting means someone screwed up.

To learn more, visit our Governance Cadence Meetings Resource Center.

Catalyst Meetings The Right Group to Create Change – Meetings with Participants and Patterns Customized to Fit the Need

New ideas, new plans, projects to start, problems to solve, and decisions to make—these meetings change an organization’s work.

These meetings are all scheduled as needed, and include the people the organizers feel to be best suited for achieving the meeting goals. They succeed when following a thoughtful meeting design and regularly fail when people “wing it”.

Because these meetings are scheduled as needed with whomever is needed, there is a lot more variation in format between meetings. This is the realm of participatory engagement, decision and sense-making activities, and when the group gets larger, trained facilitation.

Idea Generation

• Create a whole bunch of ideas
• Ad Campaign Brainstorming Session
• User Story Brainstorming
• Fundraiser Brainstorming

Idea generation meetings often include participants from an established team, but not always. These meetings are led by a facilitator and participants contribute new ideas in a structured way. While it’s always nice to meet with people you know and like, established relationships don’t necessarily improve outcomes for these meetings. Instead, leaders who want to get the widest variety of ideas possible are better off including participants with diverse perspectives and identities. Relationships are not central here; ideas are.

These meetings start with the presentation of a central premise or challenge, then jump into some form of idea generation. There are loads of idea-generation techniques, all of which involve a way for participants to respond to a central challenge with as many individual ideas as possible. Unlike workshops or problem-solving meetings, the group may not attempt to coalesce or refine their ideas in the meeting. Here, idea volume matters more than anything else. Organizations run these meetings when they aren’t sure what to do yet; the whole meeting is an entreaty to serendipity. As such, there are few governing principles beyond the rule to never interfere with anyone else’s enthusiasm.

To learn more, visit our Idea Generation Meetings Resource Center.

• Create plans
• Secure commitment to implementing the plans
• Project Planning
• Campaign Planning (Marketing)
• Product Roadmap Planning
• and so on. Every group that makes things has a planning meeting.

Planning meetings often involve an existing team, but also involve other people as needed. Depending on the size and scope of the plans under development, these meetings are led by the project owner or by an outside facilitator. Participants are expected to actively collaborate on the work product. They may or may not have established relationships; if not, some time needs to be spent helping people get to know each other and understand what each of them can contribute. That said, these meetings are about getting a job done, so relationships don’t get central focus.

Planning meetings vary depending on the kind of plan they’re creating, but generally start with an explanation of the overall goal, an analysis of the current situation, and then work through planning details. Planning meetings end with a review and confirmation of the plan created. Planning meetings are not governed by rules nor do they follow specific rituals; the meeting format is dictated more by the planning format than anything else. Because planning meetings happen very early in an endeavor’s life cycle, successful meetings design for serendipity. Anything you can learn during this meeting that makes the plan better is a good thing!

To learn more, visit our Planning Meetings Resource Center.

• Group formation
• Commitment and clarity on execution
• One or more tangible results; real work product comes out of workshops
• Project, Program and Product Kickoffs
• Team Chartering
• Design Workshops
• Value Stream Mapping
• Strategy Workshops
• Team Building workshops

Groups are assembled specifically for these meetings and guided by a designated facilitator. These meetings put future work into motion, so the focus may be split equally between the creation of a shared work product (such as a value stream map or charter document) and team formation since successful team relationships make all the future work easier. Workshops often incorporate many of the elements you find in other types of meetings. For example, a workshop may include information gathering, idea generation, problem solving, and planning altogether.

Because they attempt to achieve so much more than other meetings, workshops take longer to run and way longer to plan and set up. Most workshops expect participants to actively engage and collaborate in the creation of a tangible shared result, and a lot of effort goes into planning very structured ways to ensure that engagement. When it comes to business meetings, these are also often as close to a working party as it gets.

Smaller kickoffs may follow a simple pattern and be held in the team’s regular meeting space, but many workshops take place in a special location; somewhere off-site, outside, or otherwise distinct from the normal work environment. All these meetings start with introductions and level-setting of some kind: a group exercise, a review of the project goals, and perhaps a motivational speech from the sponsor. Then, the team engages in a series of exercises or activities in pursuit of the work product. Since these meetings are long, coffee and cookies may be expected. Workshops conclude with a review of the work product, and often a reflective exercise. That said, while the basic pattern for a workshop is fairly standard, these are bespoke meetings that do not adhere to any particular rituals. The people who plan and facilitate the meeting work hard to create opportunities for serendipity; they want the team to discover things about each other and the work that inspires and engages them.

To learn more, visit our Workshops Resource Center.

Problem Solving

• Find a solution to a problem
• Secure commitment to enact the solution
• Incident Response
• Strategic Issue Resolution
• Major Project Change Resolution

These meetings involve anyone who may have information that helps the group find a solution and anyone who will need to implement the solution. Depending on the urgency of the situation, the meeting will be led by the person in charge (the responsible leader) or a facilitator. Everyone present is expected to collaborate actively, answering all questions and diligently offering assistance. Tight working relationships can help these meetings go more easily, and participants who establish trust can put more energy into finding solutions since they worry less about blame and personal repercussions. That said, these meetings need the participation of the people with the best expertise, and these people may not know each other well. When this happens, the meeting leader should put extra effort into creating safety in the group if they want everyone’s best effort.

Problem solving meetings begin with a situation analysis (what happened, what resources do we have), then a review of options. After the team discusses and selects an option, they create an action plan. We’ve all seen the shortest version of this meeting in movies when the police gather outside of the building full of hostages and collaborate to create their plan. Problem solving meetings follow this basic structure, which can be heavily ritualized in first responder and other teams devoted to quickly solving problems. These strict governing procedures get looser when problems aren’t so urgent, but the basic pattern remains.

In a problem solving meeting, the ugly surprise already happened. Now the team welcomes serendipity, hoping a brilliant solution will emerge.

To learn more, visit our Problem Solving Meetings Resource Center.

Decision Making

• A documented decision
• Commitment to act on that decision
• New Hire Decision
• Go/No-Go Decision
• Logo Selection
• Final Approval of a Standard

Often a decision-making meeting involves a standing team, but like problem solving meetings, not always. These meetings may also include people who will be impacted by the decision or have expertise to share, even if they aren’t directly responsible for implementing the decision. Decision making meetings may be led by a designated facilitator, but more often the senior leader or chair runs them. People participate in decision making meetings as either advisers or decision makers. If the decision under discussion is largely a formality, this participation will be highly structured. If, on the other hand, the group is truly weighing multiple options, the participation style will be much more collaborative. Established relationships are not central to decision making meetings, but the perceived fairness and equanimity of the discussion is. When the group behaves in a way that makes it unsafe to voice concerns, these concerns go unaddressed which then weakens commitment to the decision.

Decision making meetings involve the consideration of options and the selection of a final option. Unlike problem solving meetings that include a search for good options, all that work to figure out the possible options happens before the decision making meeting. In many cases, these meetings are largely a formality intended to finalize and secure commitment to a decision that’s already been made. Ritual is high, and surprises unwelcome. In other situations, the group is weighing multiple options and seeking to make a selection in the meeting. There still shouldn’t be any big surprises, but there’s a whole lot more flexibility. For example, corporate leadership teams run decision-making meetings when faced with unexpected strategic challenges. Many of these teams revert to a structure-free conversational meeting approach; just “talking it out” until they reach a decision. Unfortunately for them, teams make the best decisions when their meetings follow a formal decision-making methodology .

To learn more, visit our Decision Making Meetings Resource Center.

Context Meetings Efforts to Evaluate and Influence – Meetings Between Us and Them, with Info to Share and Questions to Answer

These meetings are all designed to transfer information and intention from one person or group to another. They are scheduled by the person who wants something with the people they want to influence or get something from.

At the surface, that sounds Machiavellian, but the intention here is rarely nefarious. Instead, these meetings often indicate a genuine interest in learning, sharing, and finding ways to come together for mutual benefit.

Because each of these meetings involves some form of social evaluation, the format and rituals have more to do with etiquette and interpersonal skills than regulations or work product, although this is not always the case.

• To learn things that you can use to inform later action
• To gain an understanding of the current state of a project, organization, or system
• Peer Consults (aka Braintrusts)
• Project Discovery Meetings
• Incident Investigations
• Market Research Panels

Expected Participant Profile

These meetings may be led by an interviewer or facilitator. Participants include the people being interviewed and sometimes a set of observers. Engagement in sensemaking meetings may feel conversational, but it always follows a clear question-response structure. Most interviewers work to develop a rapport with the people they’re interviewing, since people often share more freely with people they perceive as friendly and trustworthy. That said, many sensemaking meetings work fine without rapport, because the person sharing information is expecting to benefit from it in the future. For example, if a doctor asks a patient to describe his symptoms, the patient does so willingly because he expects the doctor will use that information to help him feel better.

Many interviews are governed by rules regarding privacy, non-disclosure, and discretion. These formalities may be addressed at the beginning or end of the session. Otherwise, there are no strong patterns for a sensemaking session. Instead, people regularly working in these meetings focus on asking better questions. Like idea generation meetings, information gathering meetings delight in serendipity. Unlike idea generation meetings, however, the goal is not to invent new solutions but rather to uncover existing facts and perspectives.

To learn more, visit our Sensemaking Meetings Resource Center.

• Learn about each other
• Decide whether to continue the relationship
• a Job Interview
• the First Meeting Between Professionals
• the Sales Pitch
• the First Meeting with a Potential Vendor
• the Investor Pitch

Introduction meetings are led by the person who asked for the meeting. The person or people invited to the meeting may also work to lead the discussion, or they may remain largely passive; they get to engage however they see fit because they’re under no obligation to spend any more time here than they feel necessary. People attempt to engage conversationally in most introductions, but when the social stakes increase or the prospect of mutual benefit is significantly imbalanced, the engagement becomes increasingly one-sided.

There are no strict rules for meetings of this type as a whole, but that doesn’t make them ad-hoc informal events. On the contrary, sales teams, company founders, and young professionals spend many long hours working to “hone their pitch”. They hope this careful preparation will reduce the influence of luck and the chances of an unhappy surprise. The flow of the conversation will vary depending on the situation. These meeting can go long, get cut short, and quickly veer into tangents. It’s up to the person who asked for the meeting to ensure the conversation ends with a clear next step.

To learn more, visit our Introduction Meetings Resource Center.

• A new agreement
• Commitment to further the relationship
• Support Team Escalation
• Contract Negotiations and Renewals
• Neighbor Dispute

These meetings are led by a designated negotiator or moderator or, if a neutral party isn’t available, by whoever cares about winning more. All parties are expected to engage in the discussion, although how they engage will depend entirely on the current state of their relationship. If the negotiation is tense, the engagement will be highly structured to prevent any outright breakdown. If the relationship is sound, the negotiation may be conducted in a very conversational style. Obviously, relationship quality plays a central role in the success of a negotiation or issue resolution meeting.

The format for these meetings is entirely dependent on the situation. Formal treaty negotiations between countries follow a very structured and ritualistic format. Negotiations between individual leaders, however, may be hashed out on the golf course. These meetings are a dance, so while surprises may not be welcome, they are expected.

To learn more, visit our Issue Resolution Meetings Resource Center.

Community of Practice Gatherings

• Topic-focused exchange of ideas
• Relationship development
• The Monthly Safety Committee Meeting
• The Project Manager’s Meetup
• The Lunch-n-Learn

The people at these meetings volunteer to be there because they’re interested in the topic. An organizer or chair opens the meeting and introduces any presenters. Participants are expected to engage convivially, ask questions, engage in exercises when appropriate, and network when there isn’t a presentation going. These meetings are part social, part content, and the style is relaxed.

Most of these meetings begin with mingling and light conversation. Then, the organizers will call for the group’s attention and begin the prepared part of the meeting. This could follow a traditional agenda, as they do in a Toastmaster’s meeting, or it may include a group exercise or a presentation by an invited speaker. There’s time for questions, and then more time at the end to resume the casual conversations begun at the meeting start. People in attendance are there to learn about the topic, but also to make connections with others that create opportunities. Many hope for serendipity.

To learn more, visit our Community of Practice Meetings Resource Center.

• To transfer knowledge and skills
• Client Training on a New Product
• New Employee On-Boarding
• Safety Training

The trainer leads training sessions, and participants follow instructions. Participants may be there by choice, or they may be required to attend training by their employer. There is no expectation of collaboration between the trainer and the participants; these are pure transfers of information from one group to the next.

Training session formats vary widely. In the simplest form, the session involves the trainer telling participants what they believe they need to learn, and then participants ask questions. Instructional designers and training professionals can make training sessions way more engaging than that.

To learn more, visit our Training Meetings Resource Center.

• To share information that inspires (or prevents) action
• the All-Hands Meeting

Broadcast meetings are led by the meeting organizer. This person officially starts the meeting and then either runs the presentation or introduces the presenters. People invited to the meeting may have an opportunity to ask questions, but for the most part, they are expected to listen attentively. While they include presentations in the same way a Community of Practice meeting does, they do not provide an opportunity for participants to engage in casual conversation and networking. These are not collaborative events.

Broadcast meetings start and end on time. They begin with brief introductions which are followed by the presentation. Questions may be answered periodically, or held until the last few minutes. Because these meetings include announcements or information intended to inform later action, participants often receive follow-up communication: a copy of the slides, a special offer or invitation, or in the case of an all-hands meeting, a follow-up meeting with the manager to talk about how the big announcement impacts their team. The people leading a broadcast meeting do not expect and do not welcome surprises. The people participating often don’t know what to expect.

To learn more, visit our Broadcast Meetings Resource Center.

That said, I have heard people call broadcasts and training sessions “meetings” on multiple occasions. The all-staff meeting is often just announcements, but people call it a meeting. Project folks will schedule a “meeting to go over the new system” with a client, and that’s basically a lightweight training session.

And if we look at meetings as a tool we use to move information through our organizations, create connections between the people in our organizations, and drive work momentum, broadcast meetings and training sessions certainly fit that bill (as we’ll see in the story below).

Table: All 16 Meeting Types in the Taxonomy of Business Meetings

Now that you’ve seen the details, download this table as a spreadsheet .

Why a spreadsheet?

I expect people to use the taxonomy in one of these ways.

• Take inventory of your organization’s meetings. Which of these do you run, and which should you run? If you’re running one of these kinds of meetings and it isn’t working, what can you see here that may point to a better way?
• Make the taxonomy better. At the end of the day, our list of 16 types is just as arbitrary as MeetingSift’s list of 6 types. What did we miss? What doesn’t work? Let us know. Comments are welcome.

