How to Keep Meetings on Track: Be Master of the Un-Derailable Meeting

If you’re a business leader, your calendar is likely filled with meetings. You probably have meetings with your executive team, meetings with potential clients, meetings with business contacts and meetings with all of your employees. Meetings are important, but they can also go quickly off the rails.

In order to keep meetings on track, efficient, and useful to everyone involved, you need to leverage certain tools and techniques. With these techniques in your arsenal, you can lead a meeting knowing that it will be well-thought-out, productive, and necessary.

Without further ado, here are some practical ways to be the master of the un-derailable meeting.

How to keep meetings on track and effective

1. Create an agenda

One of the easiest ways to keep everyone on track during a meeting is to develop a meeting agenda. This agenda should include topics to discuss, questions to ask, action items to be determined, and/or deliverables to assign out. Agendas should be clear and concise. This will allow you and the entire team to stay on task and avoid any unnecessary distractions.

As a business leader, you should write up an agenda before each significant meeting. Then send it to all attendees in advance via a link on the calendar invite or email. This practice will ensure everyone at the meeting knows its purpose and has a chance to ask questions beforehand. By laying out discussion items ahead of time, you’ll reduce the likelihood of participants going off track and raising topics best discussed at another time.

2. Avoid inviting everybody

Nobody likes to feel left out. But when it comes to holding an efficient meeting, limiting the number of attendees can be helpful to the business. This isn’t to say that you should make decisions without getting needed input. However, the more people you invite to a meeting, the more likely the meeting is going to be derailed.

In general, seven is considered the magic number of attendees. Having more than seven individuals in one meeting can cause disruption and lead to an unproductive discussion. You may find that the time is up before necessary decisions are made because everyone felt the need to chime in.

When creating your meeting agenda, decide who is absolutely necessary to the meeting and who can be filled in via email afterward. Chances are, your unincluded colleagues will be grateful to have more time on their calendar to get work done.

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3. Start and end on time

Lastly, make sure all meetings you conduct start and end on time. This may seem like common sense, but how many meetings have you joined only to wait around 10 minutes for the meeting to start? Exactly. Your colleagues’ time is valuable, and you should show that you realize that. Keeping to a set time limit will ensure that your attendees feel respected and will go a long way toward keeping the meeting on track.

Additionally, starting on time will set a precedent for your employees. They’ll know they need to be present from the start of the meeting in order to get all of the information. And if your company is working remotely, starting on time helps avoid any extraneous chitchat that can quickly tank your employees' productivity.

Keeping meetings on track

Being able to keep your meetings on track and safe from derailment isn't difficult, but it does require intention. Setting an agenda, inviting the right people, and sticking to a time limit will set your meeting up for success.

Given the vagaries of the business world, not all of your meetings will go according to plan. Nevertheless, using these tactics will help ensure that your meetings are productive and beneficial to your business the vast majority of the time.

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