Every meeting needs a five-minute wrap-up to avoid running late and leaving unclear next steps. Ask four questions: Did we achieve the purpose? Did we produce the output? What's still outstanding? What happens next? Five minutes of clarity beats a messy ending.
Chapters
Welcome to the 15 Steps for Successful Meetings series. This is step number 12: have a 5-minute wrap-up. What this means is allow enough time to end the meeting properly. I'm pretty sure most of us have been in meetings that get to the very end and the person leading it says, oh, we've got 1 minute left, and let me quickly wrap up and summarize what we've done and talk about next steps. And there's no way that that can fit into 1 minute or 30 seconds. And when that happens, there's a lot of impacts not only to you, but to the meeting and to the other people that are in it. So don't rush at the end. Do make sure that you allow for a full 5-minute wrap-up. Now, if you don't do this, what happens? Well, first of all, you're going to end late. If you don't allow enough time for a proper wrap-up, you're going to finish your meeting late. You're Possibly going to have an incomplete output. Because you're rushing to the end of the meeting, it's unlikely you've really had enough time to finish what you were intending. The next steps will be unclear, even if they've been identified throughout the meeting. Without that wrap-up, it's a pretty good bet that some people are going to leave that session without knowing what the next steps are because they haven't been summarized at the end. There's also no follow-up. Because you rush to the end of the meeting, you don't have the chance to set up what those next steps and follow-up actions will be. And, and this is a really important personal one, you can damage your reputation. Why does it damage your reputation? Well, if you are late, you can make other people late. You can make— have impacts on the next meeting that's happening after yours, and people will think that you're not good at time management. All of those things and more It will damage your reputation if you don't allow for and plan for a 5-minute wrap-up. So how do you do it? Well, what you're doing at the end, other than keeping an eye on the time to make sure you have 5 minutes, you're summarizing the meeting. In your final 5 minutes, you're answering these 4 questions. Did you achieve the purpose? Did you get the output? Sometimes getting the output delivers the purpose. Sometimes you may have achieved the purpose but changed what the output was. Remember those earlier steps where you can change the output of the meeting if it's relevant? Well, you're going to address those in these first 2 parts of your summary. You're also going to recap any questions that need to be answered, any actions that people are going to take, and any decisions that were either made or need to be made soon. And finally, you will state the next steps. If you do this, you bring your meeting to a close and everybody knows that they succeeded or not, that we produced the output that was needed or not. And in both cases, whether you produced what you needed or didn't, there are going to be actions and next steps. And there may have been questions that either were important and were answered or need to be answered soon. All of that gets wrapped up by saying what is going to happen next. The end of the meeting is very rarely the end of the topic. So allow 5 minutes for the end of your meeting so you can properly give a summary of each of these things. And that is how you end a meeting really well. And this is step 12 in the process. Allow for that 5-minute wrap-up.
