I just finished up a post about Understanding Effective Meeting Agendas and thought it was important to expand on the importance of clearly setting the meeting objectives before you create your meeting agenda.  Setting  meeting objectives is the first and most important step during the meeting management process.   It answers the question of “What do I hope to accomplish when my meeting is done?”.

Before planning the agenda, write down a phrase or several phrases to complete the sentence: By the end of the meeting, I want the group to… Depending on the focus of your meeting, your ending to the sentence might include phrases such as: …be able to list the top three features of our newest product, …have generated three ideas for increasing our sales, …understand the way we do business with customers, …leave with an action plan, …decide on a new widget supplier, or …solve the design problem.

Think of the overall outcome you want from the meeting and what activities you need to occur to reach that outcome. The agenda should be organized so that these activities are conducted during the meeting.

The benefit of setting objectives for the meeting is to help you plan the meeting. The more concrete your meeting objectives, the more focused your agenda will be. A second important benefit of having specific objectives for each meeting is that you have a concrete measure against which you can evaluate that meeting. Were you successful in meeting the objectives? Why or why not? Is another meeting required? Setting meeting objectives allows you to continuously improve your effective meeting process.