by Max Isaac
As president of 3Circle Partners, I help organizations establish sound leadership and create stronger, more effective teams through Team Acceleration™, a process that enhances individual and team interaction to drive sound strategies and superior execution.
Perhaps you have seen the recently-launched free app from Xerox, Business of Your Brain. If so, you likely found that you spend too much time in meetings. I’d like to share our basic meeting principles called The Three “P”s, to help you reduce meeting times by up to 30 percent and produce better results.
1. Purpose: Define the purpose and outcome desired at the beginning of the meeting to ensure a goal oriented meeting. This also provides a point of reference at the end of the meeting that can be used to assess whether the meeting was successful or not.
2. Process: Keep things simple and adjust the process to the purpose of the meeting to drive huge increases in productivity. There are some basics that apply to most meetings:
- Start with divergent thinking and then move on to convergent thinking when solving difficult problems.
- Use a “parking lot” to catch good ideas and actions that come up as discussion points, but don’t relate to the purpose of the meeting. This keeps the meeting on track and captures good ideas for later use.
- Discuss benefits and concerns at the end of a meeting. The key to this process is determining if the desired outcome specified under Purpose has been produced. If it has not, a short discussion is held and actions are identified to improve on this meeting.
3. Preparation: Attendees contribute much better to the discussion if they have time to mull over the agenda before the meeting. Prior to the meeting, send an email with the proposed Purpose, Process and Preparation, and attach documents that should be reviewed.
If you’re interested in hearing more, read Max’s full article on meeting preparation with less pain and more gain.*
Max Isaac is president of 3Circle Partners. helping industry-leading organizations establish sound leadership and create stronger, more effective teams through Team Acceleration® .
_____
John Jantsch filed this content as part of a paid partnership with Xerox. The content shared is the author’s opinion and does not necessarily reflect the views of Xerox. The Focus: Real Business, Real Opinion posts are designed to spark open discussion on a variety of trending industry topics.
#FocusFriday is a weekly conversation helping people with productivity in the office. Posts can be at the same time fun and serious, in the spirit of the company’s Business of Your Brain app, yet always focused on what matters most, Real Business.
*Updated November 21, 2017.