Since all models are wrong the scientist cannot obtain a “correct” one by excessive elaboration. On the contrary following William of Occam he should seek an economical description of natural phenomena. Just as the ability to devise simple but evocative models is the signature of the great scientist so overelaboration and overparameterization is often the mark of mediocrity. George Box in 1976 Journal of the American Statistical Association

Or, stated more economically, “ All models are wrong, but some are useful. ” We’ve tried to hit a mark that’s useful in a way that simpler lists were not. We invite your feedback to tell us how we did.

The 17th Type: BIG Meetings and Conferences

Just when you think you’ve really broadened your horizons and been very thoroughly inclusive, you meet someone who sets you straight. I recently had the pleasure of meeting  Maarten Vanneste , who is also a dedicated advocate for meeting design and the meeting design profession . It turns out that while we are using the same words, Maarten works in a very different world where a “meeting” might be a multi-day conference with dozens of sessions and a highly paid keynote speaker or 10. In that world, meeting planners handle logistics, room reservations, lighting requirements, branding, promotions… a wealth of detail that far exceeds anything we might worry about for even the most involved strategic planning workshop.

This is so different, why even mention it?

Because it’s another example of how using a generic word like “meeting” leads to bad assumptions . In case it isn’t clear, in this article when we talk about meetings and meeting design, we’re talking about the 16 types of day-to-day business meetings listed above. Professional meeting planning is a whole different kettle of fish.

How Different Types of Meetings Work Together: A Tale of 25 Meetings

To illustrate how the different kinds of meetings work together, let’s look at a typical sequence of meetings that you might expect to see in the first year of a company’s relationship with a major new client.

This is the story of two companies: ACME, makers of awesome products, and ABC Corp, a company that needs what ACME makes, and all the people working in these two companies that make their business flow.

Sam likes what he saw in the webinar.

Peter calls Sam and they schedule a demo meeting.

Peter tells Jill and the sales team about the upcoming demo with Sam at ABC.

Peter, Jill and Henri prepare before the demo with Sam at ABC.

Peter and Henri give a demo to Sam and Ellen. Ellen is impressed and asks for a quote.

Jill tells the CEO and the rest of the leadership team about the big ABC deal her sales team is working so everyone can prepare.

Peter goes over all the requests in his meeting with Ellen to make sure he understands them, but he’s in no position to authorize those changes. After the meeting, he takes the requests back to Jill.

Peter discusses the contract with Ellen. Ellen wants a better contract.

The leadership team meets to decide how to respond to Ellen’s contract demands. And they do!

Several more negotiation meetings and a security review later, and the deal is signed! Meeting 9: The Sales Handoff (Type: Introduction ) Now that the contract is signed, it’s time to get the project team involved. Peter arranges a meeting between Ellen and Sam and the customer team from ACME: Gary the project manager, Henri the solutions analyst, and Esme the account manager. Going forward, Gary, Henri and Esme will handle all the communication with Sam from ABC Corp. Before the meeting ends, the ACME team schedules a trip to visit ABC Corp the following week.

Peter introduces Sam and Ellen to the ACME team: Gary, Henri, and Esme.

Jill, Peter and the sales review the lessons they learned closing the ABC deal.

Sam escorts Gary, Henri, and Esme through a day of discovery meetings at ABC Corp.

With the background set, everyone works together to draft the project plan. People from the implementation team suggest ways they can easily handle some requirements, and identify items that will require extra time and creativity. They begin a list of issues to solve and one of risks to manage. Starting from the desired end date and working backwards, they work together to build out a draft timeline that shows the critical path, times when they’ll need committed resources from ABC, and places where they just aren’t sure yet what they’ll find. When they feel they understand how the project will go as best they can, they review their draft plan and assign action items. Gary will work on the project timeline, matching their draft plan with available resources and factoring in holidays. Henri will contact Sam to go over questions from the implementation team, and Esme will schedule the kickoff meeting with the client team.

Gary, Henri, and Esme meet with the implementation team members to draft a project plan.

Next, both teams dig into the details. They go over the project plan ACME created and suggest changes. They establish performance goals for how they expect to use the product, making it clear what a successful implementation will look like. They talk about how they’ll communicate during the project and schedule a series of project update meetings. They take breaks and get to know each other, and share cookies. Then they get serious and talk about what might go wrong, and outline what they can do now to increase their odds of success.

At the end, Ellen rejoins them and the group shares their updated project plan with her. They explain changes they made and concerns they still have, and ask a few questions. Finally, they go over exactly who does what next, and set clear expectations about how and when everyone will see progress. With the kickoff complete, they all adjourn to the local pub to relax and continue getting acquainted.

Esme and Ellen lead team members from both companies through the project kickoff

Happily for Gary, the ABC project is right on schedule. For now.

Gary, the other ACME PMs, and the ACME implementation team discuss project progress every week.

Surprise, Gary! Gary hates surprises.

Sam tells Gary there’s been a major shake-up at ABC, and the project is on hold. Oh no! What will Gary do?

Belinda can’t answer those questions, but she helps Gary relax and promises to get a team together who can give him the guidance he needs.

Gary meets one-on-one with his boss Belinda, and they make a plan.

Belinda, Gary, and the leadership team meet find a solution to the problems with the ABC project.

When Gary, Esme, and Sam meet, they each share their constraints and goals, then focus on those places where they seem to be at an impasse. 90 minutes of back and forth, and they reach a deal. The project deadline will move out 2 weeks because of the delay at ABC, but in recompense for the missed deadline, ACME will provide 4 additional training sessions at no charge for all the people at ABC that were just reassigned and need to be brought up to speed. It’s not perfect, but it works and the project gets back on track.

Esme and Gary meet with Sam to negotiate how they’ll finish the project.

ACME trainers teach the ABC team how to use the product.

Gary, Esme and the ACME team, along with Sam and the ABC team, meet with the ABC leadership group. They present their progress, sharing slides with graphs of tasks complete and milestones met. The leadership team asks questions along the way, making sure they understand the implications of the upcoming product launch. When everyone is satisfied, they turn to the CEO who is the decision maker in this meeting.

The launch is approved, and the new system goes live.

Gary, Esme, Sam and their teams ask the new ABC CEO to approve the project. She does!

Everyone agrees that, for the most part, this was a successful project. The client is happy, the product works well, and they made money. Still, there are lessons to learn. Peter and Henri realize that they saw signs that the situation at ABC wasn’t stable in those first few conversations, but they were so eager to win the client that they dismissed them. In the future, they’ll know to pay attention more closely. Gary and the implementation team discovered ways they could keep the project running even when the client isn’t responding, and they’ll build that into their next project plan. At the end of the meeting, the group walks away with a dozen key lessons and ideas for experiments they can try to make future projects even better.

The ACME team meets to discuss what they learned from the ABC project.

The ACME CEO talks about the ABC project with the ACME Board, and gets approval to pursue a new market.

Esme reviews how the product is working out for the ABC team with Sam in the Quarterly Business Review.

This case study becomes a central piece of content in the new marketing campaign approved earlier by ACME’s board.

The ACME marketing team interviews Sam about his experience with their products for a case study.

Sam tells Esme she’ll need to renew the contract with the new head of procurement. Esme gets ready.

Phew! What a journey.

We’ve talked about why it’s important to get specific about the kind of meeting you’re in, and then we looked at our taxonomy for classifying those meetings. Then, we explored how different types of meetings all work together to keep people connected and move work forward in the story of ACME and ABC.

In many ways, the story of Gary, Sam, Esme and the gang is just a story of people doing their jobs. A lot of people work on projects that run like the one described here. Sometimes everything works fine, other times they freak out; nothing unusual there. What you may not have paid much attention to before, and what the story works to highlight, is how often what happens on that journey is determined by the outcome of a meeting. The other thing we can see is that, while those folks on the implementation team may have thought the few meetings they attended were a waste of time, their contributions during meetings helped make the ABC project a success and had a major impact on the direction of the company. When we show up and participate in meetings, we connect with people who will then go on to different types of meetings with other people, connecting the dots across our organization and beyond.

With that in mind, let’s close by revisiting Simon Jenkins’ gripping headline:

Crushing morale, killing productivity – why do offices put up with meetings? There’s no proof that organisations benefit from the endless cycle of these charades, but they can’t stop it. We’re addicted.

Is it possible to run meetings that crush morale and kill productivity? Yes, of course it is. That doesn’t mean, however, that meetings are simply a useless addiction we can’t kick.

It means that some people are running the wrong kind of meetings, and others are running the right meetings in the wrong way. Not everyone does everything well. Have you ever eaten a sandwich from a vending machine? If so, you know that people are capable of producing all kinds of crap that does not reflect well on them or on the larger body of work their offering represents.

In the working world, meetings are where the action is. Run the right meeting well, and you can engage people in meaningful work and drive productivity.

Seems like a pretty nice benefit to me, and hopefully this taxonomy helps us all get there. 

General FAQ

Why do meeting types matter.

In the working world, meetings are where the action is. Run the right meeting well, and you can engage people in meaningful work and drive productivity. But if you’re running the wrong meeting, you’re pushing a heavy rock up a tall mountain.

What are the three main categories of meetings?

• Cadence Meetings – the regularly repeated meetings that make up the vast majority of the meetings held in the modern workplace.
• Catalyst Meetings – scheduled as needed, and include the people the organizers feel to be best suited for achieving the meeting goals.
• Learn and Influence Meetings – designed to transfer information and intention from one person or group to another.

What are examples of Cadence Meetings?

• Team cadence meetings
• Progress check meetings
• One-on-One meetings
• Action review meetings
• Governance cadence meetings

What are examples of Catalyst Meetings?

• Idea generation meetings
• Planning meetings
• Problem solving meetings
• Decision making meetings

What are examples of Learn and Influence Meetings?

• Sensemaking meetings
• Issue resolution meetings
• Community of Practice meetings
• Training meetings
• Broadcast meetings

To explore each of the 16 Meeting Types in more detail, visit our Interactive Chart of Meeting Types

Want More? Check out our Online Meeting  School!

Categories: meeting design

Elise Keith

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Creating a foundation for changing your organization’s meetings.

What is an effective meeting?

“This meeting should have been an email.” Emblazoned on coffee mugs, endless memes, and your colleagues’ faces on their ninth video call of the day, this sentence may end up being a catchphrase of the modern era.

As the pandemic rewrote the rule book for coworking and office culture, new processes and untested systems allowed inefficiencies to creep in —inefficiencies that included meetings scheduled for the sake of unstructured discussion or even basic human interaction rather than for productivity. While interacting might be easier than ever, value-creating collaboration isn’t—and its quality seems to be deteriorating .

Effective meetings aren’t just about keeping ourselves from going around the bend. When meetings aren’t run well—or when there are too many of them— decision  making becomes slower and the quality of decisions suffers. According to one McKinsey survey , 61 percent of executives said that at least half the time they spent making decisions—much of it surely spent in meetings—was ineffective. Just 37 percent of respondents said their organizations’ decisions were both timely and high quality. And, in a different survey , 80 percent of executives were considering or already implementing changes in meeting structure and cadence in response to the evolution of how people worked during the pandemic.

What’s more, when leaders try to solve for inefficient decision making, they too often look to organizational charts and vertical-command relationships. Rarely, in McKinsey’s experience, do they see the real issue at hand: poor design and execution of collaborative interactions. In other words, you guessed it, ineffective meetings.

It doesn’t have to be this way. When meetings are run well, they not only foster better decisions but also leave attendees feeling energized and motivated to carry the momentum forward independently. For tips on how to put a stop to video call fatigue and restart your team’s productivity, read on.

Learn more about McKinsey’s People & Organizational Performance Practice .

What does time management have to do with effective meetings?

“The only thing on Earth that never lies to you is your calendar ,” says renowned business author and McKinsey alum Tom Peters. “That’s why I’m a fanatic on the topic of time management. But when you use that term, people think, ‘Here’s an adult with a brain. And he’s teaching time management. Find something more important, please.’ But something more important doesn’t exist.”

Endless, diffuse meetings, according to Peters, take up far too much of executives’ precious working time. Half of leaders’ time, he says, citing an idea from the Israeli executive Dov Frohman, should be unscheduled. What should they do with all that unstructured time? One typically cheeky suggestion from Peters is to read more.

The reality is that effective meetings and good time management exist in a virtuous circle. Good time management means you feel empowered to turn down unnecessary meetings—and better meetings mean you spend the rest of your time feeling more purposeful in carrying out your work.

How can leaders address the problem of time scarcity?

McKinsey’s experience shows that leaders may want to stop thinking about time management as primarily an individual problem and start addressing it institutionally. Increasingly, time management is an organizational issue with roots deeply embedded in corporate cultures.

Unsurprisingly, the solution seems to be balance. Executives in one McKinsey survey  who reported being satisfied with the way their time is allocated spent 34 percent of their working time interacting with external stakeholders (including boards, customers, and investors), 39 percent in internal meetings (including one-on-ones with direct reports, leadership team meetings, and other employee gatherings), and 24 percent working alone.

Here are five ways to achieve optimal balance in allocating time :

• Have a ‘time leadership’ budget—and a process for allocating it. When adding a project or initiative, companies should analyze how much leadership attention, guidance, and intervention each will need. In our experience, this is the best way to move toward the goal of treating leaders’ time as a finite resource—one that is as precious as a company’s financial capital.
• Consider time when you introduce organizational change. Understanding the time required to achieve goals is critical to the long-term success of any organizational change. The hours needed to manage, lead, or supervise an employee can leave managers with little time left over. Getting this balance right can be tough—having too few managers could lead them to feel overwhelmed, with more direct reports than they can manage. But having too many managers can cause redundancies and unnecessary complexity.
• Ensure that individuals routinely measure and manage their time. Time analysis exercises can yield surprising results—and can inspire time management that more closely aligns with organizational priorities. Including time-related metrics in performance reviews is another driver of behavioral change.
• Refine the principal calendar. Revisit all standing meetings and make an honest assessment of which ones are being held out of habit and which ones are genuinely useful.
• Provide high-quality administrative support. In a survey of executives on how they allocate their time , 85 percent of those who considered themselves effective time managers reported that they received strong support in scheduling and allocating time. Only 7 percent of ineffective time allocators said the same. In the case of one global chemical company, the administrative assistant of the CEO considers it her responsibility to ensure that the organization’s strategic objectives are reflected in the way she allocates the CEO’s time.

Learn more about McKinsey’s  People & Organizational Performance Practice .

What are three questions you should ask yourself before scheduling a meeting?

Good meetings nurture better decision making . On the flip side, inefficient meetings not only waste time but also create distraction and confusion even when people are working independently. Here are three questions you can ask when scheduling a meeting  that can help create the clarity needed for efficient decision making.

Should this even be a meeting at all? Recurring meetings are particularly susceptible to migration from the original purpose toward something more diffuse. Check in with stakeholders to ensure that the frequency is right (weekly meetings could be changed to monthly, perhaps), or think about whether decisions could be best made by an individual—with, of course, guidance from others.

