721: How to Lead Engaging Meetings, with Jess Britt
Feb 22, 2025
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Jess Britt, an experienced executive and nonprofit board chair, shares insights on transforming meetings from dreaded events into engaging collaborations. She emphasizes the importance of clear objectives to enhance participant engagement. Techniques such as warm-up questions, role-playing, and feedback methods like emoji polls are discussed to foster interaction. Britt also highlights the benefits of virtual meetings while stressing the need for open dialogue and respectful time management. Listeners are encouraged to implement simple strategies that lead to productive and enjoyable gatherings.
Establishing clear meeting objectives significantly improves engagement and helps leaders navigate discussions effectively by focusing on group dynamics.
Incorporating warm-up and checkout questions fosters a comfortable environment and allows leaders to gauge participants' understanding and feelings towards the meeting content.
Deep dives
The Importance of Meeting Objectives
Establishing clear objectives is crucial for effective meeting leadership, serving as a foundation for planning and facilitating discussions. Meeting objectives enhance the likelihood of achieving desired outcomes and help leaders to navigate the meeting effectively by allowing them to focus on their roles and the group's dynamics. Personal objectives, kept private, can guide leaders' actions during the meeting, enabling them to pivot or delegate responsibilities as necessary to ensure collaboration. By reflecting on both shared and personal objectives ahead of time, leaders can enhance their preparedness and create a supportive atmosphere for all participants.
Engaging Meeting Practices
Sending out a meeting agenda ahead of time is a foundational practice that can significantly improve engagement and clarity among participants. Providing a high-level outline of the meeting serves not only to clarify expectations but also encourages attendees to voice any concerns regarding the agenda prior to the meeting. Balancing the amount of pre-meeting preparation required can enhance participation while ensuring that attendees do not feel overwhelmed by too much information. The key is to find a middle ground where participants are informed enough to contribute meaningfully without being burdened by excessive preparatory tasks.
Warm-Up and Checkout Questions
Incorporating warm-up questions at the beginning of meetings can foster a comfortable environment where all participants feel their voices are valued, leading to enhanced engagement throughout the meeting. These questions can serve multiple purposes, such as starting discussions relevant to the meeting topic or reinforcing organizational values. Similarly, checkout questions allow leaders to gauge participants' understanding and feelings regarding the meeting’s content, providing insights into the group's dynamics. By inviting open-ended responses, leaders can foster a reflective atmosphere that encourages sharing and engagement.
Norms and Learning Principles in Meetings
Establishing and enforcing meeting norms is essential for maintaining a productive environment where everyone feels empowered to contribute. Co-generating norms with the group promotes accountability and ensures that all participants remain aligned throughout the meeting. Implementing adult learning principles, such as allowing participants to draw on their past experiences and engaging them in hands-on activities, can create a more inclusive and interactive atmosphere. Techniques like think-pair-share and role-playing foster collaboration and encourage attendees to actively participate, ensuring that meetings do not become passive experiences.
Jess Britt is an experienced executive and nonprofit board chair. Today as a coach and consultant, she uses a facilitative leadership approach to empower leaders and teams to build collaborative, high-performing, data-driven workplace cultures. She’s an alum of our Academy and for the past two years, has taken a leadership role inside our community as a Coaching for Leaders fellow, providing coaching and facilitation to our members.
While some leaders love to hate meetings, a well-designed meeting can open huge opportunities to connect, engage, and build culture on a team. In this conversation, Jess and I zero in on simple tactics that will help you engage attendees and lead meetings that people actually enjoy. We explore how objectives, facilitation tactics, and adult learning principles can help and invite you to start with one.
Key Points
Identifying both shared and non-shared objectives helps you design meetings, informs how you show up, makes meetings less frustrating, and helps you pivot.
Invite discussion and engagement at the start with a warm-up question. If possible, connect the question to an objective of the meeting.
Check-out questions are a quick indicator of what worked and what didn’t. Use emojis, voting, or a quick question to assess, and follow up if something didn’t land.
Adults learn best by drawing on past experiences and taking action. Bring in role plays, think-pair-share, and gallery walks to help engage people.
Simple debrief questions will open up insights. Consider prompts like: “What came out of this?” “What did you hear?” and “I heard you discussing an idea. Tell us more.”
Reach out to Jess at jess@jessbritt.com and tell her one thing you tried from this conversation and what happened. She’ll respond by sharing her full guide of meeting facilitation ideas we weren’t able to entirely cover in this episode.