Most meetings end like T.S. Eliot’s Hollow Men: with a whimper, not a bang. Often people just leave, with their notes, and sometimes schedule the next meeting. But everyone just knows what they have to do, right?
Well, in other chapters we’ve discussed documenting meetings with notes and sharing them. But today we’ll discuss another technique that is among the most common techniques we’ve discussed in this series, but still not widely known enough and for those who know, not widely done enough. Namely:
End every meeting by verbally announcing what the next concrete steps are for everyone who was in the meeting.
An easy way to do this is to just go around the table (or Zoom windows) and everyone just announces what they’re going to do (of course, record that in your notes and share that. Do I even need to say that?)
Or for those with more confidence, just announce it, “Okay, let me repeat this to make sure I’m clear on what everyone is doing for the next steps. I’m going to A, B, and C. Jake will D and E. And Jane will F, G, and H. Is that right?”
And when your meeting notes come around, this is the most important part of your notes as well.
The advantage of doing this is that it always pushes the ball forward. The default meeting ends with a deflation—the whimper—and everyone scurrying off to their next meeting or task.
The broader version of this is the following: one of the things that your boss or client fears the most is stagnation, that the ball isn’t moving forward enough or fast enough. This is the “bad case” from the boss’s eyes; not terrible, but not good. The “terrible” case of work is a total disaster situation. That of course should be avoided, too.
So how do we always move the ball ahead? Easy: whenever you finish an important task, individual or group, just ask yourself what the next important task is. And if it’s a group, to articulate it.
But what if the task you finish isn’t important? Then you should ask yourself the deeper question of why you’re doing it, or why you’re in the situation where you need to be doing it. And answering that requires more time than we have here today!
