Steps for successful meetings – Step 4: Write a great invitation

Hi and welcome to the 15 Steps to Run Successful Meetings series. Gosh, that is a bit of a mouthful to say. Let's take a look at step number 4: write a great invitation. Now, successful meetings start with good invitations. How do I know this? Well, I bet if you think back to any time where you've received a blank meeting invitation— have you ever received a blank one or one with very little information in it? How good was that? How helpful was it? Did you feel prepared and informed before the meeting? Could you tell why you were invited or what you were expected to produce? Or were you guessing? Or was it a complete unknown and you thought, well, I guess I'll find out when I get to the meeting. If you've had any of those thoughts, that should tell you right away why writing a good invitation is important and why successful meetings start with good invitations. Now, if you don't write a good invitation, what happens? Does it really matter? Well, there are some consequences. You'll have poor attendance, confusion, frustration, wasted time, and overall a less effective meeting. Why do you get poor attendance? Because if you have a blank or very poorly written invite, people can't tell why they need to be there. And if they have a conflict, so 2 meetings happening at the same time, and they don't know what yours is about, They might well choose the other one because they do understand what it's about. So you could get really poor attendance. And some people just say, oh, if the meeting's invite is blank, I'm just not going. There can be confusion. If your invitation isn't clear for what the meeting is about, people might come into it expecting something different from what you want to do in that time. And that is frustrating. And all of that leads to wasted time. If you don't have the right people or they're not prepared or they're not in the right mindset to deliver what you need, That's wasted time, possibly going to need yet another meeting. And all of this, of course, adds up to just a less effective meeting overall. And we don't want to be less effective. We want to be really effective in our jobs. So now you know why you should write a good invite. How do you do it? Well, as has become quite obvious throughout this series, if you've watched the first few steps, it all comes down to topic, purpose, and output. When you write your meeting invitation, here's a nice one from Outlook, a very standard email or meeting invitation. You put the topic and purpose in the subject line. What is the thing we're going to be talking about and why are we gathering in this meeting? And then you put short descriptions for the purpose and the output in the body of the invitation. So you tell people, what are we going to talk about? Why have we gathered? And what is the thing we're going to produce at at the end? What is that output that we will leave with? Now, let's take a look at an example. Now, I'm going to do this with words on the screen instead of an image because it's a little bit easier to read. But if the subject line for the invitation I'm sending is Project Everest: Identifying People to Work on It, if you received that, you'd know that I wanted to talk to you about Project Everest. That may or may not mean anything to you, but you know that we're then going to be identifying people to work on this particular project. Just from the subject line of the invite. And then in the meeting invitation, I'd say the purpose is to identify people to work on the new project, and by the end, the output is a list of names for key project roles. Now, these are 2 sentences. They're very, very short sentences. It's not a huge amount of writing. We're not doing loads of paragraphs in there, but with 2 very simple sentences, you or anybody else could see Well, I'm— this is why we're being brought together in this meeting, and this is the output that we're going to produce. It's very clear what that meeting is about. And if you got this invite, you'd be better prepared than if you got one that was blank or one that just had a couple of words in it. So if you want to run successful meetings in your work, make sure you don't skip step number 4, which is write a great invitation.