Successful Meetings in High Performing Organisations — Part 1: Before the meeting

Photo by John Price on Unsplash

A successful meeting starts with good preparation. Preparing (for) the meeting is not only the responsibility of the organiser. Everyone must play their part.

Assuming a meeting is needed or unavoidable, a good meeting invitation should contain all the necessary information.
Of course the date, time and place (physical or virtual) but also the topic, agenda, goal, audience, context, output. The organiser needs to clearly identify these elements and state them in the invitation.

Here an informal checklist for the organiser with a few questions that might help.

• The topic: why is the meeting taking place?
• The goal: what is the desired output or outcome that participants will try to achieve? This is also what needs to happen (at a minimum) by the end of the meeting to say that the meeting has been “successful”.
• The audience: who are the right people to include in order to achieve the goal? Decision makers, subject matter experts, advisors, stakeholders… Are there too many participants? Hypothetically, if you need more than 2 pizzas* to feed the audience, the answer is probably yes.

* “No meeting should be…