I'm Candice and I am a Human Resources Strategist and supporter of small businesses. Today, I'm going to talk about meetings. I've been in so many bad meetings over the years, but I thought it was really important to include this as a part of this section on mentorship and development because meetings can be an awesome opportunity for both of those things but so often are not, and just get totally derailed and become another animal entirely.

A few ways to incorporate your staff into your meetings and provide for their development through the meeting method is what I'm going to be talking about today. The first one is magic, if you can get it going, is to alternate the meeting host or presenter, whatever you want to call them. This works best in teams of 15 or fewer. If you get into more people than that it would only work best if you were to split them into smaller, maybe project-based groups. It also works best on a weekly basis, if you're doing a weekly meeting.

Otherwise, there's just not enough of an opportunity for everyone to have their turn or their go. In this method, the different person each week would be responsible for setting the agenda, for [00:02:00] sending the agenda out to all of the meeting participants, for making any updates to the agenda that needed to happen. Then also communicating to the next person who's responsible for setting the agenda. This works well if you have an agenda template and you have the same topics that you're covering week to week in your meetings. It also works to allow other contributors to add information to the document that you use for agenda-setting.

It's nice to have a person who's a filter who's making sure, "Okay, we have an hour for this meeting. These are the topics we're not going to be able to get to all of them. Let's pick the ones that are the most important and find other ways to tackle the things that we're not discussing in this meeting and so forth." Another fun thing to do is to allow that host or presenter to have some time for a presentation during their meeting.

Typically, about 10 minutes is usually enough for this. You can have them present on a project that they're working on, or a training that they just went to, or if it works for your organization, people I've seen present on their personal lives and trips that they've taken. That can be a really fun way of getting to know the presenter, their work, and all of the things that are going on with them.

Then the last thing is to have the presenter do an icebreaker at the beginning of the meeting. [00:04:00] You can Google meeting icebreaker and there are like 20,000 of these things. I'll put some examples in this section so that you have some ideas of what they can be. They can be anything from what's your favorite color to write down all of the names of the states on a map of the United States or tell me about a time that you were surprised about something.

One of my favorite ones in a meeting that I was in was tell me about a job that you had that is not on your resume. Everybody talked about all these really fun and unique and interesting jobs that they had. I hope that gives you some ideas about how to bring a little bit more life into your meetings and how to bring your staff into them a little bit more. I'll have a meeting template too. That'll be available for you. Bye.