We can’t talk about the perfect meeting invitation without thinking about the most critical factor in any meeting: the people. Work meetings are all about collaboration — we aim to co-create with others. Choosing the right people is an absolute must.
There’s a reason why I saved the invitees for last. Only after we define what we aim to achieve and understand the context can we start thinking about who should be on board with us in this discussion. If there’s one thing we must remember, it is this: only the people who can actively help us realize the goal of the meeting should be in the room.
An effective meeting doesn’t need an audience, and we don’t need “optional” invitees. People should not be CC’d on the invitation just because they will need to know the meeting’s outcome later. If you need to share information or keep some people “in the loop” even though they are not active participants in the meeting, there are better ways to do that than just adding them as invitees. Inviting people just because they have a formal role or place in the organizational hierarchy, even when they are not expected to contribute to the discussion, is precisely why meetings got a bad rap. A work meeting is designed to do some predefined work, and every single person we invite to the meeting should have an explicit role in it.
In a previous post, we discussed the importance of assigning a concrete task to every participant in the meeting. Communicating the role of each participant is no less critical. People attending the meeting must know what is expected of them before accepting the invitation. Therefore, the last part of the perfect meeting invitation is not just deciding who to invite but explicitly stating what is expected of each invitee.
Of course, the number of participants significantly impacts the effectiveness of the discussion. A meeting with 20 people is ineffective even if you can define a role for each of them. We will discuss how to manage such cases in a future post.
The perfect meeting invitation is now ready. It is time to hit “Send.”
Once the invitation is out there, we should just do one small additional thing: close the loop. That is what we’ll do tomorrow.
"An effective meeting doesn’t need an audience". Wow.