Running Effective Meetings: The Developer Mindset

Being able to run effective meetings is a critical part of management. This is especially true for senior management. You need to create meetings that accomplish their objectives and help to keep the company moving forward. You need to create meetings that work.

Over the past few posts, we’ve discussed the importance of mindset in meetings. You need to bring the right mindset coming into the meeting, and you need to foster the right mindset among your meeting participants.

Prisoner, Vacationer and Critic

Some mindsets actively work against having meetings that work:

• Prisoner. When you attend a meeting with a prisoner mindset, you feel trapped. Instead of doing your “real” work, you’re stuck in a useless meeting. It’s no wonder these meetings aren’t productive; you fully expect them to be a waste of time, so they are exactly that.
• Vacationer. The vacationer mindset sees meetings as time away from the daily grind. Meeting attendees with this mindset are likely to tune out and neither contribute to nor benefit from meetings.
• Critic. Someone attending a meeting with a critic mindset sees meetings as an opportunity to display their superior knowledge. They believe they’ve already solved all the problems the meeting intends to address, and will demonstrate their own knowledge.

In this post, we’ll examine a fourth mindset: the developer. This is the ideal mindset for having productive meetings that work.

The Developer Mindset

Having a developer mindset is all about making a decision. Developers enter meetings with intention. For most people, this is the only mindset that’s a conscious choice. The other mindsets are incidental to the meeting; they are merely an accidental byproduct of habit and personality.

Most industries have entire departments devoted to development and research. It’s the development mindset that drives progress and makes businesses work. You choose to bring the developer mindset to your meetings.

The developer mindset is powerful and productive. Meeting attendees with a developer mindset understand that business is a process. One step at a time, one decision at a time, a business will either grow or it will stagnate. Developers actively work for the former.

Developing an effective approach to meetings

There are a handful of attitudes you choose to adapt if you’re going to have a developer mindset:

• A willingness to build. Is your organization already at its pinnacle? If you answer “yes” to this question, chances are you’re actually in decline. Every business has room for improvement. Even if you’re a market leader, there are always more ways to grow your success. Effective meetings are a key component to this type of growth, but it will never happen if you don’t enter meetings with the intention of creating beneficial outcomes.
• Openness to other ideas. Collaboration is essential to success. Learning to truly listen to the ideas of others, even to the point of setting aside your own ideas for a moment, is a necessity for an effective meeting.
• Positivity. You’ve often heard it said, “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.” If you choose to create an expectation of positive progress from every meeting, you might be surprised at how effective those meetings can be.
• Curiosity. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but curiosity is the father. Getting the right answers starts with asking questions. Meetings can be a place where new ideas are born and where new frontiers are explored. Some of your most productive meetings will begin with the words, “What if?”

Developing these attitudes and bringing them to your meetings with you will help foster creativity and development among your team both during the meetings and afterward.

Marcus Coaching’s BusinessLife skill: Running effective meetings

Along with examining meeting mindsets this months, we’re also exploring one of Marcus Coaching’s essential BusinessLife’s skills: running effective meetings, and how that BusinessLife skill can exponentially increase the effectiveness of your meetings.

We’ve looked at principles such as understanding the purpose for each meeting and having a result clearly in mind.

Today, as we think about the developer mindset, we add a couple of important principles:

• When you enter a meeting, know what result you want to get, and what you’re willing to bring that helps bring about that result.
• Express the meeting’s intended purpose to the attendees, and clearly state what you expect from them. This allows them to attend the meeting prepared.
• During and outside of meetings, choose to take ownership in your development, whether that applies to the business, the project or of the idea.
• Set an agenda for the meeting. This should include time limits for the various agenda items in order to maximize the effectiveness of the meeting and to respect everyone’s time. If someone is late, don’t wait for them, and don’t spend time to recap what he missed. Respect everyone’s time, and expect the meeting’s time to be respected.

A meeting mindset that will change your entire organization

When you choose to take charge of your own mindset, you can change your entire organization. In many instances, all it takes is the example of leadership for your employees to do the same. A developer mindset can be contagious, and when it spreads throughout your organization it will dramatically increase the effectiveness of meetings.

That said, remember that your meeting mindset is your choice. You choose to enter meetings in an intentional way, believing that the meeting can create a positive outcome and contribute to the business’ overall objectives and success.

Choosing to run effective meetings

Just to review, there are a few key components to running effective meetings:

• Create clear goals for the meeting.
• Develop an agenda and circulate it prior to the meeting.
• Encourage participation from the start to help make sure everyone has a stake in the meeting’s success.
• After the meeting, evaluate its effectiveness.
• Circulate a meeting summary that highlights new information and decisions.

Each of these is essential to making meetings effective.

Time to show up prepared

Now that we’ve explored the various meeting mindsets, it’s time for some introspection. Be honest with yourself: are you showing up to meetings as a prisoner, a vacationer, a critic or a developer?