How You Can Lead an Effective Meeting with
Better Questions
Harnessing the value of group interactions

Raising Awareness in Your Meetings

How do you turn an ineffective meeting on its head to ensure everyone’s time is well used?  Regardless of what type of meeting you are having, be it a conference, strategic meeting or smaller in-house meeting there are strategies which can help you improve the return you get for the investment you make.

In every meeting, ideas are shared and issues are discussed before solutions and actions can be found. This is what we call the Awareness stage of a meeting.

At this point, your meeting can take advantage of the diverse knowledge and perspectives of the group.  If not, the meeting will likely produce disengagement and inadequate solutions. You may well have experienced a meeting where you knew the decisions were destined to fail. 

Four Classic Meeting Flaws

Let’s look at four classic meeting flaws and how to correct them with one powerful tool.

1. Talk festivals -  too much time is spent discussing and debating” the issues, (often with no structure or focus) without reaching a solution.
2. Death by a thousand bytes - People are blasted with a Google’s worth of data and updates, with no space in the agenda to absorb, apply and act on any of it.
3. Mono derail - One or two strong personalities dominate the input at the exclusion of all others, creating a biased perspective and lack of involvement.
4. Premature activation - people try and solve the problem prematurely without taking enough time to consider the context and issues at hand.

The Solution – Asking Strategic Questions

An effective meeting conversation is created by the quality of the frames around the discussion.  Too often, information sharing is initiated by low quality questions which lack focus and intent.

These are real examples of questions we have heard in meetings (hint: these aren't very powerful questions)

• Quarterly sales review; “We need better sales results.  Any suggestions?”
• Strategic board meeting; “So what do we think our vision should be?”
• Leadership meeting; “How is everyone going with their teams?”
• Association conference planning meeting; [Talk about the topic for a while, then ask] “So what does everyone think?”
• Project / team meeting; “Why aren’t we doing as well as we should be?”

Which of these meetings most matches yours?  What kind of conversation do you think the question above would create?  Poorly constructed questions contribute to the four flaws above.

The Effect of a Powerful Question

A good question accomplishes the following:

1. Prepares – a question crafted and posed before a meeting enables for the chair or leader, and the participants to think about the issue at hand
2. Focusses - it points peoples’ thinking towards a specific purpose, and creates an anchor that people can use to stay on track in fulfiling the meeting purpose.
3. Opens - Creates an opening for a response from people to explore and engage.

Crafting a Powerful Question

When thinking up a powerful question, consider:

1. What information must be explored to get to the solution or result;
2. What are the different perspectives of the topic we must consider?
3. What gaps and blindspots exist that we need to highlight?
4. What new knowledge will help people to move forward after the meeting?

Some examples;

• Quarterly sales review;
• “What is the single most influential factor that is holding us back from achieving increased sales results?”
• Strategic board meeting;
• “What will be changing in our environment over the next year which we must now think about responding to?”
• Leadership meeting;
• “What evidence do we have of the collective influence we are having as leaders on our vision?”
• Association conference planning meeting;
• “What is a key industry trend which our members would thank us most for helping them solve?”
• Project / team meeting;
• “What would be the most effective ways to interact with each other over the next four weeks to ensure we can deliver this project on time?”

Action Steps

There are some definite steps you can now take towards making the Awareness stage in your meetings more effective:

1. Observe Others: Notice how people use questions in the Awareness stage of meetings, and the effect of those questions on the quality of the awareness raised.
2. Craft Your Own: Next time you need to raise awareness around a topic, craft a question pre-meeting, using the guidelines above
3. Test and Refine: Notice the types of responses people make to your questions; you may need to refine the types of questions you ask.

By asking powerful questions, you will achieve an immediate lift in the quality of your meetings through more effective Awareness raising, and consequent improvement in the nature and ownership of solutions and actions.

More Questions?

For assistance with implementing this, or to find out more about what kinds of questions you could be asking in your meetings, you can contact us. We design and facilitate over 250 meetings every year, and our continuing work with clients illustrates the value we help them create.

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