More Dialogue, Less Lecture

Thoughtfully create your meeting agenda and make sure it includes only items that need to be discussed or decided upon by your team. I’ve been guilty of this myself — it’s really, really easy to just throw everything into your agenda, things that you just want to communicate out to people or just share information, give updates and so forth. But if you use it just as a one wave mode of communication (where you’re just the one sharing) that’s an easy way for your audience or your team to tune out and start to multitask or not pay attention in the session.

A way to prevent this from happening is to make sure that if you have anything that can just be shared one way, you either can write it down and send it out ahead of time (then just have people come ready to discuss), or what I’ve started to do because I still find it sometimes easier to talk through than it is to share, is record myself. So my team has to listen to videos of me talking like this to give updates, and then when they come to the meeting, they can just be ready to discuss the things that were shared ahead of time.