When a meeting covers multiple topics, repeat steps 5 through 10 for each one: introduce it, verify relevance, define the output, allocate time, track progress, and give updates. Plan your time breakdown before the meeting and adjust as needed. Skip this step if you have only one topic.
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Welcome to the 15 Steps for Successful Meetings series. This is step number 11. If you have multiple topics, then repeat steps 5 through 10. Now, to tell you what I mean is if you have a single topic meeting, there is only one main topic that you're covering, then you can skip this step. You can jump straight to step 12. So stop this video and go to the next one. However, at some point you're going to have a multi-topic meeting, in which case, if you have a multi-topic meeting, then repeat steps 5 to 10 out of these 15 steps in the process. As a reminder, here are steps 5 through 10, and I've left 11 down here because that's the one we're talking about right now. All of the steps are valid for each of the topics that you have in a multi-topic meeting. You still need to introduce each topic. At the beginning of the meeting, you're going to introduce the overall meeting, and your meeting may have 3, 4, or more topics in it. Then you'll go through topic 1, and when you get to the end of topic 1, you're going to introduce topic number 2 and check with the attendees that that topic is still valid and relevant for the people in the room, the time available, and whatever is deemed to be important. You may have found something in the first one or more topics that you've covered, which means the topic you're about to begin is no longer relevant or should change in priority. So always check with the attendees. And as you work through the topic, you want to maintain the focus on the output, measure the progress towards producing that output for that particular topic, adjust as you need to, and give time updates so that you can continue being successful in producing the outputs. Now, on this one, on the time updates, time and progress measurement must be relative. What I mean by that is when you have one topic, the time and progress is the entire duration of the meeting. When you have multiple topics, your meeting is subdivided into smaller sections. That means you're going to be spending smaller amounts of time on each topic. Maybe it's 5 minutes per topic, maybe one topic has half an hour and 5 other topics have 5 minutes each. Whatever it is, it's going to be relative to the time that's been defined for that meeting. Now, to make sure that you get the best out of your entire meeting, plan the time breakdown before the meeting starts. Know what the outputs are. Think about how much time you're going to need to produce that output in the meeting. There's no point putting 5 topics in a 1-hour meeting if each topic requires 15 to 20 minutes. You just can't squeeze that amount of time into the hour. So plan the breakdown before the meeting starts. And if you're not sure how long a topic will take because maybe someone else is leading it, talk to that person and make sure you both have a clear understanding of how much time is really needed to achieve the output that you have to and want to get. And when you've done that, repeat all the steps for each topic, purpose, and output. The more topics you have in the meeting, the more times you will run through this cycle. And that is step 11. If you have multiple topics, repeat steps 5 through 10 in this process.
