I love meetings!
Confession time – I love meetings. When they’re meticulously planned, demanding, collaborative, and productive, what’s not to love? When you’re facing a daunting task, one expertly facilitated meeting with the right colleagues can be a game changer. And there’s little that’s more energizing (thrilling even!) than accomplishing something together that would have been impossible alone.
I can say without hesitation or exaggeration that meeting agenda templates are among the most powerful resources in my toolkit.
Yes... I also hate them.
I also hate meetings. And I’m guessing I’m not alone. When meetings are poorly planned or lack clear objectives, they are frustrating, counter-productive, and costly uses of time.
Truthfully, I’ve facilitated some inspiring meetings during my career and some terribly demoralizing ones. In my experience, the most accurate predictor of whether a meeting will be a success or a failure is the quality (not quantity) of the work done to prepare.
As school leaders, many of us understand the importance of preparation. Many of us also feel we lack the time we need to prepare for every event as thoroughly as we’d like. Over the years, I’ve built a number of meeting agenda templates that have helped me to prepare very effectively for meetings even when I’m stretched thin.
The first template is one that I use for a type of meeting that is almost certainly in the weekly schedule of every school leader – I call it the “triage meeting.”
triage (n.): "the assigning of priority
order to projects..."
You know you’re in a “triage meeting” when the agenda:
- centers on problems or issues,
- includes more items than you can address in the time available, and
- includes items that are almost all of importance.
The triage meeting I participate in weekly in my current role occurs each Friday for 90 minutes. That is when the high school principal, the other deputy principal, and I meet to talk through our school’s most pressing issues. I’m guessing most school leaders have similar recurring meeting structures.
What do I suggest?
Over the years, I’ve learned a few things about making these triage meetings as productive as possible. A few suggestions:
Share Responsibility
Give all team members responsibility for adding to the agenda and ask that items are added at least 24 hours in advance whenever possible. This will give team members a chance to reflect prior to the meeting on what colleagues have added, which will save you valuable time during the meeting.
Remember – this is a “whenever possible” expectation, not a hard-and-fast rule. As we all know, situations arise last minute in schools that really could not have been foreseen.
Prioritize
As agenda items are added, have each team member label the item with its level of urgency.
Remember that it is common to have more items to discuss than time available. You’re not going to get through everything, so this will help you prioritize.
What our team does is scan the list for items marked “Urgent,” and we work through those first. Then as time allows, we go after items marked “High Priority” and finally (if we’re lucky) get to stuff marked “Low Priority.”
Want to try this out?
LIFTeducation’s triage meeting template is available for public use. It’s lightweight and easy-to-use. Give it a shot, and feel free to let us know if you have questions.