Successful meetings and workshops comprise three essential phases: a beginning, a middle, and an end. Yet, meetings often fail because leaders ignore the importance of one or more of these.

In this Best Practices article, we’ll focus on phase one, the beginning, or meeting introduction, by detailing seven consecutive activities that, easily mastered, ensure stronger meeting and workshop launches. Here is a link to four activities to command a professional wrap.

Start with the End in Mind

An effective meeting introduction relies on the leadership consciousness that knows what the result looks like. Yet describing the results of a successful meeting is not enough. The name for each agenda step needs to describe its result or deliverable. Remember, the objective for each agenda step or activity is an object—a noun. You cannot deliver a verb. Agenda steps are best described by answering the question, “What does DONE look like?”

We begin by detailing seven activities that you should command for every Launch (Introduction). In a separate Best Practices article you will find a detailed explanation of four activities that you should command for every Review and Wrap (Conclusion).

Launching — Your Meeting Introduction

Your launch sets the tone, confirms roles, clarifies boundaries (scope), and describes what results will be generated during the session. A meeting launch should last no longer than 5 minutes (excluding icebreakers or other special activities such as an executive kickoff or a product or project update).

Transfer Ownership

Make sure that your participants understand that this meeting has a clear purpose and impact. Use the integrative and plural first person of ‘we’ or ‘us’ and avoid the singular ‘I’ so that you begin to transfer responsibility and ownership to the participants who need to own the results.

Visual Confirmation

Before you start your meeting, have your in-person or online room set up to visually display the meeting purpose, meeting scope, and meeting deliverables. If you cannot simplify each statement into 25 words or less (for each), then you are not ready to launch your session. In particular, if you do not know what the deliverable looks like, then you do not know what success looks like, or when you will be DONE.

Display the meeting purpose, scope, and deliverable on a slide, screen, whiteboard, handheld artifact, or large Post-it® paper. Additionally, display the agenda and ground rules appropriate to your politics and situation. Use the following seven activities in sequence to launch every session, even a 50-minute meeting. Your meeting introduction is not an appropriate time to experiment. These seven activities (plus occasional Kick-off), in this sequence, have been stress-tested and proven to be most effective, assuring a clear and compelling launch.

 

Seven Meeting Introduction (Launch) Activities

ONE — Roles and Impact

Introduce yourself in the role of facilitator as neutral and unbiased. Stress their roles of participants as equals. Remind them to leave egos and titles in the hallway. Stipulate how much money or time (FTP)^[♠] is wasted or at risk if the meeting and thus the organization, product, or project fails. Complete this activity within 30 seconds. Avoid using the word “I” after this activity. It is tough to drop the ego but remain conscious whenever you use the first person singular. Complete this first activity within 30 seconds.

TWO — Meeting Purpose

Describe the meeting purpose, either on large-format paper, a handout, or a screen. Stress again that this session is important because… and seek audible confirmation from your participants. Frequently, for this first request, put your hands to your ears while saying “I can’t hear you” to force a louder audible response. Professional facilitators constantly strive to shift “airtime” to their participants, and participants’ vocal affirmation transfers ownership.

THREE — Meeting Scope

Describe the meeting scope, either on large-format paper, a handout, or a screen. The meeting scope is either the entire organization, department, product, or project, or part of them, but never more. Again, secure an audible assent from your participants that builds consensus and transfers ownership.

FOUR — Meeting Deliverable

Describe what DONE looks like by using your prepared statement. After securing audible assent here, you will have facilitated audible agreement three times within two minutes. If participants cannot agree on the meeting purpose, meeting scope, and meeting deliverables, then your agenda is at risk, and you have a more serious problem to address.

NOTE: This meeting purpose, scope, and deliverable should be provided to participants before the meeting as part of an invitation, pre-read, or read ahead. The prepared statements should not change at this point. If they do, the meeting may be challenged, and the agenda may no longer be valid. I have been asked to modify the scope a few times, but it was always sharpening and not broadening the prepared statement ( Who knew that Greenland and part of Iceland are in North America?).

I frequently put hands to my ears while saying “Can’t hear you” to force a louder audible response. Professional facilitators constantly strive to shift “airtime” to their participants, and their vocal affirmation transfers ownership.Be particularly careful to describe what DONE looks like (the deliverable). After securing audible assent here, you will have facilitated consensus three times within two minutes. 

FIVE — Housekeeping

Explain that housekeeping or “administrivia” is any noise that might be causing a distraction. You want to clear participants’ heads from thinking about themselves, especially their creature comforts. For brief meetings, you might include where to locate emergency exits, fire extinguishers, lavatories, or coffee and tea. For workshops and longer meetings, you would also cover the frequency of breaks, break times for responding to emails, lunch arrangements, and any other “noise” that might prevent participants from staying focused. You may also conduct Icebreakers here, or after presenting the Ground Rules described as the seventh activity below.

