Mastering Productive Meetings: Elevate Your Skills with Our Free Training Program!
Meeting Excellence 101: A Step-by-Step Training Program to Productive Meetings— Start Now!
Meetings have become essential for any role, and having strong skills and understanding how to best run productive meetings can help you improve how you work, save you time, enhance your relationships with coworkers and how they perceive you, improve your output, and even access more and better career opportunities.
This skill is not just about being able to share a good story (storytelling) or creating a good presentation/deck; what makes a meeting productive is the ability of the person leading the meeting to achieve the meeting objectives efficiently. In other words, having one meeting to accomplish the objective and making decisions during that meeting is better than having two meetings to discuss the same thing and still needing to chat on Slack about it for a week.
However, even facilitating meetings is a key skill; the majority of us haven’t been trained to be good at it, so we often make the same mistakes everyone makes because we have learn by mimicking our leaders.
So we often make these mistakes:
- We tend to start the meeting by sharing the agenda but don’t often share or clarify what the objective of the meeting is.
- We often share information (proposals, designs, strategies, updates…) and ask people to ask questions or raise their hands if they have any additional comments.
“Do you have any questions or comments?”
This is very similar to what we have seen in our school. The teacher shares information, and people have a chance to ask questions. It also follows traditional organizational hierarchy — where “the boss” used to be the one making decisions. So he/she would be presenting and then just letting everyone else ask questions.
This traditional way to lead meetings ….are just not aligned with the way we work anymore. Especially for knowledge workers and specialists, where each person (or stakeholder) in the meeting is there because they bring certain knowledge, perspectives, ideas, etc., to the table. So what you want is to leverage that!
To help organizations and teams have access to a training course that anyone can watch to improve their facilitation skills, our team has decided to start a training course on YouTube.
We wanted to make it accessible to everyone and ensure individuals and teams can use it to train their teams and ensure they have the basic skills to lead productive meetings. So this post can be shared with your team, or you can copy the links from the videos and make your own onboarding or training course for your team.
First here is what you can find…
The Training Program
Intro
Run Productive Meetings
- What to Do and What Not to Do During Meetings.
- How to Run a Productive Meeting.
- How to Run a Productive Meeting — A Practical Framework That Your Team will Remember. The OFQ Meeting Framework.
- How to Encourage Your Team to Get Better? They can Ask for Feedback Like This! Learn About PI Meetings.
Move your meetings Async. Less meetings, more productivity: Get things done!
- What Meetings Can You Move Async?
- How to Move Your Informative Meetings Async?
- How Can You Move 30%-60% of Your Meetings Async?
Facilitation Skills & Tools.
We’ll add additional videos in a few months.
Let’s go over some of these…
What Meetings Reveal About Your Productivity and Organizational Health.
Meetings are a little bit like a thermometer.
Meetings really help you get a good understanding of your organization’s health, how productive your team is, and also how they could be feeling.
It’s very easy to identify if a company will have problems scaling or if people are burnt out, or even if managers do not really have a good way to delegate work and manage their team. In this educational video, we share with you how to interpret what your calendar full of meetings is telling you.
It should also help you get a basic understanding of what those meetings are a symptom of. We try to explain this in simple terms and without going over too much complexity. Our goal is for you to be able to start thinking about which areas you think you have to improve. Or maybe this ends up inspiring you to send a team survey or even cancel a few of your meetings. Take a look.
What to Do and What not to Do during Meetings.
This is a fantastic video, and we also have a blog post that walks you through some of the details. In here, we try to show you some of the typical mistakes we make during meetings and some of the things we should be doing instead. We also show you how the same mistakes are made even if you are running an asynchronous meeting.
Are you doing any of these things?
How to Run a Productive Meeting.
Time to start improving!
Learn about how you can run a productive meeting and discover some of the key tips that will help you get better immediately.
How to Run a Productive Meeting — A Practical Framework That Your Team will Remember.
The OFQ Meeting Framework.
This is a continuation of the previous training session.
In here we wanted to give you an easy and actionable framework that you and your team can use and remember. We want to make sure that you can prepare your meetings and remember these 3 things you have to do to ensure your meeting is productive.
Yeah, just 3 things!
We also show you how you can find templates and tools inside Nova (this is useful for all our users).
How to Encourage Your Team to Get Better? They can Ask for Feedback Like This!
Learn About PI Meetings.
Are you trying to get better at leading meetings? Do you know someone that may need to improve some of their skills? Or maybe you want to encourage your team to always be better.
Continuous improvement is always important, so here is a framework that will help your team prepare a good meeting and also get some feedback so that they — or you — can keep improving. The framework is known as PI meetings and you can also find tools and templates at Nova (if you are a user).
What Meetings Can You Move Async?
One of the key ways for you to increase productivity and get more time to get things done is not depending so much on meetings for collaboration and decision-making, and moving some of your meetings asynchronously.
But…
What meetings should you move async?
Which ones tend to be easy to move?
Which ones tend to be more difficult?
Discover that in this video.
How to Move Your Informative Meetings Async?
This is the continuation of the previous video. In here we share with you how you can move your informative meetings asynchronously because these meetings tend to be quite easy to move to asynchronous formats. So it’s a good way to start. You only need a tool like Loom or some video recording platform.
In the video, we also show you how you can track who has read the information or watched your video so you have the certainty that they are informed. We show you how you can do that with a tool like Nova (for our users) but you can use your own tool.
How Can You Move 30%-60% of Your Meetings Async?
If you got here, you are almost done with our basic training.
In here we walk you through the best way to move your meetings asynchronously. Not only informative meetings but all types of meetings.
The Art of Asking Powerful Questions During Meetings.
In some of our training videos and blog posts, we mention the importance of asking good questions during meetings. In fact, we, at Nova, believe that this is essential for any productive meeting, so we wanted to share some resources with you.
Our blog provides a list of sample questions and if you are a Nova user you have a card deck available there.
In conclusion, mastering the art of leading productive meetings is not just a skill; it’s a transformative journey that can reshape the way you work and interact within your team. Our comprehensive training program is designed to empower you with the tools, insights, and practical frameworks needed to turn every meeting into a powerhouse of productivity.
We’ve crafted a series of engaging videos. Each video is packed with actionable tips and a wealth of knowledge to help you not only identify areas for improvement but also implement lasting changes.
But our journey doesn’t end here — it’s just the beginning.
We encourage you to dive into these videos with an open mind and a readiness to enhance your facilitation skills. Watch, learn, and absorb the strategies we share to make your meetings more purposeful, efficient, and impactful.
All tips shared during our videos can be implemented wether you are a Nova user or not.
Here’s where you come in:
We value your thoughts, experiences, and questions.
After watching each video, take a moment to leave a comment. Share your insights, challenges, or any aha moments you’ve experienced. Let’s build a community of leaders committed to continuous improvement — so that we can keep providing good learning resources.
Moreover, if you find the content valuable, don’t keep it to yourself! Share the videos with your team, colleagues, and anyone you believe can benefit from mastering the art of leading productive meetings. Together, let’s create a ripple effect of positive change within organizations.
Lastly, if you have specific topics or questions you’d like us to cover in future videos, drop them in the comments section. Your input guides our content, ensuring it remains relevant and impactful for you and our growing community.
Thank you for joining us on this journey! Let’s make every meeting count, and together, we’ll redefine productivity in the modern workplace. Watch, comment, share — let the meeting mastery begin!
The Nova Team.