How often do you show up to a meeting and no one is prepared? That may even include you.

“You cannot underestimate the importance of preparation.” - Ray Mears, UK survivalist

Many seasoned professionals know their discipline and their client work and therefore may show up to meetings without significant pre-work. What’s the problem in that?

They know their team, the work, the clients. It’s easy enough to say:

Job done, right?

If that’s your answer, your meeting prep is all wrong. Why? You’re too close to the work you or your team have been responsible for. The meeting participants will not have the same context or framing as you. Showing up to a meeting like this means you need to set the context or framing in the meeting.

Don’t worry. There's an easy way to fix this. And, you’ve likely even come across or used it.

What is it? A meeting agenda.

This simple tool is the most effective way to prepare for a meeting. Meetings are costly exercises as valuable time is committed by all participants from clients, partners, and team members.

Committing an agenda to a meeting means 3 key things:

A meeting agenda is not only productive in evaluating whether the meeting is needed. It’s an act of respect and intention. Time is money: an ineffective meeting is disrespectful to individuals and businesses.

At Connect4, we’ve used the feedback from customers and meeting participants to make agendas the starting point of our “Prepare. Meet. Act” framework. Over thousands of meetings, these are the key components of agendas that you can embrace:

Let’s break these down a bit.

Reference past meeting notes and agendas to make sure you do not cover the same conversation. Not only is this immensely boring, it looks bad.

Don’t remember what you talked about? Time to invest in taking smart meeting notes that are digital and referenceable. This may be accomplished by taking clif notes in a meeting then sharing via email with all participants. This will bring the notes into shared internal systems such as Practice Management software or CRM. Alternatively, systems like Connect4 can be used to take notes live in the meeting or post to both share via an email summary as well as set history for reference 24/7 by participants.

Every meeting has agreed next steps. Turn those next steps into actions or tasks for the right person to complete.

When setting the agenda, revisit what was agreed by checking meeting notes, follow-up conversations or, for those enabled organisations, collaborative working systems such as practice management Karbon.

“Ensure actions set in every client meeting are seamlessly integrated into your team’s Karbon workflow and client work delivery.”

Gone are the days of static, printed agendas in a boardroom. Not only is a smart agenda more environmentally friendly, the text of agendas can be used to point people to the required data to share knowledge.

Add URL links into the agenda’s text to easily direct people into shared resources for data or report review. An example of this is providing links to software platforms such as financial forecasting and data analytics tool, Syft Analytics.

“Data visualizations that help you bring your insights to life. Explore the whole picture across every aspect of your business so you know what to focus on.”

Smart agendas also make it easy to share the agenda once sent. Leverage technology to share the agenda allowing a respectful time to prepare.

The act of sharing smart agendas also allows participants to suggest talking points from their own work. Leverage technology to make agendas collaborative and living.

Changing your framing to the meeting participants takes a bit of practice. Now that you’ve had a read, why not try incorporating these 3 steps into preparations for your next meeting?

Whether your meeting is internal with a working group or external with a client, here’s a bit of a challenge to try out for fit:

We’re confident that you’ll find the preparation taken will not only show off the impact of your team and organisation’s work, but the power of your leadership in a meeting. And, in no time, you’ll have an amazing process to rinse and repeat with all your high impact meetings.

Practice makes prepared.

Sarah Broderick

Sarah is now the Head of Strategy at Marshall Group. She was previously the COO at Connect4, where she led the commercial teams to GSD and delivers more for customers. During 15 years of client-facing roles in software and financial services, she's become passionate about creating client transparency through consistent, humanised interactions as the key to building strong business relationships.