Then go deeper. Examine whether your company’s culture is to encourage meetings rather than individual decision making. To remedy this, if you’re a leader, think twice before reflexively accepting any meeting invitation as it appears in your inbox. The goal should be to treat leadership capacity as a finite resource— just like your company’s financial capital .

What is this meeting for? A meeting’s title and its purpose are not the same. When the latter isn’t clear, meetings can seem frustrating at best and futile at worst. To help avoid this, companies can appoint a “chief of staff” for certain efforts or products. This person collates materials before meetings, ensures that they are distributed ahead of time, and verifies that the due diligence has been done to necessitate a meeting in the first place. This can lead to better-informed participants, which in turn can lead to more effective time spent in meetings—and, ultimately, better decisions.

What is everyone’s role? Even if a meeting has a clear purpose, it’s of little use if there is no one present deputized to make a decision . Equally, even if it’s clear who the decider is, it’s a mistake to hold a meeting when people are unsure of participants’ roles. McKinsey analysts have seen poor role clarity stymie productivity and cause frustration, especially when decisions involve complicated business activities that cut across organizational boundaries. Blurry accountability is especially costly in an era where speed and agility confer a competitive advantage .

Meeting participants can be divided into four roles:

• Decision makers should be the only participants with a vote, and the ones with the responsibility to decide as they see fit. Sometimes decision makers will need to “disagree and commit,” to use a phrase coined by Jeff Bezos in a 2017 letter to Amazon shareholders.
• Advisers give input and shape the decision. They typically have a big stake in the decision’s outcome.
• Recommenders conduct analyses, explore alternatives, illuminate pros and cons, and ultimately recommend a course of action to the advisers and decision makers. The more recommenders the better—for the process, not the decision meeting itself.
• Execution partners don’t give input in making the decision but are deeply involved in implementation. For optimal speed and clarity, execution partners should be in the room when the decision is made so that they can envision how the implementation will evolve from the decision.

OK, I’ve eliminated all unnecessary meetings and assigned specific purposes to each one. Now what?

Great work. Now you can assign each meeting to one of the following three categories , and make specific shifts to improve the outcomes.

• Decision-making meetings. This category includes routine decisions, like quarterly business reviews, as well as complex or uncertain decisions, like decisions about investments. In order to make high-quality decisions quickly, it’s critical to clarify exactly who is going to make them. Some of these meetings can be held virtually, but complex decision-making meetings are better in person. These meetings should result in a final decision (even if not everyone agrees).
• Creative solutions and coordination meetings. These include innovation sessions—for instance, in support of a new product—as well as routine working sessions, like daily check-ins. Rather than telling people what to do, leaders should work to empower employees to make their own (supported) decisions and to spend more time on high-quality coaching sessions. As with decision-making meetings, creative solutions and coordinating meetings can be virtual—but most innovation sessions should be in person. Innovation sessions should result in potential solutions and prepare for a decision meeting, whereas routine working meetings can result in next steps.
• Information-sharing meetings. Live interaction can be useful for information sharing, especially when an interpretive lens is required or if the information is sensitive. But information-sharing meetings are often regarded as having limited value. Many organizations have recently moved to drastically improve meeting efficiency. Netflix, for example, has limited the duration of meetings to a maximum of 30 minutes  and requires that meetings involving one-way information sharing be canceled in favor of other mechanisms like a memo, podcast, or vlog. Early data from Netflix shows that the company has reduced meetings by more than 65 percent and that more than 85 percent of employees favor the approach. The goal of these meetings should be to increase awareness of the new information shared in the meeting.

What are some best practices for video meetings?

Establishing best practices for meetings might seem like common sense—but they are not commonly practiced. Here are some helpful tips from Karin M. Reed , author of the 2021 book Suddenly Virtual: Making Remote Meetings Work :

• Time: The most effective meetings are short meetings. Rather than scheduling a two-hour call with ten agenda items, cut it down to a 20-minute meeting with two agenda items. There are limits to people’s endurance and attention spans in the virtual environment.
• Participants: When determining the number of attendees for decision-making meetings, the sweet spot is five to seven. More than seven attendees in any meeting can result in an unwieldy discussion.
• Appearance: Pay attention to your appearance when hosting a videoconference. It’s not a matter of vanity—it shows respect for your conversation partner and can help you get your message across. Light your face properly: facial expressions are critical to conveying a message. And anything that takes attention away from you, whether it’s a crackly audio connection or a silly picture of Uncle Rupert in the background, will distract from your message.
• Eye contact: Look at your camera lens when you’re talking, not at your screen. This goes against our natural impulses, but eye contact is critical when you’re having a conversation. And to maintain eye contact on a video call, you need to look at your camera.
• Inclusion: Leaders should engage in proactive facilitation to ensure that everyone has the chance to say their piece. Cold calling on people—gently, and with good intention—lets people know that it’s their time to speak. Even if someone doesn’t have anything to add, they will have felt included.

For more in-depth exploration of these topics, see McKinsey’s People & Organizational Performance Practice . Also check out organizational structure–related job opportunities if you’re interested in working at McKinsey.

Articles referenced:

• “ If we’re all so busy, why isn’t anything getting done? ,” January 10, 2022, Aaron De Smet , Caitlin Hewes, Mengwei Luo, J. R. Maxwell , and Patrick Simon  
• “ Author Talks: Karin M. Reed on virtual meetings ,” April 20, 2021
• “ To unlock better decision making, plan better meetings ,” November 9, 2020, Aaron De Smet  and Leigh Weiss
• “ Want a better decision? Plan a better meeting ,” McKinsey Quarterly , May 8, 2019, Aaron De Smet , Gregor Jost , and Leigh Weiss  
• “ Tom Peters on leading the 21st-century organization ,” McKinsey Quarterly , September 1, 2014, Aaron De Smet  and Suzanne Heywood
• “ Making time management the organization’s priority ,” McKinsey Quarterly , January 1, 2013, Frankki Bevins  and Aaron De Smet

Want to know more about effective meetings?

Related articles.

If we’re all so busy, why isn’t anything getting done?

To unlock better decision making, plan better meetings

Author Talks: Karin M. Reed on virtual meetings

• Project Management

Planning a Meeting: A Step-by-Step Guide to Effective Meeting Planning

Home Blog Project Management Planning a Meeting: A Step-by-Step Guide to Effective Meeting Planning

Effective meeting planning is highly important for the success of any project or initiative. It involves setting clear objectives, ensuring the right people are in attendance, and creating an agenda that fosters productive discussion. 

When executed properly, meeting planning transforms what can be monotonous and inefficient gatherings into streamlined, collaborative events that drive program success. Planning a meeting can be enhanced by going for the Project management courses and getting globally recognized accreditations authenticating your project leadership skills.   

What is Meeting Planning?

Meeting planning is a strategic process that involves the organization of a professional gathering (either in-person or online) where individuals deliberate on specific topics, devise directions toward achieving aimed solutions, or make decisions for steps ahead of an organization or a strategic program. These meetings can come in various forms with varied objectives. They should be strategically planned based on the specific objectives that are expected from the meeting. One can refer to several sources on the internet for a meeting plan example, which can be used as a starting point.

Types of Meetings

Meetings could take several shapes, and some of the prevalent ones include:

Strategic Planning Meetings:  Running an effective strategic planning meeting is crucial for shaping the long-term direction of an organization or project. These meetings bring together executive leadership or strategic teams to discuss and decide on high-level objectives and strategies. Key topics covered include setting goals, determining growth strategies, identifying risks, and allocating resources. The main goal of these meetings is to align stakeholders towards a shared vision and strategic path, fostering coordinated efforts toward achieving organizational or project objectives.

In a scaling tech start-up, a strategic planning meeting sets the growth strategy for the next fiscal year. Attendees, including the CEO, CTO, and CFO, review the previous year, analyze feedback, and assess market position. New goals for customer acquisition, product development, and revenue targets are established, addressing challenges like competition. Resource allocation is discussed for initiatives such as hiring and marketing campaigns. The meeting concludes with a clear direction, specific targets, and action plans for the upcoming year.

Operational or Tactical Meetings: Along with the know-how of how to run a planning meeting discussed above. Organizational or Tactical Meetings form the backbone of daily operations within a company. Regular tactical meetings are essential for managing short-term tasks and executing strategies smoothly. These meetings, similar to Agile Scrum's daily standups, involve resource allocation, problem-solving, decision-making, and progress monitoring. Effective planning is crucial to maintaining focus and productivity.

In IT services firms, we hold daily 15-minute tactical meetings. The Program Manager reviews the previous day's tasks and addresses any obstacles. Each team member then shares their specific tasks for the day, and resources are allocated accordingly. The session concludes with problem-solving and decision-making discussions to ensure alignment with project goals. This Agile-inspired approach fosters a productive environment and adaptability to immediate changes.

Problem-Solving Meetings: Problem-solving meetings primarily focus on addressing specific challenges or issues that a team or organization is facing during the progress of their program. These gatherings offer a collaborative platform to break the problem into workable parts, explore its roots, and brainstorm potential solutions for the problem. Participants collaborate by pooling their knowledge, experiences, and approach to generate diverse ideas and solutions. 

The goal of these meetings is to arrive at a consensus on the most effective course of action, enabling faster and more efficient issue resolution. A well-orchestrated problem-solving meeting can harness creative problem-solving, which enhances team collaboration and stimulates innovation.

Let us say, for example, during the launch of a new software platform, the tech team of a company identified a recurring glitch that affected user experience. The team held a problem-solving meeting, where the team members dissected the issue, traced its root, and brainstormed potential solutions. By tapping into the team's collective knowledge and experience, the team members would be able to design an innovative patch, unanimously agreed upon, that resolves the glitch and improves the platform's overall performance.

Project Planning Meetings: Project Planning Meetings are a significant means for better management and execution of any project. These meetings bring together all relevant stakeholders and enable them to collectively agree upon the project's roadmap, including critical milestones and deliverables. During these sessions, responsibilities are delegated to stakeholders, ensuring that everyone understands their specific responsibilities. In addition, these meetings set the project's timeline, creating a shared schedule that aligns all stakeholders.

Project Planning meetings are generally done at the start of the project. For example, during the initial phase of constructing a new eco-friendly building, a project planning meeting will be held with architects, construction managers, environmental consultants, and client representatives. 

During this session, the stakeholders will agree on key milestones like design finalization, securing permits, starting construction, and completing interior fit-outs. Tasks should be assigned, ensuring each stakeholder knows their responsibilities and a timeline should be created, aligning everyone towards a shared goal.

The planning procedures and requirements might differ based on the type of meeting you're orchestrating, which is where the usefulness of a versatile yet thorough meeting preparation checklist becomes apparent.

Why is Planning a Meeting Important in Project Management?

Efficient meetings form the core of any successful project management endeavor. They promote communication, stimulate collaboration, enable decision-making, and ensure alignment among team members. By implementing a project planning meeting template, project managers can streamline the meeting process, ensuring every attendee comprehends their roles and responsibilities. Enhancing your knowledge in project management through PMP certification will greatly benefit your ability to plan strategic meetings.

Additionally, planning meetings in project management facilitates transparency and accountability among stakeholders. This process helps to eliminate ambiguity by setting clear goals and discussing potential challenges. A well-structured meeting nurtures problem-solving and innovation by providing a platform to discuss ideas openly and constructively. Scheduled meetings also set a regular rhythm for the team, fostering a sense of consistency and reliability. 

Furthermore, integrating stakeholder feedback becomes much simpler when a meeting provides an avenue for open discussions and proactive engagement. So, it can be summarised that meticulous planning of meetings is a non-forgettable part of project management.

How to Conduct a Strategic Planning Session? (Step-by-Step)

Effective strategic planning meetings are vital to the success of an organization or a project. Here's how to orchestrate a strategic planning session as a part of their project meeting plan:

Step 1: Discuss the Goals of a Meeting

Each meeting should be planned to have a clear purpose or goal. Be it is on generating new ideas, making crucial decisions, or discussing project progress, having a defined goal for the meeting helps the meeting organizer steer the meeting in the right direction.

Step 2: Decide a Meeting Committee

Assigning a team to be responsible for conducting the meetings yields the best results for the program's success. And this team is termed as Program Management Office in most of the leading organizations. This meeting committee or the program management office should consist of a meeting leader, a note-taker, and any other roles that are deemed to be necessary based on the meeting's nature.

Step 3: Create a Meeting Agenda

Creating a meeting agenda is an important activity in the process of meeting planning. It serves as a roadmap for the discussion aimed at the meeting. It ensures all necessary topics are addressed. A meeting agenda also assists in managing time effectively. It is recommended to utilize planning meeting agenda examples to structure your agenda.

Step 4: Gather Necessary Equipment and Tools

The meeting organizer or the team should ensure that all the required tools and equipment are prepared to be ready for the meeting. The necessary equipment and tools range from presentation equipment, brainstorming whiteboards, or specific video conferencing platforms such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams or Cisco for virtual meetings. While planning a meeting template, one should keep in mind that there should be fields that include entries of necessary equipment and tools.

Step 5: Send Invitation and Meeting Agenda to all Stakeholders (Send Prep Materials)

It is recommended that the program team that organizes the meeting dispatches meeting invitations and the agenda to all participants well in advance. Recommended time for sending pre-reads for the meeting is at least 2 days ahead of the meeting. This allows participants to prepare for the discussion, which enhances the productivity of the meeting.

Step 6: Decide the Location of the Meeting

The meeting organizer should select the right location which is able to accommodate all required attendees, and the location should be arranged in such a way that it supports the meeting's purpose. If you are conducting a virtual meeting, make sure that all participants have access to the required video conferencing platform. The location of the meeting should also be given priority while planning a meeting template.

Step 7: Start the Meeting on Time

An important aspect of the meetings to be effective is beginning and ending them at the right planned time. This gesture from the meeting organizer demonstrates respect for the meeting participants' time and helps them maintain focus and be engaged throughout the meeting.

Step 8: Send out the Meeting Summary

After the meeting completes, the meeting organizer or the team should send a summary that includes meeting minutes and action points to all attendees. This post-meeting document should underline key points, decisions made, and actions to be undertaken, along with the target dates. The best meeting summary also includes the next meeting date if a follow-up meeting is required. The meeting summary can also be included in the process of planning a meeting template.

Enrolling in PRINCE2 course is an effective way to acquire the skills necessary for meticulous and result-driven meeting planning.

Benefits of Standardized Meeting Process

Adhering to a standardized meeting process leads to several hidden benefits. It cultivates consistency, ensuring all meetings are productive and abide by the same standards and practices. By planning a meeting template for project planning, we can make sure that all important points are addressed. 

This will be reducing the likelihood of overlooking critical aspects. In addition, standardizing the procedures helps in setting clear expectations for attendees, boosting participation and overall effectiveness.

