How even your CEO will love your meetings

Meeting minutes: Consider the duration of the meeting. Keep it as short as possible, but as long as necessary—typically between one and two hours, going through all the meeting ToDos.  

Meeting materials matter too in your meeting preparation. Attach any documents, presentations, or materials to the invitation. This aids when you prepare for an important meeting and ensures absent participants can catch up easily.  

Meeting summary: After the meeting, your work isn't over, the meeting summary is very important. Create detailed meeting minutes that include all necessary information, such as who attended, where and when the meeting took place, and titles and positions of participants.  

Consider recording the meeting for future reference, but be cautious with sensitive topics. Lastly, wrap up with a summary email. Attach the meeting minutes and emphasize important meeting ToDos, responsible individuals, and deadlines, these are some other tips for successful meetings. 

By following these seven tips for successful meetings, you will be setting up a meeting that leaves a lasting positive impression on your colleagues and easily planning a board meeting or planning a meeting with the CEO. Prepare for an important meeting, and success is sure to follow. 

Video transcript:

How to impress your CEO with your meeting organization?

Time is money, and this is why Goldbrain hates boring meetings. This video is about how you impress your CEO and even Goldbrain with your meeting organization.

Gabriel Goldbrain SUCCESS Training

By the way, I'm Gabriel Goldbrain, and I developed the Goldbrain Success Training. This training helps young professionals land the job at McKinsey, BCG, and Bain, which are leading management consulting firms where you can expect base salaries of $100,000 plus straight out of college. If you want to find out more, visit my website www.Gabrielgoldbrain.com.

How to prepare for an important meeting

Today I will talk about seven things to consider when you organize a meeting. If you follow these seven things, you can even master the toughest meetings like meetings with a CEO, meetings with the CFO, board meetings, steering committee meetings, and management meetings easily. So, the key to holding a meeting that everyone will love is good preparation. So prepare your meetings well to impress your colleagues. The meeting preparation may take as long as the meeting itself, so be aware that good organization, good preparation, good minutes, and a good summary of the meeting are integral parts of an excellent meeting that everyone will love.

The Audience

Now let's start with the first thing to consider when organizing a meeting. It's the audience. Keep the audience as small as possible. A lot of people spend almost their whole day in meetings. Not everyone has to take part in every meeting. Only the decision-makers, the persons that really matter, which will contribute to a meeting. But don't forget people, sometimes meetings are too small, and you forget important stakeholders which then as a consequence makes things harder for you. So you have to find the right balance and deeply think about who is really required for a meeting because no one hates it more than being in a meeting which is not relevant for them. Don't waste other people's time.

Meeting Invitation

The second thing is a meeting invitation. Always send a meeting invitation a few days in advance, one day in advance maybe too short notice if a bigger group is being invited. So typically two to three days ahead of the meeting, you send a meeting invitation to all the parties which should participate in the meeting. You may put persons on CC which are not required, which are optional. And also, you may state that in the meeting invitations that these persons may optionally take part in the meeting if they think it's relevant for them. Don't make it mandatory for all the invited persons to attend. Just make it clear who are the relevant ones. So a meeting without an invitation is not a good idea.

The Agenda

The third thing is an agenda. Always provide an agenda. A meeting invitation without an agenda, that's not a meeting, that's a country club meeting. Provide a clear agenda so that everyone knows what this meeting is about and if they should come and contribute or if it's in their interest to participate. Keep the agenda to about three to five agenda items, maybe seven, but don't overdo it. Keep it small, simple. And it's clear if the more important the meeting is, the longer you should think about the agenda and the more in advance you should invite to that meeting. When it comes to the meeting agenda, first things first because you may have a CEO or a CFO participating, and therefore they may have to run away for another meeting or something will interrupt the meeting, and you want to make sure that the key points are being addressed. So the unimportant stuff always comes towards the end. So that also, sometimes people can leave the meeting. So you may say, "Okay, CEO, we have covered the topic we had for the CEO. If it doesn't matter to you, you could be leaving because I think we would not need your participation anymore because these are detailed questions which we are now discussing." So people will value it when you let them go from a meeting if it's not required anymore that they participate. That's also how good meetings are organized. Let people go if you won't require them anymore. Don't waste people's time with inefficient meetings. Also, another thing which is related to the meeting agenda, always have a meeting agenda point which is about ad hoc items because since the invitation, things may have come up, and you may need to add other or various items to the agenda. So always ask before the meeting starts if there are other points that need to be covered from the participants' perspective in that meeting, and then think about where you fit it in the agenda. And another thing is always keep track of the agenda. Try to follow the agenda as good as possible and watch the time so that you can identify when some discussions take too much time so that you may need a separate meeting or a smaller group to discuss about the matter. Participants will also honor it when you keep track of the agenda and that you keep track of a proper timing of the agenda items so that that everything will be discussed and the meeting follows a good structure. People will recognize this and value it. So that's what people will love you for if you stick to your agenda and you follow a clear structure through the meeting. That also means that at the beginning of the meeting, you should always start out with briefly talking through the agenda, so what the meeting is about and what you're planning to achieve in the meeting.

