One Meeting Minute Thought for Your Week
To be the best leader for your team and business, you need to know how to end a meeting well.
You want people to leave each of your meetings knowing that being there was a good investment of their time.
These six tips will help you make sure that happens.
6 tips to end a meeting well
These six tips to end a meeting well are tools you can put in your toolkit and use when they’ll serve you best.
You may want to use them one at a time or you may combine them as you design each meeting you lead.
End a meeting:
✅ On-time or early
✅ With a communication plan
✅ Following an action item review
✅ By gathering feedback
✅ With positive energy
✅ Clearly
End a meeting: On-time or early
This tip for how to end a meeting is so obvious it shouldn’t need to be mentioned.
But, unfortunately, many meeting leaders consistently go past the scheduled end time.
This lack of discipline frustrates your employees and destroys the productivity of your business because of the ripple effect.
One meeting runs late then all the participants can’t arrive on time to the next activity on their schedule.
Some may be going to other meetings. They show up late which negatively impacts more people throughout the organization.
Or, the next thing on your schedule may be focused individual work time.
It might even be a personal commitment like lunch with your spouse or your daughter’s soccer game.
Whatever the next event on people’s schedules is it’s disrespected by a leader who lets their meeting go past the scheduled end time.
Even when they do it unintentional, this type of behavior communicates that they are more important than the people they’ve invited to their meeting.
That’s not the type of leader YOU are so end your meetings on time (or early!)
End a meeting: With a communication plan
A critical element required to end a meeting well is communication.
Before you end a meeting, clarify what you agreed to.
If you don’t intentionally take this step, the people in your meeting may THINK they’ve agreed on something but actually haven’t.
Their interpretations of the outcome of the meeting may differ and, as a result, each person’s actions may not align and deliver the intended results.
So pause before you end a meeting and communicate clearly with each other.
After you’ve reached agreement amongst yourselves, state your plan to communicate with the rest of the organization.
Ask yourself these 3 questions to create a simple communication plan before you end a meeting:
🔷 What is the message for our organization based on the outcome of this meeting?
🔷 What key points are we going to cascade throughout the organization?
🔷 What are we NOT going to say to those who were not here?
Patrick Lencioni writes more about this in his excellent book, The Advantage.
In the chapter titled, “Discipline 3: Overcommunicate Clarity” Lencioni describes how a thoughtful communication plan will prevent “Post-meeting Confusion” and organizational chaos.
It does take time to end a meeting by creating a communication plan, but the cost of not taking this step is often significant.
End a meeting: Following an action item review
When you’re creating your meeting agenda, be sure to include a few minutes to review the action items created during the meeting.
Meetings often get rushed at the end and it’s easy to skip this important step.
When you have the note taker in the meeting read the action items they’ve recorded, you introduce clarity and accountability.
This should be a quick exercise as you end a meeting IF you’ve been asking “Who needs to do what by when?” throughout the meeting and having someone take the official meeting notes.
You’ll also be prepared to start your next meeting by reviewing these documented action items.
End a meeting: By gathering feedback
The best meeting leaders are continually improving themselves and their meetings.
You can keep getting better by gathering feedback from those in your meetings.
There are many ways to get input as you end a meeting.
You can simply ask something like this:
“I have a quick question before we close our meeting today, “What’s one thing we could have done differently that would have made our time together more valuable for you?”
Or, you could have each participant do a quick survey (online or on a piece of paper in the conference room) to rate the meeting on a scale from 1 to 5.
If you use the meeting roster to create the survey form, you can follow up with participants later to have a conversation and learn from them.
Over time you and your meetings will continually improve when you do this as you end your meetings.
End a meeting: With positive energy
Always try to end a meeting with positive energy.
You want people to leave feeling empowered and ready to make a difference in your business.
Especially when the tone of the meeting has been focused and serious, you want to be intentional to energize your team when they’re feeling the weight of the work to be done.
And, you want them to recognize the value they’ve created for the business by investing their time in your meeting.
You can do this by reflecting on the meeting while also casting a vision of the future.
Here are some example scripts you can use to end a meeting on a positive note:
🔷 “I know we have a lot of work in front of us. I believe in you and trust you to get it done.”
🔷 “We made good progress during our time together. I’m glad we had this meeting.”
🔷 “Thank you for engaging and challenging one another today. The conflict we had was healthy and productive.”
🔷”The action plan we’ve outlined is solid and is exactly what we need to do to be successful. Great work, team!”
🔷 “The way you worked together during this meeting reminded me of how powerful we are as a group. I can’t wait to see the results of our combined efforts.”
Note how these phrases incorporate gratitude, affirmation, and encouragement.
As a meeting leader, you’ll energize your team and positively impact people’s lives when you end a meeting using this type of language.
End a meeting: Clearly
There’s nothing worse than thinking a meeting is over but not being sure.
So you sit there wondering, “Can I leave now?”
And waste your precious time.
When you’re the leader, end your meetings clearly.
Be explicit so everyone knows you’re done.
This is especially important when you have some people in a conference room and others connected remotely.
Say something like this:
“We’re closing our meeting now. You’re welcome to stay in the room or on the Teams meeting and continue your conversations, but we’re officially done.”
Or, you can use this simple phrase to end a meeting:
“Ready. Break.”
This 2-word phrase comes from football where players come together in a huddle to communicate the next play and then “break” the huddle to go run the play.
It’s a concise, energetic way to send the team out to “run the play” you’ve called during your meeting.
More Resources to Help You Build Your Career and Your Business
I referenced Patrick Lencioni’s book, “The Advantage – Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business” earlier.
This is an outstanding resource to help you learn how to lead a business and productive, effective meetings.
You may also want to explore some of my previous blog posts and podcasts related to these 6 tips to end a meeting well.
✅ How To Unlock The Power To Lead In A Role You Probably Don’t Like (Blog post)
✅ How To Lead A Meeting In A Way Most People Won’t Try (Podcast)
✅ Ask “Who Needs to Do What by When?” Drive Results! (Blog post)
✅ Why I Don’t Want to Ask “Who Needs to Do What by When?” (Blog post)
And Now a Word from Our Sponsors
If you or someone on your team is struggling to end meetings well (or maybe they’re having trouble starting and leading them too!), you may find my coaching services helpful.
Contact me (click here) and let me know what you’re struggling with.
I’d love to have a conversation to see how I can help you have productive, effective meetings to support your business objectives and achieve success.
That’s All for this Issue
I’ll end this by giving you a glimpse into how my brain and writing process works.
When I started writing this I thought it might be good to incorporate the phrase “all’s well that ends well.”
But then I did some research on what that idiom means.
Here’s what I found on Merriam-Webster’s website:
“Used to say that a person can forget about how unpleasant or difficult something was because everything ended in a good way.”
Clearly, that’s NOT what I was trying to say about why you should end a meeting well!
I know you don’t lead meetings that are “unpleasant and difficult” so you don’t need to end them well just to make the pain seem worth it.
Good thing I dug a little deeper before I dropped in an “all’s well that ends well” reference!
Let’s lead with kindness and confidence!
Greg
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