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Leading Your Crystal

Writing a Meeting Specifi cation

1. Define the meeting’s purpose: to inform, solve, or both.

2. Write a one- or two-sentence objective for the gathering.
3. Define mandatory and optional attendees and their roles.

4. Define the logistics for attendance and/or remote connection.
5. Write a meeting fl ow section that gives each meeting item’s time,
owner, format, and expected outcome.

As the meeting leader, should Paula allow the departure from the
fl ow or stop the conversation and make a note to include it as part of
a future meeting?
The answer depends on the importance of the newly introduced
topic relative to the overarching goals of the meeting. The decision
could go either way. The value of the meeting specifi cation is that it
forces the decision to be an overt one. Someone—the leader, the fl ow
monitor, or another attendee—should speak up, noting that contin-
ued conversation about the new topic will not leave suffi cient time for
the other items. Perhaps each team member will be asked to quickly
give his or her opinion regarding the relative importance of each.
Then Paula can decide whether to change the plan or stick with the
original one and return to the new topic later.
If the plan is changed, the change is overt. Perhaps it would make
sense in this case to move the “Choose top areas” item to the begin-
ning of the next meeting—or to conduct an e-mail poll for that
purpose between meetings—in order to free time for this new and
important discussion. The specifi c details are far less important than
the fact that the entire group stays on the same page with respect to
what’s going on in the meeting.

Group Memory: Consistency and Follow-Through
One major by-product of using well-formed meeting specifi cations
is that you will need better tracking in four specifi c areas. Like the

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