Chairing meetings to their full potential: 30 years of learning in 3 minutes

Chairing meetings well is an art. Poor chairing results in underachievement, but do it with skill and you’ll get the best performance the group can give. There are plenty of good guides about how to chair meetings (see below), but there’s a big difference between knowing what to do, and knowing how to be.

What I do is pretty simple — I seek to keep us on time, on topic, and on task — then reflect back a summary of what we’ve agreed with actions and responsibilities. I also keep a steady eye on the purpose and watch out in case things get bogged down by symptoms and miss the cause. This is basic level chairing, but it’s enough to get tasks done. The difference between a good chair and a great one lies in the qualities of their attention and the way they ‘hold’ the space.

It’s where chairing gets much more interesting.

There’s always more going on in a room than people voice out loud. It’s both our greatest challenge (because we can very quickly get things very wrong), and our greatest opportunity (because we’re so brilliantly creative). So to be a great chair, you have to develop your sensitivity to the unspoken ‘what else’ that’s going on. It’s the way to shift from simply getting things done, to getting them done to the best of everyone’s ability.

My top tip is to explore the field of Appreciative Inquiry. It’s a great source of learning about how to get the best out of people, including yourself. It will help deepen your awareness of the skills and strengths people are able to offer in the room and that’s critical to maximising the potential.

The way I use it is also fairly simple — I pay attention to the voices in the group and how people are (or are not) using them. I check in with the quiet ones to give them a clear space to talk if they need/want it. I help people be appreciative/constructive in exchanges if there are strong differences of opinion, and bring them back to shared purpose and outcomes if it seems we’re getting fractious. That’s pretty much it.

As ever, it’s the balance between the doing and being that’s key. You can tell if you’ve been a bad, good, or great chair from the atmosphere when people leave the room. I aim for people to walk out a bit taller than when they came in — that’s when I know it’s been a great session.

I can’t leave this piece without mentioning a Harvard Business Review piece on How to be a better meeting chairman by George Prince. It’s a bit stilted and odd because it was written in 1969, but it’s still relevant today. The ‘command and control’ culture he saw then is still our social default setting, so it’s worth a read because the behavioural patterns persist. The chair is often taken by the most ‘important’ or most confident person, which is not always the same as the most skilled.

There are ways to improve meeting performance in a situation where the chair is doing a poor job, but that’s a whole different blog about the kind of subtle questioning skills you get to learn through Appreciative Inquiry. The Scottish and Welsh governments are both using Appreciative Inquiry in work on public service reform, and it’s working. The more widely it’s shared, the better it works. The best thing about it is that you don’t need permission to explore it for yourself, and there’s no reason why you can’t just get on with a few colleagues and experiment with the tools in work. Let me know if you do!

Before I go, I promised to share some ‘proper’ guides about how to chair meetings — these three are all pretty good in their own ways: the modestly headlined ‘ultimate guide to chairing meetings effectively’ from the Success Factory; chairing meetings from the Developing Governance Group, and my favourite, What makes a good chair? from the Brighton & Hove Resource Centre.

If you found this article useful, please give it a like or a clap, and comments are always welcome.