As a leader in any organizations, you have meetings. You’re probably responsible for your fair share of those meetings. Your job relies on communication as a leader, and you are out there pushing to communicate using all the means at your disposal (please tell me you’re not just relying on e-mail). If your organization falls into the fat part of the bell curve, your team hates your meetings.

Let’s start with the meeting request. Before you schedule a meeting, are you clear about what you want to accomplish with the meeting and do you communicate it to everyone you invite? Without a clear goal, your team is attending your meeting because of your authority not because they care about the objective of the meeting. They’ll come unprepared and maybe late, because something else they’re doing is more important than a nebulous subject like “Tech project update”.

Once the meeting time comes, do you actually start on time? For those folks who have shown up when you invited them, are you respecting their time by starting - or are you waiting for everyone to show up and penalizing the prompt people by wasting the first ten minutes? I’ve been in organizations that have meetings start a full 30 minutes after the scheduled time when the most senior people finally show up.

During the meeting, are you clear about the topics that need to be covered over the time you scheduled? You scheduled an hour and started a little late to wait for everyone, so if you haven’t outlined what you want to cover in the remaining 50 minutes the meeting time wanders through the general subject. Are you accomplishing what you need to accomplish, and will you be done in time for folks to get to the next meeting on their schedule?

My friend Sam reminded me that so many of our meetings these days are with remote participants. Are you forgetting about the remote participants that are dialing in to your meeting? Are you making sure they don’t feel like second class attendees by including a dial-in, dialing in on-time and checking in with folks on the phone to be sure they can hear and are following the meeting? It’s more and more possible these days to use video conferencing to create a sense of presence in the room for these remote folks, work ahead of time to be sure you have the equipment ready to project their video and show folks in the room with a wide-angle camera.

As you try and accomplish something during the meeting, are you clear about what the various participants’ roles are? Is everyone in the room decision maker, or are some folks coming with recommendations? I’ve been in meetings where it seemed like everyone believed they were decision makers. I’ve also participated in meetings where there didn’t appear to be a decision maker in sight. In both circumstances, no decisions were made.

When the meeting finally ends, are you ending the meeting with confidence? Or are you ending it when you lose steam and people simply start leaving? I’ve seen meetings go on well past the end-time with no clear end in sight, and people just start leaving because they are very late for the next obligation. Are you ending the meeting by fixing responsibilities and decisions in order to be clear who is doing what by when?

Are you communicating key decisions to those who couldn’t make the meeting? One of your staff was home taking care of his sick child - do you send out the key decisions and action items to everyone who was invited? Are the folks who couldn’t make the meeting for a valid reason now left out in the cold because they have no way to know what happened?

Take a moment and consider one or two key things you can do to improve your meetings. It’s one of the three things that will set you apart. You’ll be shocked how much improved meetings can improve employee engagement and productivity. Stop wasting time and sucking the energy from your organization through ineffective meetings.