00:00 – Show Opening

Are you a professional who wants to become a more effective leader? Then get ready for daily tips from the coach with the experience and inspiration to help you succeed in any leadership situation. You’re listening to the Meeting Leadership Podcast with Gordon Sheppard.

00:27 – Podcast starts here!

Welcome to another episode of the Meeting Leadership Podcast, where we give you the practical tips and the strategies that you need to build your leadership skills and learn how to run outstanding meetings.

00:48 – The physical layout of your agendas

Now, as many of you already know, today is part three of a five part series called, ‘How to Create an Effective Team Meeting Agenda.’ But before I get into it, I want to talk about the actual physical layout of your agendas themselves. So, right now typically, agendas are a set of items. Kind of go one, two, three, four, and it’s just really often things that are written down in that order.

Well, if you can re-imagine the actual physical layout of your agenda itself by thinking about it in terms of blocks rather than just typing out line by line. So, you can imagine in the upper right hand third, you might be able to say, “Put the vision statement from your strategic plan,” and that would be a reminder that every meeting that you attend should be moving that vision forward.

Or maybe down in the lower part, you would have some accountability items, or perhaps you would even in the middle have an inspirational quote. If you start to think about the physical layout of your agenda in blocks rather than just as a series of lines, then you can create something that people actually want to read and get really excited about.

01:43 – Revisiting Part 2 – https://meetingleadershipinc.com/72

And just to bring you up to speed, yesterday in part two of ‘How to Create an Effective Team Meeting Agenda’ we introduced you to the first two letters in our agenda acronym. A is for attention grabber, and G is for great goals. And now today in part three, we’re going to explain the E and the N. 

01:57 – Free download for AGENDA – https://meetingleadershipinc.com/71download

And if you haven’t got it already, there is a free download that explains the entire agenda acronym, and you can get that by going to meetingleadershipinc.com/71download. That’s meetingleadershipinc.com/71download.

02:20 – The E is for “Excitement”

And with that in mind, let’s get started. Now, the E in the agenda acronym stands for excitement. Just think about it. If we’re going to get away from those boring line by lines and really start to include things, what sort of things can you get people really into reading it and then get really engaged when they’re in the meeting itself?

 And here’s a few suggestions to help get you started. You could list individual achievements right there on the agenda itself. Let’s say somebody on your team had done something really, really well, you can put a summarizing sentence or maybe even their picture right there on the agenda. You could include positive stories from around the office or around your organization. You could also make a note to say, “Hey, if you read this agenda now, we’re serving pizza,” but put it right there on the agenda, and that might be the thing that gets people’s attention.

And one of my favorite things that you could put on an agenda to create some real excitement, is you could include a new project announcement that was the result of the team meetings that you’ve been having. 

03:27 – The N is for “Navigation tools”

Wouldn’t that be great? People can then directly connect the efforts that they’re making in your meetings with the outcomes that are happening, which leads us to the N in our agenda acronym. And that stands for navigation tools.

Now, it doesn’t matter whether you are the facilitator or someone participating in the meeting, if you have the things that we do, the ways that we behave when certain things happen right there on the agenda, this can create a real environment of trust. So, for example, if you put the words ‘parking lot’ right there on the agenda, then it gives the facilitator permission to help someone when they are talking about something that’s not related to this meeting.

That’s actually a real facilitation techniques. So, somebody is saying extra things. The facilitator can jump in and say, “Wait a second. Those are great ideas. Let me just put them in the parking lot.” And when I say parking lot, it’s like a list that you put up on a whiteboard or maybe you just take extra notes. But what you’re doing is you’re acknowledging that the person is saying some things that are a value, but they’re not quite right for what you’re there to talk about that day.

And because you’ve put the parking lot concept right there under the navigation tools on your agenda, everybody will know what it’s all about. And let me give you another example of some very powerful navigation tools that you can put right on your agenda. Let’s say there’s a fight in your meeting. Well, in the navigation tools, you could have these two statements. One person speaks. It’s about the issue and not about the person.

Those two statements are really, really valuable when it comes to passionate disagreements in a meeting. Now we want passionate disagreements in a meeting, but if we’ve established then these ground rules, these navigation tools for when those things come up, and they’re right there on the agenda, it is more likely that the outcome of that passionate disagreement will be more successful.

05:12 – Episode recap

And now, let me take a moment to recap what we’ve covered in this episode. I started off by asking you to re-imagine your agendas and consider them as blocks rather than a straight set of lines. And in those blocks you can put very special things that will actually get the attention of all of the people on your team. And then, we moved on to the next two letters in our agenda acronym, that was E to create excitement, and the N for navigation tools.

05:40 – The value of AGENDA –  https://meetingleadershipinc.com/71download

And I hope that you can see by now the real value in using the word ‘agenda’ as a reminder of ways to really spice up our agendas and make them something that your entire team will get behind. And if you haven’t had a chance to get it yet, don’t forget your copy of the free download for this entire series. It explains the agenda acronym in detail and you can get that by going to meetingleadershipinc.com/71download.

06:07 – How To Create An Effective Team Meeting Agenda – Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 4 – Part 5

And that’s it for part three of the five part series called ‘How to Create an Effective Team Meeting Agenda’. In part one we did the introduction. In part two we covered the A and the G. Tomorrow in part four we’re covering the D and the A, and then finally, in part five we’re going to be looking at how to successfully market your agendas because you’ve put so much effort into them already.

06:30 – More great navigation tools – https://meetingleadershipinc.com/12

And if you’d like to go even deeper and get more great navigation tools, then check out episode 12 on the Meeting Leadership Podcast. It’s called ‘Three Ground Rules for Great Meetings’, and you can get that by going to meetingleadershipinc.com/12.

06:47 – Meeting Leadership Academy – https://meetingleadershipinc.com/academy

And I also want to let you know that this episode of the Meeting Leadership Podcast is brought to you by the Meeting Leadership Academy. There you’re going to find some great live training options for you and your team, and some wonderful online course options as well, with titles like, how to be a good facilitator, how to create an effective team meeting agenda, how to connect your meetings to your strategy and a whole lot more. And as always, thank you so much for listening and we’ll see you tomorrow for part four of how to create an effective team meeting agenda.

07:18 – Podcast Outro

Thanks for listening to the Meeting Leadership Podcast. Be sure to subscribe for more strategies to help you become an outstanding leader, and don’t forget to rate and review so we can bring you fresh content every day. We’ll see you tomorrow right here on the Meeting Leadership Podcast.