How to Eliminate Boring, Languishing Meetings

can’t stand when meetings languish. Being a design-build company means we offer our clients a highly collaborative team that works together for the success and health of a project—and the only way to do that is through a lot of meetings. Combine that with my passion for efficiency, and you get a passion for no boring meetings.

As director of operations at LEFF Design Build, I’m able to instill this mindset throughout the entire company by developing standards and training for every team member on meeting facilitation. Without structure and clear objectives, it’s easy to fall into tangents and other bad habits.

Training for Facilitation

Most of the roles at LEFF are required to run a meeting at some point. Even if you’re an apprentice carpenter, you will be trained to facilitate.

The goal is that everybody understands how to participate in meetings, knows what to expect, and adopts shared language. Before new team members facilitate meetings with outside parties, they first facilitate internally. They’re instructed to rehearse the opening statement, review the meeting prep checklist, and put time on their calendar to debrief. An agenda must be sent out in advance. It’s part of the training documents we give everybody during onboarding.

Meeting Structure

We have checklists for how to prepare and debrief for meetings that everybody receives. A structured meeting has four components:

Purpose: Why are we meeting today?

Agenda: What topics will be covered in order to support the purpose of that meeting?

Logistics: How long are we meeting today? When are we stopping? Where are we meeting? Do we have all the tools?

Desired Outcomes: Where do we want to be from when we start the meeting to when we end the meeting?

Rules of Thumb

I believe a facilitator should not talk for more than 20% of the time. You’re there to receive information and ask questions, not present.

Meetings are inherently collaborative. If you’re attending a meeting where the sole purpose is to report data or deliver information, it should be an email.

Internal weekly meetings are productive at 45 minutes, and hand-off meetings with design and production are four hours. If any set durations are changed, they need to be pre-negotiated with the team.

Always utilize the first five minutes of a meeting to build rapport before jumping right in. With external clients, it’s harder to stick to five minutes, so we set the number at 15.

If you’re attending a meeting where the sole purpose is to report data or deliver information, it should be an email.

Handling Vendors and Clients

We call outside parties “untrained players,” and the only one to be concerned about is the client.

You should prep vendors and trade partners in advance of a client meeting so that they know what pieces they’re allowed to participate in, and how you want them to participate.

If clients start a tangent, you can kindly divert them back by asking, “Is this the priority now of the conversation and would you like to shift the conversation?”

It can’t be dictatorial and has to be collaborative. So it always has to come in the form of a question.

These guidelines have proven invaluable to our organization.