CHAPTER 22

Don’t End a Meeting Without Doing These 3 Things

by Bob Frisch and Cary Greene

When a sports team finishes a game, they usually don’t gather up their gear and immediately leave the court, rink, field, or locker room. The players and coaches take a few minutes for a post-game meeting—a ritual that’s just as important as the pre-game warm-up.

Meeting participants can benefit from the same exercise. A quick wrap-up discussion before attendees leave the room goes a long way toward ensuring the gathering achieved what it set out to do and that future gettogethers will also prove successful. Here are three steps to take at the end of each meeting (though you can, of course, dial up or down each component as the situation warrants). Once you’ve done this in person, follow up in writing.

Confirm key decisions and next steps.

Recap what was decided in the meeting, who is accountable for following through, when implementation will occur, and how it will be communicated. You want every attendee to leave the meeting with the same understanding of what was agreed on so there’s little chance of anyone reopening the issues later. One client we’ve worked with preps for this end-of-meeting review by writing on a flip chart to capture decisions as they’re made so nothing is forgotten or overlooked. He also notes action items, including who is responsible, when things should happen, and how status will be reported back to the group.

Develop communication points.

If a colleague who missed the meeting asks an attendee “What happened?” the person who went to the meeting should know what to say. So before you wrap up, put the question to the group. “What are the most important things we accomplished in our time together here?” As the group responds, capture the key points on a flip chart, whiteboard, or shared document, and briefly summarize them. Once you have alignment on what should be communicated to others, ask everyone if there are any parts of the discussion that they wouldn’t want to be shared. Some information might be confidential; perhaps some ideas aren’t quite ready for dissemination. Be as specific as possible here so everyone clearly understands what is off-limits. Then, as soon as possible after the meeting, send your agreed-upon talking points to everyone in an e-mail. The goal of this exercise is not to give people a script to read from. It’s to provide guidance on the key messages they should convey and what they should keep to themselves, if asked, so the rest of the organization gets a consistent picture of what went on. After a recent strategy meeting of the top 30 executives at a major technology company, for example, the group decided on these communication points:

• This was not a one-time event but rather the beginning of this group coming together as a senior leadership team.
• We talked about our strategy, which is to build a collection of great businesses in strong categories.
• We agreed that each business should focus on driving its own growth, but where it makes sense, units and functions should leverage each other’s best practices and capabilities. We captured some ideas for how to start doing this and talked about opportunities for leaders to grow and take on new boundary-spanning roles.

Gather session feedback.

Especially if your group will meet regularly, ask attendees for feedback on the session while it’s fresh in their minds. This is an often-missed opportunity to learn what people liked and what they would change. Instead of asking a broad question like “What feedback do you have?” which often yields equally vague and unhelpful responses, break the discussion into what we call “roses” (positives) and “thorns” (negatives). Start with the latter. Tell attendees to think about everything they have received or done related to the meeting from the time they were invited right through the review, including any pre-reads or prework and aspects of the meeting itself (such as location and use of time). Then ask, “What could be improved?” Avoid debating the suggestions raised, but do ask questions to clarify what’s being said. Finally, turn to roses. Ask the group, “What went well? What should we be sure to do again in the future?” Combined with the recap of decisions, next steps, and talking points, this last discussion helps you end the session on a positive note.

When you embed a regular post-meeting debrief that incorporates these three elements into your meetings, you’ll help your team dramatically improve its play.

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Bob Frisch is the managing partner of the Strategic Offsites Group, a Boston-based consultancy, and is the author of Who’s In The Room? How Great Leaders Structure and Manage the Teams Around Them (Jossey-Bass, 2012). He is the author of four Harvard Business Review articles, including “Off-Sites That Work” (June 2006). Cary Greene is a partner of the Strategic Offsites Group. They are coauthors of Simple Sabotage: A Modern Field Manual for Detecting & Rooting Out Everyday Behaviors That Undermine Your Workplace (HarperOne, 2015) and are frequent contributors to hbr.org.

Adapted from content posted on hbr.org on April 26, 2016.