Boosts Productivity: Adhering to a standardized meeting process can drastically enhance productivity. With a clear structure and agenda in place, attendees can come prepared and contribute effectively, making the most of the allocated time.

Enhances Consistency: The use of a standardized meeting template ensures that each meeting abides by the same set of practices and rules. This leads to a more consistent approach to decision-making and problem-solving within the project team.

Improves Coverage of Critical Aspects: With a well-planned meeting template, project managers can make sure that all significant aspects of the project are addressed. This systematic approach reduces the risk of overlooking critical details or tasks that are essential to the project's success.

Sets Clear Expectations: The implementation of a standardized meeting process allows for the setting of clear expectations for all attendees. This can boost participation and engagement as team members understand their roles and the contributions they're expected to make.

Promotes Effective Communication : Standardizing the meeting process improves communication by providing a clear and organized platform for team members to share ideas, raise concerns, and provide feedback.

Encourages Accountability: With clearly defined roles and tasks distributed in the meeting, each team member becomes accountable for their responsibilities. This can significantly improve task completion rates and overall project progress.

Saves Time: A well-structured meeting process, with its agenda set beforehand, avoids irrelevant discussions and focuses only on the vital points. This efficiency saves valuable time, which can be utilized for other important project tasks.

Best Practices for Planning Meetings Effectively

While we have covered the steps in planning a meeting, there are a few additional best practices to make your meetings run smoothly:

Have a Clear Objective: Every meeting should have a specific and clear objective. This prevents deviation and keeps the meeting on track.

Invite Relevant Stakeholders: Only those necessary for the meeting should be invited. This prevents overcrowding and ensures everyone present can contribute.

Encourage Participation: All participants should be given the chance to contribute to the discussion. This fosters a sense of collaboration and can result in more varied and innovative ideas.

Respect Everyone's Time: Start and end meetings on time, and try to keep them as concise as possible. Long, drawn-out meetings can lead to decreased focus and participation.

Effective meeting planning extends beyond merely setting a date and time for a discussion. It involves meticulous preparation, execution, and follow-up to ensure the meeting is productive and achieves its intended goals. With these steps and practices, you'll be on your way to orchestrating effective and efficient meetings that can propel your projects and organization toward success.

Looking to delve deeper into effective meeting planning and project management methodologies? Check out KnowledgeHut's top Project Management certification programs . We provide in-depth, practical training to help you master these skills and more.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

It is important to have proper planning for a meeting as it helps in setting clear objectives, ensuring that all necessary topics are addressed and that every participant understands their roles and responsibilities. It helps meetings be more efficient, productive, and goal-oriented.

The 5 key elements of a meeting are a clear purpose, a well-planned agenda, relevant participants, necessary equipment and materials, and a designated leader or facilitator.

One should be prepared for a meeting through a set of preparatory activities which involves understanding the meeting's objective, creating an agenda, inviting the right participants, preparing any necessary materials or tools, and making logistical arrangements such as deciding the location or platform for the meeting.

Nithin Kumar Peratla

Nithin, an MBA from IIM Bangalore and M.Tech from IIT Madras,  has 10+ years of experience in product management, within data analytics, cloud, ERP and CRM domains. He works for Cognizant currently and is an adept writer in these domains of work.

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How to write an effective team meeting agenda (with templates!)

Because if there’s no agenda, there shouldn’t be a meeting in the first place.

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5-second summary

• Team meeting agendas help you prioritize important topics and keep things running smoothly and efficiently, so your team walks away from the meeting feeling motivated and aligned.
• All agendas are not created equal; read our tips to learn what to include on every agenda, and how to tailor your agenda depending on the goals of your meeting.
• Templates are a helpful jumping-off point, and can be tailored to meet the needs of your particular meeting.

Imagine you’re knee-deep in work, laser-focused, and ready to tackle the next task on your lengthy list. Nothing can stand in your way…except for the meeting you have in 10 minutes. Now imagine that you come out of that meeting inspired and motivated – exhilarated, even. And despite that dreaded context-switching , you’re able to pick up right where you left off with even more gas in the tank. This is how productive and effective meetings should make you feel. But how do you get there?

Your secret weapon might just be a team meeting agenda. Too often relegated to an afterthought, this handy tool can go a long way to help you run more effective in-person or virtual meetings. It helps with managing time, setting expectations, and staying on the task at hand. Agendas ensure that you have a clear purpose and that you can achieve the goals you set, whether you’re plotting your quarterly budget or creating a project timeline – real, shareable results. Team meeting agendas also help you prioritize the things you want to talk about, so you can guide your team through the most important topics of the week.

Leading productive, fruitful meetings doesn’t always come naturally – and that’s okay. Follow these helpful tips for creating an effective team meeting agenda, including a few free templates to get you started and a video with tips on how Atlassian approaches meeting agendas, taken from Atlassian University’s course How to Run Effective Meetings .

What is a team meeting agenda?

A team meeting agenda is an organized and scheduled list of topics and action items that you plan to discuss with your team during a meeting. It’s there to help you prioritize the most important topics and keep things running smoothly and efficiently so your team walks away from the meeting feeling motivated and aligned. But it’s not enough to jot down a simple list of topics and put a time stamp next to each one; it actually takes a fair amount of thought and effort to organize an effective team meeting agenda.

5 tips for creating an effective team meeting agenda

How to run effective meetings in the era of hybrid work

The most effective team meeting agendas are well-planned, clear, and concise. Here, it really helps to take a step back and put yourself in your team’s shoes. Be sure to consider your audience and what they already know; the purpose of your meeting (are you trying to solve a problem, brainstorm ideas, or make a decision; and how you can make your meeting as engaging and memorable as possible?

After skimming the agenda items, all team members should understand the purpose of the meeting and their roles within it, as well as anything they need to prepare for like questions about a certain project or deadline. This kind of preparation eliminates distractions and keeps the momentum going, leading to a more productive meeting. Here are five ways to create an effective team meeting agenda.

• Tailor your agenda to each meeting. Not all meetings are created equal, and not all agendas should be either. Maybe your weekly team meeting agenda needs a space for wins and shoutouts, but your workshop meeting agenda doesn’t. Because there are many types of meetings, do your best to format your agenda in a way that’s appropriate for your meeting and your team.
• Prioritize your agenda items. They’re the meat of your entire meeting – the reason(s) you’ve decided it was worthwhile to pull everyone away from their work and discuss each topic. That’s why it’s absolutely necessary to prioritize each item from highest priority to lowest priority, with the understanding that you’ll push the lowest-priority items to the next meeting if you run out of time.
• Include an icebreaker or other team-building activity . Icebreakers set a more casual tone (if that’s what you’re going for), and serve as a way to engage each person on the team. But keep in mind the size of your team and the length of your meeting. A complex icebreaker with 20 participants could take up your whole meeting.
• Hold enough time for questions and discussion. A well-planned meeting holds more than a measly 60 seconds for questions at the end. Reserve enough time to discuss the items on your agenda and encourage participation. Instead of asking, “Do you have any questions?” Try rephrasing it as “What questions do you have?” It’s a lot easier to shake your head “no” and get on with your day rather than thinking about questions for the agenda items. This could also spark healthy debate and spars.
• End on a positive note. Saving a few minutes to give team members some kudos will leave them feeling valued and motivated – when’s the last time you got an appreciative shoutout and did less work afterward? Whether it’s calling out people individually or thanking everyone as a group, your team will see that their hard work doesn’t go unnoticed.

On a more granular level, here are some characteristics at the core of most or all team meeting agendas.

What should all team meeting agendas include?

Every team meeting agenda should include the following basic elements to keep everyone in the loop:

• Date, time, and location: These details are especially important for dispersed teams. Be mindful of where everyone is and specify which time zone you’re in. As for the location, these days it might be a Zoom link or another chat channel instead of a physical location, so don’t forget to include that as well.
• Objective and goals: Use this as your North Star. Ask yourself, “What type of meeting is this? What am I trying to get out of it?” Be straightforward with everyone else about it so everyone’s on the same page and stays focused on the task at hand.
• Facilitator and attendees: You don’t necessarily have to take attendance, but keeping track of who’s running the show can orient team members about who to notify in case they can’t make it to the meeting or if they have something to add to the agenda.
• Agenda items: The purpose of agenda items is to make it crystal clear to the team what topics you’ll be discussing, what you want to accomplish within that item, and any action that needs to be taken. Keep it brief and avoid using jargon so everyone has a crystal-clear understanding of what’s to come.
• Time for each topic: Indicating an estimated time for each agenda item is crucial to keeping your meeting on track and on pace.
• Team check-in: Whether or not you do an icebreaker, find time to check in with your team members and their well-being. It’s important to show compassion and make sure they know you also care about factors that might be affecting them outside of work. Check-ins also ease your team into the meeting before diving right into business.

It’s also worth noting that agendas need to be circulated to all participants at least a day before the meeting. Doing so ensures that your team has had a chance to review what projects and assignments will be covered so that they come prepared for discussion. You might also welcome some feedback from your team in case you missed a thing or two.

Atlassian’s approach to team meeting agendas

Curious about how we approach meeting agendas at Atlassian? Check out this clip from Mark Cruth, Atlassian’s resident Modern Work expert and evangelist. Focused on practice over theory, Mark spends his days coaching both Atlassian and customer teams on new ways of working.

For more practical tips, enroll in the How to Run Effective Meetings course from Atlassian University – it’s completely free.

Team meeting agenda templates to get you started

6 types of meetings that are worth your time (and 3 that aren’t)

You might be wondering whether it’s worth your time to create an agenda. Although it can be a lot of work upfront, the amount of time you put into making a clear agenda can be compensated for by the efficiency of your now-wildly-productive meeting.

There are tons of free templates to choose from online – don’t hesitate to tailor them to your meeting’s particular needs. To start, check out our top team meeting agenda Confluence templates (downloadable with a free account) and explore how you can make each one your own.

• All hands meeting agenda template
• Remote team meeting agenda template
• Workshop meeting agenda template
• Brainstorming meeting agenda template
• Problem-solving meeting agenda template

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How to Prepare for a Meeting: Step by Step (With Examples)

It’s a good idea to make sure that all bases are covered if you’re planning a meeting ahead of time, so that you know it’ll go smoothly.

But there’s plenty more to do than just getting your slides and talking points ready while you’re in preparation for the meeting.

From working out a clear structure to getting your team prepped and ready, there’s a lot to consider.

Let us walk you step-by-step through the meeting preparation process that works for us at Slido and share some of the best practices that were game-changing for us.

1. Set purpose and goals

First, define the meeting purpose, or the ‘ Why ’ behind your meeting. Why are you meeting? Is it to brainstorm? Is it to have a discussion or plan the next steps? If you set one clear objective, it’ll be much easier for you to design an agenda for your meeting.

Second, specify the main goal, or the ‘ What ’ of the meeting. What should come out of the meeting? What is the main deliverable? Set a tangible meeting outcome and stick to it. If it’s to make a decision about X, don’t leave the meeting without seeing it through.

These will be the guideposts that will help you set the right expectations and steer the meeting in the right direction.

2. Create & share an agenda

Now that you’ve set your meeting objectives and goals, it’s time to create a bulletproof agenda.

A meeting agenda is an outline of all the activities and discussion points to cover during a meeting in order to reach the meeting goal/s. In short, a structure that your meeting will follow.

While there isn’t a one-size-fits-all meeting agenda template, there are several best practices to keep in mind when designing an agenda for a) recurring and b) one-time/first-time meetings.

Recurring meetings

With meetings that you run regularly – e.g. team syncs – it is tempting to think there’s no need for an agenda. Your colleagues already know the format, so what’s there to design? Well, there are still things to consider.

The main keyword here is simplicity . A simple agenda goes a long way and will hold your meeting together like a skeleton. All you need is a list of action points to go through.

Write down the main discussion points that you want to touch on during the meeting. You can even assign owners that will drive the discussion around each point.

Here’s an example from one of our meetings:

💡 Don’t forget to share the agenda with your team members ahead of the meeting (1-3 days) via your internal comms channels, such as Slack, Webex, or Microsoft Teams.

One-time meetings/First-time meetings

With new meetings for which you don’t have an already established format, you need to go deeper. In these instances, you need to design the whole meeting agenda from scratch.

The main keyword here is alignment . Given that your team members don’t know the format, it’s crucial to:

• Communicate clearly the purpose, expectations and goals of the meeting
• Describe the structure and length
• Explain what needs to be prepared and what the responsibilities of each member are
• Crowdsource any questions or discussion points in advance of the meeting

If there are multiple speakers who will present at the meeting, align with them prior to the meeting. Set a time frame for each of the meeting sections. Be as specific as possible.

Get inspired by our first-ever ‘Cross-team alignment’ meeting, for which we set a very bold objective — to bring together 3 teams (20+ people) and get them aligned .

A lot also depends on the size of the meeting. If you’re preparing an all-company meeting, there’s a whole different strategy to employ. Read more about how to design an all-hands meeting agenda here .

3. Send out meeting invites

Send meeting invites to everyone involved in the meeting at least two weeks in advance so your colleagues have enough time to work it into their schedules.

Add all the important details in the meeting invite description. Share the meeting goals and the agenda (regardless of whether you already shared it or plan to share it later – make it available in the invite as well).

In case you’re meeting online or in a hybrid setup , also include the link to the video conference call so that nobody can miss it, and can easily access it via their calendars.

Here’s an example of a meeting invite for our summer brainstorming session:

💡 For even better invites, add links to Slido so you can start collecting people’s input , like questions or ideas before the meeting. Learn more in the next point.

4. Collect questions and ideas from your team

Gathering input from the team members before the meeting works well with some meeting formats.

Brainstorming & planning

For example, if you’re having a brainstorming session or a planning meeting, start collecting your team members’ ideas beforehand. Attach a link to Slido to the meeting agenda or to the meeting invite and ask your colleagues to type their ideas into the app.

This gives your colleagues a safe space for submitting their ideas and levels the playing field – everyone can contribute equally , even the ones who fear speaking up in the meeting. They can even do so anonymously if they wish.

Plus, it’s more efficient than brainstorming during the meeting. It allows you to review all the submissions before the meeting and then spend the meeting time discussing and prioritizing.

In preparation for our meetings at Slido we use this technique a lot:

Retrospective meetings

A team retrospective is another meeting type where you can benefit greatly from collecting insights beforehand.

Send a stop-start-continue survey for your participants to fill out in advance.

Go through people’s submissions and look for patterns, items mentioned repeatedly, or any other important feedback. This way, you can identify the most burning issues which you can then use to create an agenda, and drive discussions during the meeting.

Create your own poll or survey in Slido and hear from everyone. Sign up below and try it for yourself.

Sign up for free

All company meetings/All team meetings

Larger meetings such as all-hands, town halls, or strategic team meetings provide an opportunity to address questions or concerns that your team members might have. Give your team a chance to post their questions into Slido even before the meeting.

