721: How to Lead Engaging Meetings, with Jess Britt

207 snips

Feb 22, 2025

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.

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ADVICE

Meeting Objectives

Identifying shared and personal objectives for a meeting helps design and lead it effectively.
It allows for better preparation, reduces frustration, and enables pivoting when necessary.

ANECDOTE

Shared vs. Personal Objectives

Jess Britt used a shared objective of reflecting on a strategic plan, while personally focusing on her leadership transition in a board meeting.
This approach guided her preparation and in-meeting decisions, like delegating facilitation and stepping back to let others lead.

ADVICE

Effective Objectives

A good meeting objective should be realistic, resonate with attendees, and be specific.
For example, "align on next steps" is better than "complete the project."

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Jess Britt

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.

Resources Mentioned

Related Episodes

How to Lead Meetings That Get Results, with Mamie Kanfer Stewart (episode 358)
Moving Towards Meetings of Significance, with Seth Godin (episode 632)
Bringing Your Strengths to a Big Job, with General CQ Brown, Jr. (episode 691)

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