SIX — Meeting Agenda

Describe each Agenda Step, including the reason for the sequence of the Agenda Steps and flow. Explain how the Agenda Steps relate to one another. Do not read them. Rather, explain why the Agenda Steps help us get DONE and why they are listed in the sequence provided. Link Agenda Steps back to the deliverable so that participants see how completing each Agenda Step helps us get DONE.

Fully explaining the Agenda Steps helps groups move out of “storming,” Stage 1 of the group life cycle. Again, do not read the Agenda Steps —explain them! Optimally, use a nonprofessional analogy to explain your Agenda Steps.^[♣] You have heard that a picture is worth a thousand words; well, an analogy is worth a thousand pictures (and a story is worth a thousand analogies).

SEVEN — Ground Rules

Share appropriate Ground Rules. Most importantly, explain why they are being used. Supplement your narrative posting of Ground Rules with audiovisual support, including humorous clips, but keep it brief. After presenting your essential Ground Rules, solicit any additional ones from the group, if desired.

Explain each ground rule (not more than nine). For professional meetings, we treat ‘speaking up’ in a meeting, NOT as an opportunity, rather as an obligation. After all, they are being paid to be there. We stress that “consensus” does not mean that we’ll make everybody happy, rather we will find an answer that everyone can support. See the MGRUSH alumni site for some other examples and audio-visual support.

Optional or Occasional (Eighth) Activities

• Have everyone introduce themselves by providing a structured Icebreaker. Complete Icebreakers before moving out of your Launch agenda step. If you expect Icebreakers to take up a significant amount of time, more than a half-hour, consider sequencing this activity sooner and move it up to the fifth activity (“Housekeeping”). 
• Product owners and project managers or sponsors may provide updates about progress or changes that have occurred. Have them remain brief by sticking to the vital information affecting the participants. Do not let them go too far “into the weeds,” providing details that bore everyone else. Keep them focused on WHAT has transpired (abstract), not HOW it is being done (concrete).
• You may need to conduct a review of open items from prior meetings. Preferably, have the product or project manager or sponsor read open items and share a status update while you document or record participants’ comments if needed.
• For multiple-day workshops, consider mounting a Plus-Delta in the back of the roofer participants to comment and request during the meeting. You don’t want to find out on the last day there is something you may have fixed on day one.

Kick-off During a Meeting Introduction

Do not modify the sequence of the seven activities for your meeting introduction sequence except, for any executive sponsor contributions. As soon as the sponsor enters the room, if the meeting has begun, stop and introduce that person. If the sponsor is present at the start, introduce him or her immediately. Have the sponsor up front and out of the room as soon as possible or practical, preferably without letting them sit down. If the sponsor insists on staying, seat him or her in the back or on the side as an observer, unless the sponsor is going to be an equal participant, like everyone else.

For a kick-off, have your executive sponsor explain the importance of participants’ contributions and what management intends to accomplish. Consider a quick project update. However, do not allow the update or executive sponsor to take more than five minutes. Your meeting is not a mini-Town Hall meeting (unless it actually is).

NOTE: For multiple-day workshops, cover the same items at the start of subsequent days (except kick-off). Additionally, review content built or agreed upon the day(s) before and how it relates to progress made in the agenda.

The Meeting Middle

After your meeting Introduction, the agenda steps between the Introduction and Wrap comprise the middle steps. Hundreds of our other Best Practices articles focus on what you can do between the introduction and wrap to plan, decide, and prioritize issues. 

The Meeting Wrap

We also provide a detailed article that provides a structured approach to your meeting Wrap. See “Use a Professional Meeting Wrap-Up Because Most Meetings Don’t End, They Stop” for a quick but thorough explanation of four activities to manage at the conclusion of your meetings and workshops.

Daniel Pink, in his book “When” claims that the Wrap represents the most important part of any meeting because the Wrap is the “taste you leave in someone’s mouth out in the hallway” where your participants should sound like they were in the same meeting together.

NOTE: In a separate Best Practices article you will find detailed explanation of four activities that you should command for every Review and Wrap (Conclusion).

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^[♠] FTP represents Full Time Person or Full-time equivalent (FTE), frequently viewed as around 2,000 hours per year.

^[♣] For an example, see the section “Explanation via Analogy” in the Planning Approach (Chapter 6) of Meetings That Get Results.

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Don’t ruin your career by hosting bad meetings. Sign up for a workshop or send this to someone who should. MGRUSH workshops focus on meeting design and practice. Each person practices tools, methods, and activities daily during the week. Therefore, while some call this immersion, we call it the road to building high-value facilitation skills.

Our workshops also provide a superb way to earn up to 40 SEUs from the Scrum Alliance, 40 CDUs from IIBA, 40 Continuous Learning Points (CLPs) based on Federal Acquisition Certification Continuous Professional Learning Requirements using Training and Education activities, 40 Professional Development Units (PDUs) from SAVE International, as well as 4.0 CEUs for other professions. (See workshop and Reference Manual descriptions for details.)

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