You can then address them during the meeting – either in a dedicated Q&A session , or address them continuously throughout.

We start collecting questions from our employees about a week before every company all-hands meeting .

This way, our executive team has time to prepare their answers and our colleagues have a chance to go through the submitted questions and upvote the ones they identify with. We also give our colleagues a chance to ask anonymously which means our leadership gets more honest questions.

You can find more tips and ideas for all-hands meetings at our all-hands hub .

Read also: How to Host More Effective Meetings by Collecting Input in Advance

5. Distribute supporting materials

If there’s material that you want your meeting participants to review before the meeting, or if there’s something that you want your team to prepare, communicate it well in advance. You may, for instance, add it as an attachment to your meeting invite or share it in your internal comms channel.

It’s good for getting everyone aligned and familiar with the forthcoming discussion.

However, it’s good practice to clarify expectations and make a clear distinction between what’s a must  and what’s nice to have . Perhaps not everyone needs to read through a 50-slides-long presentation. Sometimes, it’s enough to get a gist of what will be discussed.

6. Prepare your slides

Getting the slide deck ready is a drill you surely know very well, but here are a few tips that can make your life a little easier.

• Apply a minimalistic approach to your slides. Keep them simple – one idea/one number/one sentence per slide. People don’t want to read huge bodies of text on slides. Plus, it’s more visually appealing.
• Use the ‘Rule of three’ method – three bullet points, three columns, etc. It’s easier for people to process
• Cut the number of slides too. Spend the meeting time on a fruitful discussion rather than going through an 80-slides-long presentation.
• Use visuals like images, graphs, tables, etc. Preferable to making people read, apply the ‘show & tell’ approach – show something visual and describe what people are looking at.
• If there will be multiple presenters at your meeting, have one master deck. Share it with all the contributors before the meeting and ask them to add their slides there. It’s much smoother than switching presentation decks.
• As you prepare slides for your meeting, think of all the points of interaction with your meeting participants (see the next point). For instance, you can insert live polls directly into your slide deck with Slido for Google Slides and Slido for PowerPoint .

7. Create opportunities for interaction

When designing a meeting, create multiple ‘ interaction points ’ – the spots on the agenda where you purposefully create a space for your meeting participants to actively contribute.

This is important for creating meaningful engagement throughout your meeting. If you let your participants sit passively through the meeting, you will eventually lose their attention.

Forbes reports that the average person loses focus within 10 minutes.

If, on the other hand, you give them space to be actively involved in the meeting, you will engage them.

So, how do you create these interaction points?

Go through your meeting agenda and think about at which point it would make sense to hear from your participants.

For example, after you’ve brainstormed some ideas for projects, ask your teammates: “Which of these projects do you think we should prioritize in the next quarter?”

Turn it into an interactive poll . Add your project ideas as options in a multiple choice or a ranking poll and let your teammates vote.

It’s a way to make your meetings more democratic – you’ll give everyone a voice – and engaging – you’ll involve everyone in co-creating the meeting and influencing its outcomes.

Learn more about how to create interaction spots in your presentation here .

💡 You can add a Slido poll, quiz, or Q&A directly into your slide deck with Slido’s integration with PowerPoint and Google Slides – it will be added as a separate interactive slide. You can manage every interaction as you click through the slides.

8. Prepare the opening

How you kick off the meeting may lay the foundations for the rest of the meeting, so leave nothing to chance and make sure to prepare your opening well.

Welcome everyone; if your meeting includes remote participants, give them a special greeting to make them feel included from the start.

To loosen people up, prepare a little icebreaker, using our selection of icebreaker questions , or, if you need a quick interactive activity that will get people talking, fire up a fun poll question .

For example, check the mood in the room and ask your colleagues how they feel in a word cloud poll . You can even let them express their feelings in emojis.

Use the poll results to trigger a small chit-chat at the start – it’s good to start the meeting with a bit of socializing, and make sure to ask open-ended questions if you want to get people really talking.

Once you kick off the official part, provide a quick context for why you’re meeting up today and briefly run people through the agenda once again.

9. Set up the meeting

Lastly, make sure you have the meeting room arrangements figured out – whether you’re meeting in an actual room or in a virtual one.

Meeting room: Face-to-face meeting

• Book a meeting room and add the room number in the meeting invite or write it in your team’s internal comms channel so everyone knows where it is you’ll be meeting.
• Consider the number of participants;  make sure everyone will have a place to sit. Arrange some extra chairs just to be safe – more is better than less.
• Make sure the seating doesn’t favor anyone – everyone should feel equal and able to contribute. Ensure everyone can hear each other well. If it’s a large meeting, ensure there’s a microphone at people’s disposal.
• Arrange for refreshments; at least supply water, so people don’t need to leave the room to get a drink.

Meeting room: Hybrid meeting

• Book a room with a large screen and a tech setup that allows for a conference call with good audio and video.
• Good audio is key . Make sure that all participants – both on-site and remote – can see and hear each other well. If your online colleagues can’t hear what’s happening in the room, they’ll have trouble joining the discussion. Ensure all your meeting rooms are equipped with quality external speakers.
• Have microphones available in the meeting room to make sure everybody online can hear their on-site colleagues if they speak up. This is important especially for meetings with a larger number of participants.
• Check if people online can hear you well . Everybody has to hear everything – and feel like they’re heard.

Online room: Fully remote meeting

• Make sure everyone has easy access to the video conferencing link where the meeting will happen. Share the link in your team’s internal comms channel or in a calendar invite (see point #3).
• Send a meeting reminder via your team’s internal comms channel some 5 minutes before the meeting.
• Start the video conference a couple of minutes early , to avoid any delays. Test the audio and troubleshoot any potential tech issues.
• Ensure every participant can hear you well as people start joining the call. You can do a little ‘thumbs up’ check – just ask your participants to put their thumbs up if they hear you well.
• Encourage people to turn on their cameras so your meeting feels more personal.

Ready to kick off your meeting?

The quality of pre-meeting preparation can make or break your meeting. You can never be over-prepared. But fail to prepare at your own peril.

With the tips that we’ve shared above, you will be 9 steps closer to a stellar meeting . We wish you good luck.

And in the meantime, go ahead and try Slido for free. Start by adding one or two polls to your meeting presentation to keep your team members actively engaged . You can always add more later.

Here’s to better meetings! 🥂

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How to Plan a Meeting

By Kathleen Costanza | February 9, 2015

Think back to the most productive meeting you’ve had recently. What made it so helpful? When you carefully plan a meeting with a clear set of objectives, attendees leave feeling motivated and informed. When you don’t, attendees can unfortunately walk away empty handed or overwhelmed. 

Research finds the quantity of meetings has increased across the board since the 2020 pandemic, largely due to the remote work. With calendars more packed than ever, it’s critical to plan meetings with thoughtful goals and strategy. Here are the basics to keep in mind when planning a meeting.

• Determine the meeting’s purpose The more specific the better. Hone in on the goals. Good: The purpose of the meeting is to discuss the new logo. Better: The purpose of the meeting is to gather feedback on the new logo from decision makers and decide what needs to be changed. Best: The purpose of the meeting is to gather feedback on the new logo from three key decision makers. We will create a list of revisions and confirm the timeline for next steps. 🚩 Red Flag: If your purpose ends up only being “to inform,” or, “to give a status update on,” you may not need to meet. Move on to step number two.
• Sensitive information
• Brainstorming
• Decision making
• Relationship building (teambuilding, etc)
• Complex or nuanced information

• Decide who needs to attend Who needs to be in the room? In general, larger meetings that need consensus can become unwieldy. Streamline your attendee list as much as is reasonable. Invite people who absolutely need to be present. For people whose participation isn’t critical to the success of the meeting, consider inviting them as “optional” so they can decide whether to attend. Deciding who needs to attend will give you an idea of other preparations you need to take. For example, is it a high-stakes, executives only meeting? You may need to reserve a different room or invite additional people than if it’s a more casual, team meeting. Sometimes, meetings are large or high-stakes enough, you may consider professional meeting planning services to take the bulk of the logistics off your plate.
• Plan how to record information If you’re facilitating, will you also be able to take notes? See if you can split this responsibility with another colleague so you can stay focused on steering the conversation. Consider recording the meeting if it’s on Zoom or another meeting platform, so if you need to stop taking notes to steer the discussion, information won’t get lost. Don’t worry about capturing every detail said — focus on the main ideas.

• Invite attendees (and send prep materials!) Over communicate! Explain to attendees exactly what the goals are, and what (if anything) they need to review or prepare. Include any Zoom / virtual meeting links, or the room where the meeting will be held. Don’t forget to send prep materials. If you need a few more days to prepare prep materials, give attendees an ETA when you’ll be sending them.
• K eep the meeting moving! Plan what you’ll do if an agenda item goes over its allotted time. If you need to resolve that agenda item to move on, note that you’re going over time, and you may need to push some of the remaining items to email or a follow-up meeting. If you don’t need that agenda item resolved to move on, suggest you move to the next item but offer a next-step for the unresolved item. For example, “Let’s find the answers to the questions raised here, and confirm after this meeting. But I want to cover as much as we can with our time, so I’m going to suggest we move on to the next item.”
• Send post-meeting follow-up After your meeting, follow-up as soon as possible with a short summary of your group’s decisions and the agenda and notes. Include the next action-items, and who is assigned which item. This is a helpful reference to look back to, or forward to other parties who couldn’t attend.

Are you looking for a team to help plan your high-stakes meeting, conference, gala, or other corporate event? We offer full service event planning nationwide. Don’t hesitate to reach out!

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Kathleen Costanza is the Content Manager at Meeting Tomorrow. She loves writing, documentaries, and Chihuahuas.

11 Tips for a Successful Monthly Meeting

Boost your team's productivity with these 11 tips for successful monthly meetings. Learn how to set clear agendas, involve key participants, and use visual aids to enhance communication. Explore strategies to make your meetings engaging and effective.

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Effective monthly meetings boost team spirit and work quality. They share company values and news, keeping everyone involved. Use tools like Zoom or Microsoft Teams for better remote participation.

Polly’s all-hands meetings are held twice a month, after trying different schedules. The right timing and setup depend on the company’s size and its communication style. Such meetings must be open to promote new ideas and trust within the organization.

At Polly, we welcome new faces with big celebrations to build a strong team. It’s important to talk and listen, as it brings the staff closer. Q\&A moments help, but time and question quality can be issues. So, it’s good to plan how these discussions will go.

Have a clear agenda and share it before the meeting to keep things on track. Using visuals like slides helps everyone understand better. Adding fun stuff and icebreakers can also make the gathering more interesting. This keeps people focused and willing to participate.

Define the Purpose of Your Meeting

In the New Age of Work, how we meet has changed. We meet in person, online, or both. Before every monthly meeting, it’s key to know why it’s happening. This makes sure everyone focuses on important issues. At Ninety, meetings are about getting and sharing info, solving problems, creating ideas, and building trust.

Clarifying Objectives

It’s important to set clear goals for your meeting . These goals need to be clear and useful. Ninety does this well by having meetings weekly, quarterly, and yearly. They focus on making sure everyone knows what to do. This helps the team move together. At big meetings, Ninety looks at long-term plans. At others, they work on fixing current problems with a special process.

Deciding if a Meeting is Necessary

Think hard before setting a meeting. Is it the best way to talk? Sometimes, emails or chats can do the job. Ninety prefers looking forward, not back. This can improve things without a big meeting. They focus on important goals, budgets, and plans without wasting time. It’s also smart to not meet around meal times or very early or late. This helps everyone be more involved.

Set a Meeting Agenda

Creating a clear meeting agenda is key to a successful monthly meeting. It’s like a map, showing the topics, activities, and who leads each part. This makes sure the meeting runs smoothly and everyone knows what to expect.

Sharing the Agenda Ahead of Time

Telling everyone about the agenda early is really important. It helps people get ready and share their thoughts. This makes sure all important points are discussed. Sharing the agenda in advance also helps the meeting go more smoothly.

Getting feedback from everyone before making the final agenda makes it better. This includes important topics and questions. It keeps discussions on track and meetings focused.

Allocating Specific Time Slots

It’s important to use time well in meetings. Each agenda item needs its own time set aside. This helps everyone respect each other’s time and keeps the meeting on track. Remember, each topic needs just enough time based on its importance.

Also, having someone to guide each part can make meetings more effective. Facilitators help discussions stay focused and make sure everyone gets a chance to speak. This makes the meeting more interactive and productive for everyone.

Include Feedback and Interaction

It’s really important to involve employee feedback and include interactive meetings. Doing this makes team engagement better and meetings more effective. Research by Gallup shows that when employees are engaged, they perform a lot better. Giving people a chance to speak up in meetings helps build a culture of openness and trust.

Employee feedback is key. Surveys after meetings let bosses and team leaders spot big problems and find areas to get better. These surveys make sure meetings are hitting their goals and help them get better over time.

When employees are encouraged to fill out surveys right after a meeting, more of them do it. Studies show that happy employees are 12% more productive, and those who aren’t into their work are 10% less productive. Adding activities like live polls and Q\&As can make meetings more fun and help everyone talk more openly.

Good communication and working together are crucial for a business to do well. Having a clear agenda for meetings and sticking to a schedule helps. It lets everyone have their say and makes sure feedback is listened to. Asking for feedback often and making meetings interactive can help keep employees happy and working hard.

For better team engagement and higher productivity, including feedback and interactive activities in meetings is a must. This way, you get more than just better involvement from employees. You also build a strong, welcoming culture in the workplace.

Include Key Participants Only

Meetings work best with only core team members, especially those who make key decisions. This approach avoids crowding and helps get to the point. It also makes sure everyone knows and tackles the problems at work.

Identifying Key Decision Makers

Picking the right decision-makers is key. They help keep things moving. Most senior managers say some meetings are not helpful. So, focusing on these crucial people keeps meetings useful and on track.

Figuring out who is most needed in the meeting is smart. This way, decisions can be made and plans put in action. Brainstorming in advance with these special folks can really make a difference.

Ensuring Essential Attendance

Being careful about who shows up is vital for good meetings. It stops meetings from getting too full and losing their focus. Regular team gatherings help everyone keep up with the company’s goals.

While online tools are great for some discussions, big decisions need key players present. Learn more about choosing the right meetings  here . This will help your team have better, more meaningful discussions.

When adding more people to a meeting, watch this guide on  “how to invite without all  the. Following this advice will keep your gatherings smooth and on topic.

Using this HTML in your article showcases why it’s crucial to have only essential people in meetings. This practice boosts meeting efficiency and teamwork.

Utilize Visual Aids for Clarity

Using visual aids in your talks is key for clear communication. It makes your points clearer and helps people remember them better. This is especially true for monthly meetings.

