Preparing the Agenda

“Great meetings don’t happen by accident. They happen by design.” — Unknown

Now that you know the purpose of your meeting, and you’ve thought about the logistics of it, now it’s time to fill in the body of the agenda. What are you actually going to talk about?

I’m going to recommend a couple of things with which you should consider starting and ending every meeting. I’ll also suggests sources for agenda items.

If this is a one-of, specific topic meeting you’re planning then your job is fairly straight-forward. If you’re planning a multi-session or recurring meeting, a large-meeting, an off-site meeting, or a multi-plant/company/client meeting, then you’ll have a bigger challenge. Customize the following suggestions to meet your specific needs.

This is a checklist of items you should consider including as standard items in your agenda. You don’t have to use them all, but it helps to make sure you’ve covered everything. I’ve found that checklists let you focus on what you need to focus on, instead of worrying about what you’ve missed. But that’s a different posting.

1. Introductions
   Make sure everybody knows everybody else in the room. Making introductions is another (or several!) posting topics all by itself. Here’s the important thing: pay attention! Learn everybody’s name. Your ability to influence the meeting is directly proportional to your ability to make a personal connection with the people in it. The easiest and fastest way to do this is to use their names. Don’t believe me? Try this experiment: talk to a friend while pretending that you can’t remember their name. Even if they tell you multiple times. How do you think they’ll react? Be ready to buy them a beer and explain yourself afterwards.

2. Review & finalize the agenda
   This is easy, since you published the agenda ahead of time and everybody reviewed it to prepare for the meeting before they got there. Sorry, I tried to say that with a straight face. Give yourself time to review and agree the agenda. This may not be necessary for a weekly, routine staff meeting. However, it can be a point of contention in larger, more complicated events. I remember a multi-day client meeting where it took the first two hours just to agree the agenda. This was an extreme case, since it was the end of the contract and things were getting a bit testy as deadlines loomed. Allow for this as appropriate. For multi-day meetings, it doesn’t hurt to do this and review the minutes of the previous day (see next item) at the start of every day.

3. Review the previous minutes
   This is an opportunity for anybody to get clarification or make corrections to the minutes of the previous meeting. The ones that you published immediately after the last meeting.

4. Agenda items
   This is the meat of the meeting, its heart, the raison d’être. Look at minutes of previous meeting for incomplete business. Your own notes, e-mails, action items, discussions with staff, boss, peers, and clients are also rich sources. Whether you follow the GTD methodology or another personal effectiveness process, this will already be organized for you.

5. Review of the “parking lot”
   More on this in the next post. Basically this is a place to park non-agenda items. Issues, discussions, ideas, and any agenda items that ran over their time get held here until the end of the meeting. Then give yourself five minutes to review and decide what to do with them (ignore them, put them on the next meeting’s agenda, have a separate meeting, or discuss it “off-line”.

6. Review action items
   If you haven’t already done this as each agenda item as you went through the agenda, now’s the time to confirm your understanding of who’s going to do what by when.

7. Time & place of next meeting
   Agree the time and place of the next meeting now, while you’ve got (mostly) all the right players in the same room.

Next time: How to conduct an effective meeting