The Vital Role Chief of Staff Has in Meeting Facilitation

During Chief of Staff office hours, the discussion focused on meeting facilitation and the Chief of Staff's crucial role in ensuring that the return on investment (ROI) is achieved for these high-level meetings that frequently occur in our professional lives.

To establish a foundation for success, meeting facilitators and owners should consider employing a meeting foundation document to complement the agenda. This document explicitly highlights the five W's (Who, What, Where, Why, and When) pertinent to any meeting and guarantees that all participants arrive with the appropriate mindset needed to fulfill the meeting's objectives.During the discussion, participants engaged in a meandering exchange of past and present challenges from their respective organizations.

Topics varied from the importance and effectiveness of having a dedicated note-taker to determining success criteria at the beginning of the meeting - "This will be a successful meeting if…" to the creation of a "parking lot" where essential yet unrelated issues that arise can be "parked" until a suitable time for addressing them is arranged.

Several participants shared their experiences on how the hybrid work environment can introduce additional layers of complexity to facilitation, as aspects such as transactional communication, informal bonding, and the challenges of interrupting someone presenting virtually come into play.Lastly, in the pursuit to objectively assess the meeting's success, we explored various analytics that could be employed to gauge factors ranging from speaking duration and information flow to participation dynamics.