Keep each PowerPoint slide brief, around ten words. This focuses on what’s important and doesn’t confuse your audience. Use charts, timelines, and graphs to show your points clearly.

Vary your visual aids, including sound and video. Make sure any videos are short and fit your main point. PowerPoint is great for this.

Always have a backup ready for technical issues. This keeps your talk running smoothly, avoiding confusion. Visual aids are also super helpful for brainstorming. Sticky notes and sketches can turn ideas into concrete plans.

Visual aids make working together fun and more creative. They help break down complex topics, sparking new thoughts. Spend time making good visual aids for a talk that’s interesting and clear.

Run a Q\&A Session

Holding a Q\&A during monthly meetings is key. This encourages open talks and boosts engagement. When you get ready for the big questions, you make everyone feel their worries are being heard. This is important for any effective meeting.

Preparing Common Questions

Think about what questions might come up. Being ready for these can make your Q\&A smoother and quicker. Experts say it’s good to have 5-10 questions ready. This way, you show you care about what your team wants to know.

Use tools to help sort the important questions. This keeps things organized. It shows your team you’re listening. What they think really matters.

Encouraging Open Communication

Getting everyone talking is a must for a good Q\&A. Let people send in questions beforehand, and also during, the meeting. This can make it more lively. Keeping 25% of the meeting just for questions means you’ll tackle every major issue.

Don’t forget the follow-up. Share a summary of the Q\&A or send answers later through your company’s channels. This clears up any last questions. Being open and clear helps everyone.

Alternate Meeting Formats

Changing up meeting styles stops them from getting boring and makes them more creative. Studies show that most workers like to take part in meetings, rather than just watch. This makes it vital to have different ways to meet that keep things interesting. For example, Fishbowl makes teams talk in smaller groups, which can lead to better chats.

Then there’s Pecha Kucha, where people look at 20 pictures for 20 seconds each. It’s fast and gets the point across. Flipped Learning is another cool method. It lets you learn before the meeting, so you can talk about it in depth during your get together.

Huddle meetings are quick and happen every day or week. They’re great for short updates. Adding games to meetings can also make them more fun and useful. Nearly everyone likes these kinds of interactive meetings.

Now, let’s talk about Hackathons. Teams work hard together for a short while to overcome challenges. This boosts teamwork and sparks new ideas. Using apps like Slack for brief meetings or feedback is yet another fresh idea. It keeps everyone connected without always being in the same room.

In the end, mixing up your meeting style with things like Fishbowl, Pecha Kucha, and Huddles fits well with today’s workers. It makes meetings more fun and everyone can contribute more. This new approach is the key to making meetings better, where everyone really takes part.

Make the Monthly Meeting Engaging

Make monthly meetings fun and informative. Add new elements to make them more engaging. This helps boost morale and keeps team members interested and participating.

Incorporating Fun Elements

Start the meeting on a good note. Have everyone share achievements or funny stories. This sets the mood for a great meeting. Use tools like Switchboard for real-time interactions. Joel Soucy of Solink says using Poll Everywhere for quizzes is fun. It keeps everyone involved. Break midway for discussions or have standing meetings. This keeps people alert and energized. 

Using Icebreakers

Icebreakers make the meeting more friendly. They reduce tension. Activities like easy debates or brainstorming make team members closer. Lucjan Suski from Surfer SEO suggests encouraging everyone to join. This makes for a more engaging meet. In big virtual meets, breakout rooms can help quieter members contribute. This ensures everyone’s voice is heard.

By using these methods, meetings become more vibrant. They’re not just for work, but also for fun. Everyone looks forward to them.

Define Takeaways and Assign Follow-Up Actions

It’s key to end monthly meetings with clear outcomes and actions to follow. This step helps use the meeting’s insights well. It encourages more talks and team work later on.

Creating an Action Plan

Make a clear action plan that says what to do, who’s doing it, and when it’s due. For example, a marketing meeting might include tasks like picking a homepage design or making a presentation. Set clear dates to check on everyone’s progress. Project management tech helps by keeping all informed.

Assigning Responsibilities

It’s important to assign tasks for a successful meeting result. Make sure everyone knows their job, like Sarah must finish the layout by June 15th, and John’s slides must be done by June 5th. Tools like Kumospace are handy, especially for remote work. This way, everyone knows what must be done and when, which makes things run smoothly.

Share Relevant Documents Post-Meeting

Sharing materials from the monthly meeting helps everybody understand key points. It makes sure everyone has the same information. This way, they can check it whenever they need.

When we share what we talked about, we thank everyone who shared. It brings us together to work better as a team. Writing down what we decide and who does what helps us stay on track.

Status updates and questions are important. They prevent us from forgetting important matters. Using pictures and charts makes it easier for everyone to get the message, even those who weren’t there.

Keeping notes as we talk helps us remember everything. This leads to better notes. And it’s an important part of what we do after the meeting. Sharing these notes helps us work together better.

Monthly meetings are key for keeping everyone on the same page, working together, and meeting goals. They help by making clear what the meeting is for, planning what to talk about, inviting the right people, and using tools to help understand.

Using humor at the start makes meetings more fun and leads to more people joining in, with a 40% increase in taking part. Since meetings have gone online, more people attend, 30% more than in person. Good opening and closing words can make a big difference. They can make people more focused, with up to 25% better attention when the start and end are done well. It shows how telling good  open and close talks  is essential for teams.

Sharing notes after can help keep everyone clear on what was discussed and what to do next. A lot of people, 86%, say these notes are really important. And most, 70%, want to know what to do right after the meeting. Using ready-to-fill templates, like the ones in this  template for meeting notes , makes this step smoother.

Adding these ideas to your monthly meetings can make big improvements. Listening to feedback and changing as needed is a must. And, wrapping up a meeting well is crucial, it should remind people of the main stuff and maybe end with something strong. To learn more about making a powerful end, check out this  helpful guide . Using this advice will help your monthly meetings do more than just hit your goals.

What makes a monthly meeting effective?

Effective monthly meetings need a clear goal and a plan. They should welcome everyone to share their thoughts. Visual aids help a lot, especially for teams working from different places.

How important is it to define the purpose of a meeting?

Defining a meeting’s goal is key. It focuses on what really matters for the team. This clarity brings everyone together to work toward the same target.

Why should the agenda be shared ahead of time?

Sharing the agenda early lets everyone get ready. It makes sure that all important topics get a turn. This keeps talks on track and makes better use of everyone’s time.

How does employee feedback enhance meetings?

Feedback makes meetings more engaging and alive. It boosts trust and shows that everyone’s ideas are welcome. Employees feel more connected when their role is valued in the meeting.

Who should be invited to monthly meetings?

Invite only those who really need to be there. This keeps the meeting small and more effective. Choosing the right people is important to get work done well without wasting time.

What is the role of visual aids in meetings?

Visual aids help explain things clearly and help everyone remember them better. They add a lot to what is being said. Slides, charts, or images can make complex ideas easier to understand.

What are the benefits of running a Q\&A session?

Q\&A sessions let people ask questions and get answers. It prepares everyone and makes the meeting more interactive. This helps build teamwork and keeps everyone on the same page.

Why should meeting formats be alternated?

Changing meeting styles keeps everyone interested. It’s good to mix it up with different types of discussions. This way, everyone gets something relevant from the meeting.

How can fun elements be incorporated into monthly meetings?

Adding fun things like short games or friendly discussions can break the ice and make meetings more lively. It helps people bond and can boost their creative thinking.

What is the importance of defining takeaways and follow-up actions?

Setting clear next steps after a meeting is crucial. It shows that the discussion leads to real actions. This helps to get things done and keeps the team moving forward efficiently.

Why should documents be shared post-meeting?

Sharing meeting documents later makes sure everyone is on the same page. It allows all to review and remember the key points. This keeps the team working together well, even after the meeting has ended.

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How to write a meeting agenda (and run better meetings!)

Learning how to write a meeting agenda that sets the stage for an effective and engaging gathering is an important leadership skill. Not only will it help you be organized and on time, but it will also help you and your team make the most of your time together.

In this guide, we’ll explore what makes a meeting productive and guide you through the process of designing a great meeting agenda . You'll also learn practical tips you can use to improve your next meeting and get every team member engaged and involved. Ready to leave behind boring, unproductive meetings? Let's dive in!

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Going into a meeting without a purpose or a clear sense of what you’re going to cover rarely results in a productive session. Writing a clear step-by-step meeting agenda is a great way to improve your management and facilitation practice. Not only will you be more effective as a team, but you can avoid frustrating or unproductive meetings and get better results too! 

In this guide, we’ll explore what makes a productive meeting and guide you through the process of designing a great agenda . Additionally, we’ll also share some sample meeting agendas so you can see some working examples you can use as the basis of your next meeting.

What is an agenda?

In short, an agenda is a breakdown of all the items that will be covered during a meeting. It should list all of the topics and tasks that will be covered during the meeting and also clearly articulate the purpose and expectations of the meeting. 

Your meeting agenda should also give everyone involved the information they need to successfully attend and adequately prepare . This means including all information relating to logistics, links and attachments and mentioning any preparations you wish everyone to do before the meeting. 

The best meeting agendas also help you effectively run the meeting on the day by giving you a step-by-step list of what to cover and timings for each major section of the meeting. 

A meeting agenda is usually created in a clear, shareable format, such as a Word document or SessionLab agenda. This makes it easy to follow and share with meeting participants.

You can see some examples of a meeting agenda template here . These meeting agendas include meeting objectives and a step by step process complete with timings so you can see how to put them together effectively.

Why is a meeting agenda important?

A meeting agenda is an effective tool for many reasons. First up, it helps ensure the meeting facilitator has everything they need to run an effective meeting. You’ll have an itemized list of every agenda item, reminders of the meeting goal and all your relevant documents attached too.

Perhaps most importantly, a meeting agenda is how you can your meeting participants can stay on track and ensure everything that needs to get done is completed.

Without it, your team meeting can quickly go off the rails or be unproductive. It helps other team members be aware of your core meeting objective, what’s going to be covered, and to give them time and space to prepare.

Preparation

By outlining what will be covered in your meeting, your agenda will ensure every team member can adequately prepare. This might mean preparing discussion topics, supplementary materials, or other items.

Creating your meeting agenda and sending it out well in advance means everyone can do what they need to come to the meeting and make it a success. If you want your meeting attendees to contribute meaningfully, give them a chance to prepare with a good meeting agenda.

Scheduling and logistics

In the most basic terms, a meeting agenda will help everyone involved align their schedules and attend. By including the location or virtual room, date and time, and any necessary links, your meeting agenda will contain all the information people need to be there and adjust their calendars.

You’ll also include information on how long the meeting will run for and timebox each section. If you have multiple people leading sections of the meeting, ensure you include clear timings for each of those sections so everyone can prepare and keep the meeting on track.

Productivity

Even the most simple meeting agenda will enable both the facilitator and participants to be productive . Going into a meeting with a clear agenda and timeboxed schedule means you and your group can be more effective and not get lost in side-discussions or unagreed topics.

In short, an effective meeting agenda clearly sets the stage for what will and what will not be included and can ensure everyone is pushing in the same direction during the meeting.

Get team buy-in

Going into a meeting without clear expectations or an idea of the talking points is frustrating for everyone involved. Make meetings work for everyone by creating and sharing the agenda with the participants and agreeing on the format. 

Getting everyone on board can massively increase the productivity of any project or meeting and by developing a standardised agenda that makes it easy for everyone to understand and attend, they’ll fit more naturally into your team workflow too!

Improve your planning

Documenting your meeting agenda is the first stage in improving the quality of your meetings. DId you find that something in your agenda plan didn’t work out? Need less time for old business and more time on new items or setting follow-up actions? Go back to your agenda and adjust. Use a collaborative agenda planner tool if you want to get comments and feedback on your meeting agenda!

Simplify a recurring meeting

In the case of recurring meetings – whether it be board meetings or a weekly meeting to catch-up – creating an agenda can simplify and streamline the process.

In SessionLab, for example, you can create a meeting agenda template or simply duplicate your session so you don’t have to start from scratch every time.

Improve meeting culture

Creating a meeting template that works for everyone and has been refined over time can help make your entire team more productive and shift the mindset around meetings. 

The work you do in meetings can and should improve all the work you do and a better meeting culture can help teams communicate better and surface issues effectively in any context.

Help identify and remove ineffective meetings

A common complaint of most teams is that they have too many meetings or that the meetings they have are ineffective.

Agenda-setting and following a process when developing your meetings can also help you and your team identify if a meeting should be run at all. We’ll cover this in more detail in our final section on how to decide if you should run a meetin g too!

What to include in a meeting invite?

Getting people to attend the meeting means sending a meeting invitation that includes all the necessary information in a simple, easy to understand format.

You’ll likely send your meeting invite as an email or Calendar invite, though you might also use other dedicated meeting software. Here’s what you should include for your next meeting.

Meeting logistics

Here, you’ll include everything your participants need to know in order to attend the meeting. Including:

• Title of the meeting
• The date and time of the meeting
• The location of the meeting
• For virtual meetings, include a link to the virtual meeting room and any necessary passwords
• The run-time of the meeting
• Host (and co-hosts) of the meeting
• Additional meeting roles such as note taker
• List of participants 

Purpose of the meeting

Ensure you include the purpose of the meeting in your agenda so everyone can understand why they’re being asked to attend and prepare adequately. You may also want to include any links to resources or co-creation documents. Additionally, include any background information to help participants understand the context of the meeting. If it’s the first in a series of meetings or a project retrospective, be sure to include that information here. 

Preparatory work 

If you have any preparations you wish participants to make before the meeting, include them here. This might include contributing ideas to an online whiteboard, reading a document that will be discussed, or preparing questions around the central topic of the meeting. Be sure to include links to any resources and make instructions completely clear.

Meeting agenda

The final section of your meeting invitation should be the agenda for your meeting. This should include a clear, simple list of the topics you will be covering. If a discussion item is led by someone other than the primary facilitator, include that information alongside each entry too. Ensure that the meeting agenda you send your participants covers everything 

What to include in a meeting agenda

Meetings of different purposes and may require different items in their agenda, though they should broadly follow the same structure in order to ensure the whole team can move through it productively.

Remember to set timings for each section so your meeting can run on time and give everyone an indication of the scope of the discussion.

It’s worth noting that while you might have a detailed meeting agenda for yourself and any co-facilitators, you might share a simplified version with your participants.

So long as you ensure that everyone attending has the information they need and a sense of each agenda item, your agenda can be as detailed or as simple as necessary. Let’s dive in!

Introductions and housekeeping 

Here, you’ll make sure everyone who needs to be in the meeting is present and make introductions where necessary. You’ll also briefly reiterate the purpose of the meeting and introduce the meeting leader too.

In a virtual meeting, allow extra time to solve technical issues and get everyone on camera.

