The Delicate Art of Closing a Meeting
Managers put a great deal of trust in meetings as the way to get things done. Unfortunately, everyone who has been in a meeting knows this is not the case. Even when a meeting goes well, it can prove unproductive afterward, with lack of follow through or issues coming back up for reconsideration.
The last few minutes of a meeting, or the closing, are critical moments to help ensure that a good meeting does not end up being wasted time and that decisions that were made stay made. There is a definite art to closing a meeting, it is much more important than just ending on time. There are four key elements to meeting closure and if you can master them, your meeting effectiveness will skyrocket.
First, a standing item at the end of the meeting might be “Any Other Business” (AOB). This is an opportunity for team members to bring up topics that otherwise did not get on the agenda or are emergent, but sometimes people might use this item to distract, or derail other decisions. As the meeting chair, you need to have clear guidelines about what can be brought up in AOB and how to handle it when those guidelines are not followed.
After AOB, there should be a summarizing of the decisions made during the meeting. I have been amazed at how many times people have left the same meeting with differing perceptions of what was decided. Many times people go on completely unaware that a decision was made. The end of a meeting is a critical time to make this explicit.
Related to the summary is a statement of responsibilities — a listing of what needs to be done, by whom, prior to the next meeting. A good rule of thumb is to ensure that no more than one person is responsible for a task, lest multiple people assume / hope someone else will take care of it. Multiple people can provide support, but only one can be responsible.
Last, and this is probably the most important, the meeting should end when you said it was going to end. Respect your team members and their time enough to give them an ending time and then honor it.
If you can do these four things at the end of every meeting, your decision are more likely to remain intact, tasks will be more likely to get done, and the whole team will know their time is valued by you and each other.
