Meetings are a fact of business life.
It goes without saying that servant-leaders in the workplace approach things – including meetings – from a servant leadership perspective.
So, aspiring servant-leaders in the workplace might find this checklist helpful.
Ask yourself, when holding meeting, do you:
- Consider whether the meeting is necessary?Ineffective organizations meet too much. Consider if an email, phone call or quick conversation will do the trick.
- Schedule with appropriate advanced notice?Your colleagues are just as busy as you are. Respect their schedules and efforts to organize their work days.
- Invite the right people? Inviting people who don’t need to be at the meeting wastes their time. Not inviting people who do need to be at the meeting can erode trust.
- Provide reading materials in advance?Give people a chance to review documents before the meeting. Not everyone can process documents “real time.”
- Start on time?Being late is disrespectful at best. At worst, it’s a power move. Nothing says, “your time is not worth as much as my time,” as starting late.
- Chit-chat a little before the meeting begins?Maybe one day, robots will call meetings. Until they do, be human – get to know your people and let them get to know you.
- Have an agenda?Think through what needs to be covered. Review the agenda with the team before starting, ask if other items need to be added and agree on it.
- Turn off the phone, close the laptop and disconnect?If you have questions about this one, I doubt I can help you.
- Stop anyone from dominating? Some people talk too much in meetings and crowd others out. As a servant-leader in a meeting, your job is to stop this from happening.
- Make sure everyone is heard? Some people are reluctant to share their input. Be sensitive to the introverts in your meeting and give the quiet ones a chance to speak.
- Listen?To what is being said. And to what is not being said. To words as well as well to facial expressions and body language.
- Express your opinions afterothers have expressed theirs?The leader who asks others to give their opinions first will hear a greater range of views than the leader who takes a position before others have spoken.
- Develop someone?Inviting the right people can include inviting a team member who would benefit from the meeting as a professional development matter.
- Celebrate a success? What gets celebrated gets done. Celebrate an achievement or good practice in the course of your meeting and you will encourage more of the same.
- Connect to the mission?The best servant-leaders will connect the dots between a particular meeting and the mission of the organization.
- Empower someone?When deciding follow-up actions, delegate, don’t dump. Servant-leaders empower others by setting them up for success.
- Thank someone?Duh.
- Have fun?There is no law against having a little fun in a meeting (if the subject matter doesn’t make doing so inappropriate.) Smile, laugh – you get the idea!
- Summarize what just happened?A great meeting without some sort of record or list of next steps can easily be forgotten – and therefore become a waste of time.
- End early?Just because you allocated an hour doesn’t mean you have to take an hour. I have yet to hear a complaint about getting a few extra minutes of free time.
What do you think of this checklist? What would you add?
Let us know.
As always, we appreciate your views. Thanks!
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Excellent – aspiring to make servant leadership part of my practice, along with authenticity, ethics and a dose of pragmatism.
Thank you.