Icebreaker (optional)

Meeting icebreakers can be a great way of helping new groups get to know each other or warm-up and prepare a team for a difficult conversation ahead. Depending on your meeting format, agenda and length, you may want to include an icebreaker at the beginning.

Remember that not every meeting needs an icebreaker. A regular weekly standup doesn’t need an icebreaker to warm everyone up. A board meeting with a tight agenda may not need this step either.

On the other hand, an interdepartmental meeting where people are coming together for the first time to discuss better ways of working might benefit from an icebreaker. 

Meeting topics and items for discussion

This is the main bulk of the agenda. Here, you’ll set out all of the items to be covered in your meeting. These might include a review of what was accomplished in a previous meeting, presentations of news and information, discussions, collaborative exercises and more. These items are completely contextual depending on the nature of your meeting and in our next section, you’ll see some example meeting agendas that include all kinds of items. 

Be sure to set a time for each item in your agenda and include a short description. If someone other than the host is leading this section, include that information too. Remember that the purpose of the agenda is to not only outline these items so people can understand the meeting at a glance but also give them opportunity to prepare.

Breaks (optional)

In longer meetings, breaks can be vital in ensuring everyone stays engaged, energized and is able to contribute meaningfully. As a general rule of thumb, a break every 1.5 to 2 hours is a great way to keep everyone happy and keep up group energy levels. Remember that virtual meetings are often more draining and so the necessity for a quick break is even greater in those situations. 

Set follow-up actions

Whatever the format or purpose of your meeting, there are likely to be follow-up actions that should be agreed upon before you adjourn. These might include taking action on items discussed during the meeting, sending notes or resources, or simply agreeing the time and date of follow-ups or later meetings. The more complex the meeting, the more involved this part of the agenda is likely to be, so ensure you set adequate time for this.

When setting follow-up tasks, be sure to give each task an owner and agree with your team members when they will be completed or checked in on. Ownership and timeboxing can help ensure that items set are completed in a timely manner.

All meetings should be brought to an effective close. Give participants an opportunity to add any final items, give feedback or briefly clarify any hanging questions before closing the meeting can help ensure follow up actions are taken and that everyone is on the same page leaving the meeting.

You might even use a closing activity from our library of facilitation methods to help your group meaningfully reflect on the meeting. 

Tips for writing an effective meeting agenda 

Once you know you are running the meeting and have an idea of the framework of the agenda, you’ll want to write up your agenda so you can share it with your participants. This means getting every agenda item in order, articulating your meeting objective and designing for flow and engagement.

Creating a great meeting agenda doesn’t need to be a chore. Check out our tips below for help in writing a meeting agenda that can help your meeting be a success and improve your general meeting facilitation too.

Clearly identify and articulate your meeting goal

One common frustration point for meetings is that not everyone is on the same page regarding the goal or purpose of the meeting. Be absolutely clear on what falls under the remit of the meeting and what falls outside of it. By doing this, you can ensure all attendees are aligned going into the meeting, and you can also identify if additional work needs to be done elsewhere. 

If the goal of a meeting is to align your marketing and product teams on a specific project make sure everyone knows it. When running a board meeting, make it clear what you’re going to cover so that everyone’s time is respected. By identifying and sharing the goal and purpose of the meeting early, you’re helping everyone make it a success.

Ask participants for input

If you’re running a meeting that will benefit from the input of participants, ask them to contribute ideas or possible agenda items in advance of the meeting. Not only can you ensure that the meeting is fit for purpose, but you can also source the best ideas and get team buy-in too.

You might also find that some sections of the meeting are best led by certain team members or stakeholders. Be sure to liaise with those people beforehand and let them know what sections they’ll be running, when and for how long. Switching meeting leaders can be productive, but only if everyone has had a chance to prepare! 

List the topics you want to address

If your meeting is following a discussion format, ensure that you include a list of all the topics or questions you will be discussing in the agenda. Though you might find these changes on the day, listing all of these items ensures participants know what to expect and can begin to prepare answers or know what to think about before the meeting. 

An effective agenda should help you stay on track without effort. Having a list in place also helps with time management and prioritization during the meeting – if you know you have some key topics yet to be discussed, it helps guide the team to end one topic of discussion and move onto the next effectively.

Identify the purpose of each task

Identifying the purpose of your meeting should be the first thing you do, but when it comes to writing your meeting agenda, you’ll want to understand the purpose of each component in order to make it a success. 

Group meetings always benefit from focus and so each task or item should be selected in order to fulfill the purpose of the meeting. If you’re running a project retrospective meeting, you don’t need a section on company-wide news, for example. If you were running an all-day virtual meeting, you might include an online energizer after lunch so that people come back recharged and ready to engage. 

We often find that certain tasks deserve to be explored but a general team meeting is not the place to explore them. In these cases, it’s worth considering how best that work should be done – is it a separate meeting or could it be done asynchronously? Whatever the case, ensure that all of the items in your meeting agenda belong there, and that you’re not overstuffing or trying to combine two meetings. 

Remember that each part of the meeting should relate to your central meeting objective. Design with this in mind and your meetings will be leaner and more productive as a result! 

Meetings that are effectively timeboxed are more productive and less frustrating for all involved. Try not to overrun and set times for each and every section of your meeting agenda. This can help prevent meandering conversations and keep everyone focused. Furthermore, people are less likely to dread attending your meetings if they run on time and they can schedule around them without worry! 

Setting times for discussion items can be difficult if you’ve never run the meeting before – estimate and use your best judgement but also take notes on how much time each section took up. You can go back to your agenda afterwards and improve for the next meeting.

Be simple and clear

Meetings do not need to be complicated and neither should there agendas. Keep your meeting agenda simple, clear and short for the best results. You want your participants to get a sense of the meeting easily, understand what they need to do to prepare and attend. Remember that people tend to have more meetings than they would like – don’t make it difficult for your team members to attend yours! 

Create a reusable template

Creating a meeting agenda from scratch each time is not only a waste of time, but it means you lose the potential to iterate and improve. By creating a template for your meeting agenda , you can speed up the process, develop a standard meeting schedule and also figure out where you can make improvements.

Find that your team meeting agenda overran? Go back to the template and change the timings. Find that energy levels dip in your longer meetings? Find space to include an energizer. 

Making your agenda into a reusable and editable template is the first step to iterating and improving and is made easy in SessionLab too!

Keep it focused

A common mistake when designing a meeting agenda is to try and cram too much in. Your group will be much less effective if you attempt to cover lots of ground and don’t spend enough time where you need to. Try to think of the most important items for every business meeting and ensure your agenda is designed so you can focus on those things.

It is much better to cover key points with the relevant depth so you find solutions and make meaningful decisions rather than try and cover everything. 

Remember that focus is contextual. A daily-standup will have a different focus to a general team meeting agenda or project retrospective. Think of the purpose or goal of the meeting – if what you’re exploring is unrelated to the goal or purpose of the meeting, it shouldn’t be in the meeting. If your goal is to align on the next steps of a project or sum up progress so far, you might cover a lot of ground but it should be related to the core goal.

Get feedback

Improving your meetings can’t happen in a vacuum. Get feedback from your participants on how the meeting went in order to improve the quality and structure of them. You can achieve this by using a debriefing activity or a round of feedback at the end of the meeting.

While this is often the most effective way of getting quick, honest feedback on your meeting, you can also send out a survey afterwards. Whatever method you choose, listen to your meeting participants and make changes so that your meetings continue to be effective and useful for everyone involved. 

Meeting agenda templates

The job of meeting agenda isn’t truly complete until it’s been shared with your participants. But are you wondering what a meeting agenda template looks like and want to see how you might put the finishing touches on an agenda that you might send to clients or internal teams?

For simple meetings, an agenda that covers the main discussion topics in a simple format such as a calendar invite is likely sufficient . See our Team alignment meeting agenda for an example of a simple meeting agenda.

For more involved meetings and group processes, a more in-depth meeting agenda template should be used to adequately prepare everyone involved for the meeting ahead. We’ve included some common meeting formats that require a more complex agenda too. 

These meeting agenda examples will give you a taste of what a completed agenda looks like and hopefully give you inspiration for your own. Let’s take a look!

Team Alignment Meeting

Aligning teams and discussing possible roadblocks or team dependencies is often better in real-time. Being able to bring up ideas and concerns while also clarifying any points in a structured manner can help prevent email back and forths too!

Here’s a simple meeting agenda template made using Google Calendar. Feel free to copy the format and use it for your next team meeting!

Ready for some more complex meeting agendas? We’ve chosen a few common meeting formats and outlined an example agenda for you below. Each of these meeting agendas also features a SessionLab template so you can adjust it to your own needs too. Let’s take a look!

Project Kickoff 

Starting a new project is always worth getting together for. Even if you’re doing preparatory work in a collaborative Google document or working asynchronously for much of the project, a kick-off meeting in real time is an efficient way to align and surface any issues before getting down to work in earnest. Let’s take a look at this meeting agenda template to see how you can set off on the right foot with a short, one-hour meeting.

Project Retrospective

Large projects can take many twists and turns. A retrospective meeting is where you and your team will discuss and learn from such projects with a view to improve things next time around. In this retrospective meeting agenda , see how your group might effectively reflect on a completed project and bring up any essential learning points in less than an hour!

Lightning Decision Jam

Unstructured, meandering discussions can kill a team’s creativity and remove the appetite for future meetings. Use Jonathan Courtney’s Lightning Decision Jam method as the basis for a short meeting in which you can use a group process to make quick, effective and thoughtful decisions. See the method below for full instructions.  

One-Hour Brain Sprint

With the right process, working collaboratively in a real-time meeting can be one of the most effective ways of generating ideas and get every team member involved. Try the One-Hour Brain Sprint template to give your next brainstorming meeting a framework for success. 

How to decide if you should run a meeting?

Organized and well-facilitated meetings can be hugely productive to any group or organisation but not everything should be a meeting . In fact, some meetings can be detrimental to your team if they aren’t thoughtfully designed and run.

We’ve all felt the burnout of having too many meetings or been frustrated by a directionless meeting that feels like a waste of time. Before you set a meeting, ask yourself these questions to decide whether it is worth bringing everyone together.

Does the meeting have a clear goal or purpose?

Whenever you’re considering bringing your team together to work in real-time, it should be with a clear end result you want to achieve. 

If you need to collaborate on a topic or make a decision as a group in real-time, this is a great reason to have a meeting.  If you do not have a goal or purpose, you should reconsider whether you should run the meeting at all. Nothing is more frustrating for a group than a meeting with no reason to be run. 

Remember that a daily catch-up or weekly progress report can be a good reason for a short meeting, though only if you can clearly articulate a goal and purpose. If you can’t, go back and clarify the purpose or goal and really determine if it’s worth holding the meeting. You might find asynchronous work or a simple email is a better option for sharing information or collaborating with your team. 

Could this be summed up in an email?

You don’t need to run a meeting every time you have a small piece of information to share. If your goal is to share information quickly, effectively and without the need for discussion, perhaps that could be shared in an email or on Slack instead?

Some topics are too large for email and if you want to discuss a topic or collaborate on solutions, a meeting might still be the right approach. Before you go in this direction, ask yourself if you couldn’t transmit the information you need to share in an email and save everyone involved the time and effort of an extra meeting. 

Could the meeting work be done asynchronously?

Not all discussions or activities need to be conducted in real-time. When asking a group to collect ideas or bring items for discussion to the table, ask whether you couldn’t do so in a shared document asynchronously. 

Collecting insights in this way allows everyone to contribute in their own time and reflect on the topic meaningfully before adding to the discussion. You will still want to timebox the activity and potentially debrief over email or in a meeting, but allocating tasks asynchronously can not only save time but also make everyone more productive too.

Who needs to be at the meeting?

Some challenges do not need an entire organisation in order to be solved. When holding a meeting, carefully consider who needs to be in the room to make it a success. You might find that you only need to chat to one other person in Slack in order to make something happen. Alternatively, you might still hold a meeting but limit the attendees so it is useful for everyone involved. 

Is the meeting an effective use of everyone’s time? 

Meetings are rarely the most important part of everyone’s day. Disrupting the flow of your team’s working day should only be done if it is an effective use of time for everyone involved. Particularly in times of upheaval or heavy workload, the potential time spent in meetings can mean other work is left incomplete.

If you can achieve the same results without interrupting people whose time is better spent elsewhere, do so. Sometimes an email or invitation to a shared document is sufficient to get the work done. 

Is the meeting actually a workshop?

If the scope or the complexity of the meeting grows, it might be that you are running a workshop and not a meeting. In simple terms, the difference between a meeting and a workshop is that meetings are often where things are discussed while workshops are where groups go through a process and take action. 

Meetings are great for surfacing issues and discussions, while workshops are better at generating ideas, developing solutions and choosing the best followup actions. While both formats are worthwhile in different contexts, workshops employ group process, facilitation techniques and activities in order to be successful and do deeper, more involved work.  

Now you’ve written a great meeting agenda that is clear, simple and fit for purpose, you’re almost set to run your meeting! Here, we’ll explore what you should do next and point out some resources that can help you improve the effectiveness of your meetings too.

Distribute your agenda in advance 

Give your participants adequate time to prepare and adjust their schedules for the meeting. Sending a complete agenda the day of the meeting isn’t sufficient and will only serve to frustrate your participants and lessen the potential productivity of the meeting. 

Remember that the more complex the meeting and the greater the prep work, the more time you want to give your participants between receiving the agenda and running the meeting.

Double check the logistics

Ensure that your meeting room is booked and free if you haven’t done so already and double check that anyone assigned to lead part of the meeting is available and prepared to do so. If you’re using tech as part of your meeting, make sure you have everything you need and perform a technical test if necessary. This is especially important if running an online meeting where the success of your meeting can be entirely lost if your tech fails!

Learn how to run better team meetings

Creating an agenda for your meeting is a vital part of ensuring its success, but running the meeting and managing discussions, tasks and activities requires some additional skills. In our post on running better team meetings , find out how you can encourage better working practices and create more productive meetings too.  

Improve your facilitation skills

Becoming a better facilitator can enable you to lead better meetings and make the most out of any group process. In our post on essential facilitation skills , learn all about the role of the facilitator and what you can do to be a more effective facilitator in meetings, workshops and more! 

Over to you

Learning how to improve your meeting agendas can make all the difference when enabling groups to work together effectively and make the most of their time spent in meetings.

Did we miss something from the list above or did you find one of the meeting agenda templates especially useful? Let us know in the comments below?

James Smart is Head of Content at SessionLab. He’s also a creative facilitator who has run workshops and designed courses for establishments like the National Centre for Writing, UK. He especially enjoys working with young people and empowering others in their creative practice.

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6 Tips to Run a Highly Effective Meeting, Backed by Science

Meetings can be terrifying, especially when you don’t have a plan! Learn how to run your meeting effortlessly and effectively!

