An Executive Assistant works for a Senior Executive who has too many meetings on their calendar. The entire team is burned out with so many unproductive meetings that they struggle to get meaningful work done. The leader is frustrated because no new ideas come out of the meetings and there is a general frustration from everyone in the company.
Step 1:
The Executive Assistant starts sitting down with the executive every Friday to review the meetings for the following week and running through the READY plan for every meeting.
R – Roles and Responsibilities
- Identify the key participants who are essential to achieving the meeting’s goals.
- Clarify roles – who is facilitating / who are the decision makers
- Who is required / Who is optional
- What group dynamics might come into play?
- Clarify roles – who is facilitating / who are the decision makers
E – Expectations and Engagement
- What is the expectation surrounding how participants should engage
- Is this an “Active Listening” meeting where information is being pushed out by the executive
- Is this an “Active Participation” meeting where everyone is expected to be involved in the decision making, adding items to a remote collaboration tool and voting on the way to move forward
- What are the expectations for in-person / remote / webcam usage
A – Agenda and Alignment
- Create the planned Agenda
- Does the agenda need to be designed so that the executive opens the session and then hands over to the team for decision making so they don’t anchor the decision by going first and stifling team collaboration
D – Define Purpose and Desired Outcomes
- Define the meeting’s purpose and desired outcomes
Y – Your Logistics
- Clarify the logistics
- Date, Time & Duration of the Meeting
- Is there pre-work that needs to be sent out ahead of the meeting
- If the meeting is remote – do we need to set up a remote workspace
- If In-person – do we need to book a room, bring postit notes / sharpies / flipchart paper / color dots, order food, drinks etc
Step 2:
The Executive Assistant updates all of the executives meetings on the calendar for the upcoming week deleting some, combining others, updating attendees and adding the agenda to each meeting.
Step 3:
At the start of the meeting – The Executive Assistant kicks off the meeting as the facilitator
They have the agenda visible and a clock / timer visible to keep everyone on track
They remind everyone about the purpose & outcome for the meeting and expectation on engagement etc.
They clarify who will be taking Action Items (Ideally everyone who owns the action item is documenting it on the virtual board or on a posit note)