Steps for successful meetings – Step 5: Introduce the meeting using TPO

Hi, we are looking at the 15 steps to run successful meetings, and this video is about step number 5. Introduce your meeting using TPO: the topic, the purpose, and the output. Now, when you do this, it helps focus the audience. It provides direction, and it makes sure we're all on the same page. When you start a meeting, when you're introducing the meeting, everybody is coming from something else. They're coming from another meeting. They're coming from doing a very specific piece of work. Maybe they've just started the day. In all those cases, their thoughts are on all sorts of different topics. And what you want to do at the start of your meeting is focus the audience, provide direction so they know where they're going, they know what they're going to achieve— that's the output— and you make sure that everybody is all on the same page when you start. And this is easy to do when you use topic, purpose, and output. If you're not familiar with topic, purpose, and output, go back and watch the previous steps in this series and you'll understand exactly what I mean. Now, if you don't do this, if you don't introduce your meeting using topic, purpose, and output, you're going to have, unsurprisingly, a lack of focus. There'll be confusion from the people in the room. Why are we here? What are we doing? What's the thing we're going to produce, if anything at all? Are we just here to have a chat? And you run the risk of getting no output. You want an output from your meeting. You want there to be something at the end that you have achieved and produced. And if you don't introduce your meeting by telling people, here's what we're talking about, here's why we're talking about it, and here's what we're going to produce at the end, you really run the risk of having no output at the end. So how do you do it? How do you start your, your meeting using topic, purpose, and output? Well, the hands down the easiest way to do this is to read the invitation. In step 4, we talked about writing a good invitation that included the topic, the purpose, and the output. If you have done that, you can start your meeting by literally reading it, and it's very, very simple. It also means you don't have to prepare some grand elaborate speech. You don't have to come up with something new. You just have to reread the information that you've already written down and shared with participants. As an example, I'm not going to go into a lot of detail, but as an example, you could say, hi everyone, welcome to today's Wednesday afternoon meeting, or whatever day it is when you happen to be, wherever you happen to be. Today's Wednesday afternoon meeting, and today we're going to talk about this thing. The reason we're talking about this is we want to do this, do X, Y, and Z, achieve this, make a decision, come up with a list of ideas, and so on. And by the end of today's session, we will have this particular output. By reading your invitation, you're going to make it easier for you to start the meeting. You don't have to remember anything. You can literally read from the page and you'll avoid those issues I mentioned earlier. You'll help everybody be on the same page. So if you want to run successful meetings, make sure that you follow and don't skip step number 5. Introduce your meeting using the topic, the purpose, and the output.