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Have you ever left a meeting that felt like it was a complete waste of your time?

Research shows that only 50% of the time spent in meetings is effective and engaging. Over $37 billion is wasted on unproductive meetings each year to make things worse.

For most of us, this isn’t a surprise. Without apparent purpose, leadership, or organization, a lousy meeting can drag on forever.

However, genuinely effective meetings leave everyone feeling organized, motivated, and clear on what they need to get done in the following days or weeks.

If you want to plan and host a successful meeting, you’ll need a proper framework and time management strategy to lead the discussion in the right direction.

Here’s how to run a meeting that will get things done. Use these 6 simple strategies to empower and organize your team to take proactive action toward your business goals.

What Makes a Successful Meeting?

Homo sapiens is a social species. For thousands of years, humans have come together in small groups or larger “tribal” gatherings to discuss matters of importance, from business to family to communal and beyond.

No matter how much technology is added to our daily lives, meetings remain vital to accomplishing a shared vision within business units. Meetings define both the cultural and strategic frameworks for our workplaces.

Whether remote or in-person, effective meetings are crucial for teamwork and productivity .

Sure, efficient meetings can speed through an agenda in a short amount of time. Still, truly effective meetings deliver a tangible result or outcome.

Everyone should leave with a feeling of clarity and confidence in exactly what they need to do, how they need to do it, and when it needs to be done.

Successful meetings should:

• Define a collective identity of a group and help each individual understand their role within the team
• Inspire creativity and cooperation amongst a team
• Take individual ideas and refine them to actionable solutions
• Clarify collective goals and deadlines so that each person sees their role in achieving them

To run an effective meeting that provides the highest ROI for your time and your staff’s wages, follow these 6 time-tested steps to get organized ahead of time.

6 Simple Steps to Run a Successful Meeting

• Define the Meeting Objectives
• Create an Agenda + Send Calendar Invites
• Create a Safe Space for Collaboration
• Strategically Choose Attendees + Appoint Important Roles
• Best Practices to Stay on Track
• End With Clear Actions, Owners, and Timelines

Have you ever showed up to a meeting and wondered, “why the heck am I here?”

Successful meetings have a clear purpose. Without an objective, there is no reason for holding a meeting.

As a leader, you must differentiate between the need for essential communications (which can be done through email, Slack, or phone call) versus the need to call a strategic meeting to accomplish an important goal (like project planning, solving a problem, setting a goal , making a decision, or mapping out a customer journey).

There are two primary types of meetings:

• Routine meetings (ex: Monday morning recap and projections, Friday team meetings, etc.)
• Strategic meetings (ex: task force meetings, problem-solving, creating a plan, etc.)

Although each type of meeting may be run differently, they require an objective. 

To clarify your objectives, jot them down! Better yet, send the meeting objectives out with the agenda, so everyone is on the same page.

Be as clear and concise as possible with your meeting objective, for example:

• Brainstorming session for how to reduce customer cart abandonment
• Explore third-party solutions to increase efficiency in online search traffic
• Present first quarter project progress and determine next steps
• Hindsight meeting with key stakeholders to celebrate wins and identify opportunities to improve

If you can’t describe why you’re holding a meeting in a sentence or two, you probably don’t need to have the meeting.

The meeting objective should have results-oriented terms and actionable goals. There may be several goals within the more significant objective. Still, these should all be defined for the team to understand ahead of time.

This is your north star and the guiding purpose of the meeting.

Watch our video below to learn ways to make your meetings better and more efficient:

Next comes your agenda, which is like your compass pointing you toward that north star objective. Without a compass to guide you, the entire team will feel like a ship lost at sea.

We all know that time is a precious resource. An agenda should directly support progress towards meeting your objectives. At the same time, sticking to a meeting agenda demonstrates that you are an effective and organized leader, which means more trust and dedication from your team.

We’ve all been in one of those meetings that were far too short to cover everything that needed to be discussed.

On the flip side, there is nothing worse than a meeting that gets derailed into off-topic conversations and goes on for far longer than anticipated.

Find a happy medium between the two by scheduling the meeting length and time around achieving the specific objective at hand.

Bonus Tip for Introverts : If you have introverts on your team who need to speak up, use the agenda to give them some time to prep. Introverts appreciate being able to prepare for speaking or brainstorming sessions. Learn more about how to make introversion into a superpower . 

Meeting Length

The length of an effective meeting should reflect how many people are involved and how in-depth the project is.

Each agenda item should have a clear amount of time allotted to it, for example:

• Introduction/call to the meeting (2 minutes)
• Review previous meeting notes (2 min.)
• Present objective or problem at hand (3 min.)
• Open brainstorming/group discussion (10 min.)
• Report from team 1 (10 min.)
• Questions for team 1 (3 min.)
• News from team 2 (10 min.)
• Questions for team 2 (3 min.)
• Updates from the chief executive (5 min.)
• Closing statements / clarify Actions, Owners, and Timelines (5 min.)

This agenda reflects a complex team project with 10 or more people. A smaller team should not require as much time.

In general, meetings should never last more than 60 minutes because people might lose focus and interest.

Keep it short and to the point!

You can always have a further discussion later on.

Meeting Scheduling Time

The timing of the meeting should be chosen based on what needs to get done. Research shows that brainstorming, creativity, and strategic thinking are best in the mornings when the prefrontal cortex is most active and we have the most mental energy.

On the other hand, we are typically better at creative problem solving later in the day because we are less distracted and more relaxed.

Don’t forget to consider time zone differences (if you’re a remote team ) and respect other calendar items within your organization.

Keep the agenda as simple as possible to keep your team engaged. Each agenda item should be allotted a specific amount of time so that everyone can know their time constraints for discussions or presentations.

Send Agenda With Calendar Invite

It is best practice to send the agenda out ahead of time if possible! Include the text or document linked in the Calendar Invite. You can also display the agenda on a projector screen or whiteboard during the meeting to keep everyone on the same page.

Be sure that only necessary team members are on the invite list for maximum productivity.

Collaboration can only happen when people feel safe and comfortable. These are the best tips for creating a safe space that yields truly effective meetings every time.

Lay Out the Guidelines

Establish guidelines when the meeting starts to ensure that participants feel comfortable speaking and sharing their ideas while remaining respectful of others and not getting too off-topic.

You can also note that you prefer cell phones to be silent to minimize distractions.

It’s essential to make sure each team member feels heard while encouraging balanced participation. Consider a “round table” approach where everyone gets a moment to speak.

Pro Tip: Want to level up your meeting game? Whether working remotely or in person, choosing the right communication tool is vital for optimum collaboration.

Psychological Safety

Ineffective meetings allow one person or a handful of people to dominate the conversation while others sit on the sidelines.

A great meeting invites a feeling of safety amongst team members by welcoming new ideas and removing the fear of public criticism.

A Harvard Business Review study found that the highest performing teams with the most successful meetings have trust, confidence, and curiosity. Their work environments do not promote punishment for mistakes.

Pro Tip: The most productive teams receive appreciation regularly. Learn more about the 10 Must-Know Productivity Secrets of High Performing Teams .

In other words, to run effective meetings, you need to be a positive leader that is collaborative and kind. You can do this by keeping to a few steadfast rules both in and out of meetings:

• Use positive reinforcement to recognize achievements rather than magnifying shortcomings.
• Never publicly reprimand an employee in front of the team.
• Avoid blaming any specific team or individual for a problem. Research shows that this destroys trust and confidence in a leader. Instead, opt for curiosity and stay solution-oriented.
• Ask for feedback. Asking for feedback increases people’s trust in their leaders .

Comfortable Ambiance

Research has shown that over a third of workers are unhappy with the ambiance of their offices.

Nobody wants to meet in one of those horrible, dimly lit, cold, dreary board rooms!

Create a pleasant ambiance (such as open windows or a decorated room) or consider providing beverages to help people relax a bit more.

Details like temperature, light, comfortable chairs, and even a few indoor plants can help create calmer, more effective meetings.

Consider an Icebreaker

Would your team like a non-awkward icebreaker ? For meetings where you want to encourage bonding and creativity, try a specifically chosen icebreaker, like one of the 8 in the video below:

Meetings are expensive and time-consuming. Avoid inviting anyone who is not needed to achieve the meeting objective.

At the same time, be sure that you have enough participants for a productive open discussion with diverse perspectives. A good meeting strikes a balance between minimizing attendees and maximizing the creative potential of a group.

Harvard Business Review has an excellent Meeting Cost Calculator that can help you figure out who is best included on your attendee list.

Choosing Roles

Running effective meetings always requires appointing roles ahead of time.

Who are the key decision-makers in your meeting?

As the host, will you be the facilitator? Will team leaders also be reporting about their department or projects?

Who is the notetaker? They will be responsible for keeping track of the discussion and recording every good idea or action plan agreed on.

They are also responsible for sending out a meeting recap with actions, owners, and timelines that were agreed on during the meeting.

Who is the timekeeper? They can help keep everyone on track with the agenda plan.

If you are running a project management meeting, be sure that key stakeholders from each department or project unit are ready to report on their area of responsibility. Allot a specific amount of time for each presentation in the agenda items.

So, after all this planning, how are you going to keep everyone on topic and focused for the whole duration of your meeting?

Surveys show that executives consider 67% of all meetings to be failures .

Failed meetings can be caused by a lack of objectivity, a poorly planned agenda, bad discussions, an unengaged team, or all of the above.

Regardless of the problem, it’s generally your job as the leader to fix them. Keep meeting participants on track by laying ground rules and keeping things interesting.

Pro Tip: Some meetings can crash and burn due to a phenomenon known as Zoom Fatigue. Here’s how to combat it: 20 Scientific Tips to Beat Zoom Fatigue, According to Your Personality

Avoid Side Discussions

Establish ground rules in your introduction to minimize side discussions, and everyone knows the core topic at hand.

If side discussions begin to happen, kindly re-route the team back to the objectives and promise to revisit those ideas in the future.

Use a whiteboard or chat recorded by the notetaker to jot down unrelated topics that can be reviewed in future meetings. 

Keep ’em Engaged

To run an effective meeting, you need your team to be engaged.

Good meetings are exciting and provide plenty of mental stimulation. 

Here are a few tips for leading engaging meetings:

• Don’t drone on and on in a monotone.
• Use visuals or slides on a screen.
• Keep the meeting short and to the point.
• Ask questions periodically so participants can contribute and remain interested.

Engagement is especially challenging in remote meetings where participants are often distracted or multitask. Research has shown that using video is one of the easiest ways to keep people engaged.

Drawing in virtual attendees through regular question asking (“Leah, could you share your thoughts on this?”) is especially important in remote meetings.

Ultimately, the most effective meeting strategies come to a crux at the very end when everyone is about to leave, and they wonder, “why the heck did I go to that meeting?”

Before the meeting adjourns, align on actions, owners, and timelines:

• Actions : What is going to get done? What are the key metrics? How does the assignment fit into the broader objective?
• Owners : Who is going to accomplish which action?
• Timelines : When is it due? What are the deadlines? Where should people report to with their final product?

If you forget this part, your entire meeting was in vain. People need crystal clear direction for what to do next.

Be sure also to discuss the general time frame of your next meeting.

Most importantly, thank everyone for coming and reminding them of their excellent work. 

Always end on a positive note!

Deal With Difficult People

Sometimes, you might encounter a difficult person (or people) in your meeting. These types of people are toxic and can alter the dynamics of any meeting—usually for the worse. Luckily, there’s an efficient way to deal with these types of people.

How to Deal With Difficult People At Work

Do you have a difficult boss? Colleague? Client? Learn how to transform your difficult relationship. I’ll show you my science-based approach to building a strong, productive relationship with even the most difficult people.

Meeting Mini-FAQ

The best meetings are highly organized ahead of time. Define a clear objective, create an agenda, and send both out with your calendar invites. Be sure only to invite relevant team members and keep the meeting time as brief as possible to retain engagement. Don’t forget to end every meeting with actions, owners, and timelines to get your team crystal clear on what needs to get done before the next meeting.

Conducting a meeting should always be done from a servant leadership mindset. Approach your team with kindness and create a culture of trust wherein everyone feels safe to speak and participate. Remain positive and inspirational while speaking with authority and focusing on the objectives. Stay true to your agenda to respect everyone’s time.

How to Run a Meeting Key Takeaways

If you’ve been nervous about running a meeting, remember that most of the work happens beforehand through organization and schedule planning. 

Don’t forget to: 

Most meetings are scattered and feel like a waste of time. Set yourself apart and establish yourself as a strong leader by putting in the work upfront.

Take the time and effort to prepare for a productive meeting. You will have a high-functioning team that meets your business goals and works in a culture of trust and collaboration.

Next thing you know, people will be looking forward to meetings rather than dreading them!

For further reading, check out this article: 17 Easy Ways to Make Your Meetings Better

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Ulster county planning board - september 4, 2024 agenda, ulster county legislative chambers, 6th floor, 244 fair st, kingston, ny, the executive committee will not meet ,    i. roll call, ii. approval of minutes, iii. education & training opportunities, iv. community reports, v. planning board reports.

A. Chairperson Report 

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Viii. public comment, ix. zoning referrals.

- See Separate Zoning Agenda Distributed at the Meeting

  X. Adjournment

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10 Tactics to Keep Your Meeting on Track

• Joel Schwartzberg

Hint: It’s not about being the “agenda police.”

Too many meeting leaders think their job ends when the meeting starts or that they merely serve as note-taker and “agenda police.” But, as with almost any work project, a meeting’s success relies on the success of leadership communication. This article covers 10 communication tactics that can help leaders and executives attending meetings make sure that critical points are raised and discussed as effectively as they are efficiently, so that meetings ultimately accomplish their mission.

Many meeting effectiveness tips — whether the gathering happens in a room or on a Zoom — are well understood by now, including starting and ending on time , creating efficient agendas , establishing clear roles, and remembering when you’re on mute. Even if you don’t know the basics, a quick Google search will reveal them.

• JS Joel Schwartzberg oversees executive communications for a major national nonprofit, is a professional presentation coach, and is the author of Get to the Point! Sharpen Your Message and Make Your Words Matter and The Language of Leadership: How to Engage and Inspire Your Team . You can find him on LinkedIn and X. TheJoelTruth

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Amazon Business Plan Slides

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Amazon Business Plan Presentation

Free google slides theme, powerpoint template, and canva presentation template.

Designed for business professionals, this Amazon Business Plan slideshow template is your go-to for creating polished and persuasive presentations. Whether you’re pitching to investors, outlining a strategic plan, or detailing monthly metrics, this corporate-style template in calming hues of blue and green has got you covered. Available as a PowerPoint template and Google Slides template, it’s versatile and easy to customize, helping you make a lasting impression with every slide.

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