The Duration of the Meeting

Number four is the duration of the meeting. The best meeting is the meeting that never takes place. Now, seriously, keep meetings as short as possible and as long as necessary. Usually, a meeting is between one and two hours, that's what you should plan for. A meeting after two hours usually it's pretty exhausting. If you can make it in 30 minutes, it's good, but try to reserve one and a half hours at least for your meetings. Nevertheless, if you're finished after 20 minutes, done. Everyone will love it if you complete the meeting after 20 minutes and everything is covered.

Meeting Materials

Number five, meeting materials. If you have meeting materials or presentations or documents you're going to discuss during the meeting, attach them to the invitation so that everyone can prepare for the meeting, that they can flip through the presentation before the meeting, and that they have their questions ready for you during the meeting. If you attach the materials to your invitation, also seniors will value it because they may not be able to participate because they're in another meeting, maybe they're in a less well-organized meeting, and then they can pull up your presentation, flip through it, and say, "Hey, this is the guy. He did it well. If only that other dude would do it like him." So it's always good for those absent if they have the materials so they can get at least a sense or like 70-80% of what is being discussed and said in the meeting and being presented.

Meeting Minutes

Number six to consider are the meeting minutes. So once the meeting is over as an organizer, your work is not over. You got a lot to do. You got to summarize the meeting outcomes in the meeting minutes. The minutes should also include where the meeting took place, when it took place, who was invited from which company, and even add the title and the position they held. And then also add who was absent and who was present at the meeting of those persons. So everyone knows who was invited to the meeting, who took part, who got the materials, so it's clear that you basically summarize everything of the meeting on a paper. This will take a lot of time, but it should be of high quality. Maybe you will need it in half a year, and then you will have it all there in every detail, and you can pull it out and reference it where you say, "Listen, at that meeting, we took this discussion." The meeting minutes should also include all the to-dos, who is responsible for the deliverables of these to-dos, and deadlines until when these to-dos were promised to be done. Typical meeting minutes are three to four pages strong. Distribute the meeting minutes to everyone who was on the invitation list so they can clearly follow the discussion you had during the meeting and see the results which the meeting brought and the decisions which were taken or maybe even the open points which have not been addressed yet so that it's pretty clear what was the outcome of the meeting, what are the open items that were discussed and discovered in the meeting. And so even those that are absent and that really interest in the topic that they pretty much know what the meeting was about and that it was not that bad that they could not participate.

Recording the Meeting

As we live in the 21st century, it can make sense to record your meeting. You can either go for a camera recording or just an audio recording so that there is an additional document that someone interested in the topic could replay or watch and so they can go back to details of the discussion which are relevant for them. But for sure, you need to make sure that you don't discuss sensitive topics that maybe should not be on tape. Maybe ask the audience before how you should do it, and I think you will have a quite good sense if it makes sense to record the meeting or not if it's important enough that it may be replayed later on or if it's not that important. For example, if you have a meeting where you explain something to someone, it could well make sense to record that meeting so you can save time in the future. Maybe you explain someone a folder structure or you explain how you do and document certain things in your company and every now and then you got a new employee which needs this training. So it doesn't make sense that you do it over and over so it can be much more efficient if you just record these kind of meetings and if there is a new person you hand over the video recording to him and so they can basically read through the document work through the document and find out how you do things in your company and so you don't waste your time and I think it's more efficient for this person because they can organize when they watch this video so they are more flexible than a physical meeting. So having a recording provides more flexibility than doing a physical meeting.

Summary of Meeting and To-Do Tracking

So the final thing to consider is item number seven this is the summary and the to-do tracking a good meeting should have a summary email which includes the meeting minutes in the summary email just highlight three to seven bullet points where you Briefly summarize the outcome and the key decisions taken during the meeting attach the meeting minutes so everyone can look into the detail details distribute the meeting minutes to everyone who was invited to the meeting so that everyone has the brief and short summary and may not need to read into the details of the meeting minutes include important todos and responsible persons as well as critical deadlines in this summary email.

Slide: Ingredients for good meetings

Like in most of my videos I summarized everything discussed in this video on on this slide you can download it from my website www Gabriel gold brain.com

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