How team meetings begin sets the tone for the engagement, positivity, and energy shared by the group.
How team meetings end shapes what the team will remember and solidifies team member commitment to next steps and actions.
Yet, most leaders don’t think very strategically about these important time-bound bookends. As such, they miss a crucial element in designing a great meeting.
Leaders interested in crafting and conducting powerful meetings must give beginnings and endings more attention than they typically get.
When it comes to kicking off an engaging meeting, good leaders deploy a variety of tactics and devices designed to create a positive meeting climate, one where team members are primed to share openly and candidly.
Beyond forecasting the agenda, good leaders turn to inspirational quotes, powerful visuals, questions connected to the agenda, and the sharing of recent successes to set the right tone.
Quick icebreakers, such as puzzles, trivia, and brain teasers, can get people talking and create a relaxed mood conducive to openness as well.
But of the many effective beginnings available to leaders, one powerful entry for leaders to consider is the reflective pause.
Asking team members to share a moment of silence where they can reflect personally on the challenges they are facing sounds like a de-energizer. Until it is followed by asking team members to show up and lean on each other to help their colleagues through the trials they face.
This call to stand as a team can create a powerful beginning, as can using the moment of silence to review what team members are most grateful for or proud of.
Once the agenda and discussion are close to concluding, good leaders take a moment to thank team members for their contribution and to recap what has transpired. Visual summaries can make this review even more memorable.
Here are some examples of other endings popular with creative leaders: Sharing one-word descriptions that capture the meeting, celebrating a team milestone, giving small prizes for the biggest meeting contributions, short rhymes or funny limericks that summarize the meeting, theme music that signals the meeting’s end, and asking team members to offer thank-yous in a round-robin.
Leaders also have the powerful option of asking team members to prepare for the next meeting now by proposing a question or issue that is worth answering or contemplating.
Asking team members to think about the next gathering now creates an anticipation and energy that primes more openness before the current meeting even ends.
Beginning and endings matter, and the best leaders believe that a great exit is really a smooth entrance to the next conversation. Just when you think the meeting is finished, you find that it launches a new beginning.
Meetings are better with both compelling beginnings and strong endings. Of course, what happens in the middle is where the team excels, and the leader becomes a peer.
