Chris Fenning explains how announcing elapsed time during meetings keeps the group focused and self-regulating. Call out time at the quarter, half, and three-quarter marks, then ask for progress feedback. When people know how much time remains, they push harder toward the output instead of the facilitator carrying all the momentum.
Hi and welcome to the 15 Steps for Successful Meetings series. This is step number 10. Give time updates throughout the meeting. Give the people who are in it updates on the progress of time, because better time awareness means better meetings. Why? Well, the group will self-regulate. The group, when they're aware of the passage of time, will have more focus. They'll think, oh, we're only halfway through. We better focus to get the output that we want. It's easier to facilitate because the group will help. When people know how much time there is, some people within that group will start helping move the conversation on to deliver the output that you need. And that all means you make better progress. So there are some pretty strong reasons to keep track of the time. Now, if you don't do this, you're gonna have a couple of problems. One, progress tends to slow down. Time moves faster than we think, particularly if we're really involved in a detailed discussion. So the progress towards your output will slow down and you end up facilitating alone. You will become solely responsible for pushing the progress towards that output, whereas when everybody's aware of the time, they will help get what you want done because they'll be more aware that time is ticking by. So how do you do this? How do you give time updates throughout a meeting? Well, there's a 3-step process you can do that's pretty simple. First of all, keep an eye on the time. If you're not aware of the time during your meeting, how can you expect your participants to be? So you need to keep an eye on the time. That doesn't mean looking at your watch or a clock every minute, but it does mean repeatedly glancing at the time to make sure that you know when 5, 10, 15, 20 minutes have gone by. The second thing is give updates at key milestones. These are the quarter, half, three-quarters of the way through your meeting. It doesn't matter how long your meeting is, you should know what a quarter, half, and three-quarters of the way through are. And then you can let people know, hey folks, we're a quarter of the way through the meeting, just want to make sure we're all aware of the time. And the third thing is ask for progress feedback. This is not you delivering a time update, this is you asking the group to To self-check on the progress towards the output, and part of that is checking against the time. So by asking them for a progress update, you're able to talk about time and give a sort of a status time progress update without seeming like you're really rigidly measuring and controlling everyone by the clock. Let's take a look at an example. You could be in a meeting, and the points at which you give those time updates are a quarter, half, and 3 quarters of the way through. And this is the kind of update you could give. You could Hey everyone, we're halfway through the time in this meeting. Do you feel that we're halfway towards the output that we want? It's a really simple question, but it helps everyone in the room sort of stop, pause for a moment, check where they are with what they're trying to produce, check where they are with the time, and give you their feedback on whether or not your meeting is successfully moving forwards towards that output. It's a time check, but without specifically saying it is now 7 minutes past 11 and we should be further along. It's a very inclusive way to give a time check and help people facilitate the meeting along with you. So when you are having successful meetings, make sure you follow step 10, give time updates.
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