• Tips for creating meetings that are effective
• Structured meetings for success
• Creating purposeful agendas
• Valuing the humans in our team
• Rules of engagement in meetings

Welcome to Take Control with Nicole, as business owners we experience first hand the fine line between our personal and business lives. During our conversations, we will look at simple hints and tips to create time, reduce overwhelm, and help you to navigate through your journey to where you want to be. If you’re looking for smarter ways to work, and create space and time freedom in your day, then you’re in the right place. All right, let’s go.

Hello, and welcome back to Take Control with Nicole. So you know, those meetings that you’ve been in, that just keep going and going and going, and we ended up going off on tangents that we’re not really intending to go towards, yet the conversation just keeps getting added and included and added and added and added and added and all of a sudden, we’ve been sitting on a zoom call for two hours and not actually achieved the intended desirable outcome, why we communed together in the first place. I’ve been in those meetings before, I’ve probably also contributed to the conversation continuing, those conversations do just have this natural way of just evolving as we go through and sometimes it is fabulous what you discover however, when we’re in a team environment, and we are coming together with an intended purpose and intended outcome with setting some guidelines and actions of how we’re going to create and contain this container, this space that we’ve come together, it’s amazing what you can actually achieve.

Now I’ve seen this beautifully executed with one of my clients recently how they were working again, very asyncly, which is where this communication or this conversation started in one of our previous episodes, and they used this tool that IDOARRt meeting structure to really help contain when they did come together, a real intention for the space, why they were there, what was the roles and responsibilities for each human that was inside that container, and how they can actually move beautifully through to reach an outcome at the end. That was the intention of that space. So today, I wanted to give some light and air and space to IDOARRt meetings, what they are, how they can be implemented into your business. Is this something that you’ve been craving for in your world? And yeah, just what are they.

So let’s get started. So what is an IDOARRt, simply put, it is a mechanism or a tool that you can implement into your business to support you to create containers and run effective meetings for your teams, we allow our structures to give us the freedom to actually have communications and focused intent on what we’re looking to achieve in a set period of time, I might actually just take a detour a slightly bit off topic, isn’t it? That’s funny, when I’m talking about creating a structured purpose, but this is going to add to the conversation. Meetings, meeting times. Corporate land, if you’re from corporate land, you may have experienced this, we back to back meeting. So we have an hour, we’ll go 10 to 11, 11 to 12, 12 to 1. Who even knows about lunchtime, and we’re running, we’re chasing our tails between each meeting, something that these sessions and these meeting styles that would love to start to encourage everyone to adapt to is the 15 minute meeting or the 25 minute meeting. So let’s try and give ourselves that breathing space to connect with all those conversations we’ve just had, collect our thoughts contain them, capture them somewhere, if you’ve got ClickUp open, pop over open a doc and start to record that information. What actions do we have from those meetings as well. So that way, when you arrive at your next meeting, you have already processed that information, you know what and when you’re going to be doing that, or you’ve also put it in a holding zone. So you know that in that time that you’ve already allocated for your day or review, you can go back easily and identify those bits of information. So that’s just something to consider as we’re talking about this meeting style.

What can we actually do a higher up to support these outcomes from introducing something like I know our meeting agenda style. Okay, so let’s break it down.

The acronym, IDOARRt stands for intention, desired outcome, agenda, rules, roles and responsibilities and time. So already, you can start to see how the structure will form to really support our humans inside this container to know exactly why they’re here. Why am I on this zoom? What are we trying to achieve? What are we actually talking about? What’s my role? What’s the rules for in this space? And how much time have we allocated for this agenda? So let’s start right at the start intention. Why are we coming together? What is the purpose of this meeting? And why are we doing it? Why am I dedicating this 15 minutes of my day to come together as a group to discuss what’s further down in the page, I think of being really transparent with this will really help your community, your team, your people to arrive, knowing okay, I’m here for a reason. I’m not just here, because I’m added as a CC or a BCC into a thing. And it’s a maybe you should come or you shouldn’t come, we value your time as a team member in our business. And the way that we value this is that you have been selected as a human that we want to bring into this conversation. You’re not just here as an add on, you’re here with intention. So we know that when we’re planning our day, each minute is quite important to us when we’ve got busy things going on if we’re successful business, that we’ve got lots of clients doing all the things, we’ve got to be really responsible of our own time and value our own time. So this way, we can actually support not only the valuing of our own time, but the value of our team’s time as well.

Next is our desired outcome. So we know why we’re coming together fabulous, tick. So what are we looking to achieve, by the end of this session? Whatever timeframe that you’ve allowed, what is it that we’re looking to achieve? Whenever we go into a conversation, if we have a focus of where we’re looking to arrive at the end, it actually really helps you to shape and flow and continue to bring back in these conversations that sometimes maybe go off those two hour ones that are spoke about. We always we can go off on tangents. It’s natural, it’s human, we’re curious. We’re like, oh, maybe we could think about this. If we keep connected into our desired outcome, it’s going to be really clear to identify when we start to go off on a tangent that is not going to add to the conversation to reach the desired outcome. Now, it’s not saying those conversations are not valued. What it is saying though, is that we can go hey, okay, this is a really important thing to discuss. Let’s schedule another session focused on that intention. So we can reach a desired outcome that we want to that’s going to give that conversation the right error in the space that it deserves to be investigated. Let’s bring the focus now back in on what today’s meeting is about our desired outcome for today. Fabulous.

Hello, there, I’m just interrupting this episode, as I would love to invite you to come on in and join us inside the Members Lounge, my community have shared with me that they joined initially, because they really wanted to discover the power of Clickup. They wanted to be able to design, build and connect their ClickUps within their own individual businesses. However, once they were inside, they really discovered how the power of looking at the foundations of your operational areas of your business and designing those really to set you up for success is such a powerful element. And guess what else, we have a fabulous community inside. So once you’re in, you’re never gonna want to leave. So come on over have a look. Go to my website, theartisans.com.au and pop up to the Members Lounge button at the top. And we look forward to supporting you as you discover how fabulous it is when you’re confidently striding down easy street. See you inside the lounge.

We’re then going to move down to our agenda. So you’ve probably seen before meeting agendas that have 100 trillion things on the agenda and we’re going to rush rush rush through through through through through let’s think about this. What are we actually again, what’s our intention? What’s our desired outcomes? What do we need to discuss today that is actually going to move have us forward towards those desired outcomes. Because when we come into a meeting, you may have things on there that are going to take us off on those tangents. So that’s where we have this real opportunity to be hyper focused with valuing our humans time, we’ve selected you to be in this room to have this discussion because you’ve added value to reach our desired outcome. It’s really amazing when you do that, how efficient you can be with conversations, because we’re all focusing on the same thing. The one thing that I do love to add, and I again, I’m getting inspiration from my recent client, the first thing, how are we all today? How are we arrived into this space? Is there anything that you need from us today? being focused on our humans in the room, being aware that other things are going on in your personal world in your business world, I think is a really fabulous place to start. I know that that’s how I start all my meetings. How are you today? How well are you today? What can I do to support you in what you’re looking to achieve? That’s just one little thing there.

Okay, roles and responsibilities. So this is a key one as well. I think when you arrive in a room, you don’t actually A) know why you’re there and B) what’s your responsibilities are in that meeting? Am I supposed to be taking notes or someone else taking notes? Who’s taking the actions? Do I record my own are they centralised, what’s happening, that means you can actually see in your role in the room in the container, wherever you aren’t, might be virtually. So being able to really clearly articulate those roles and responsibilities, responsibilities was Brother beforehand means that again, your humans can come in and go, Okay, I’m Nicole. Today, my role is to take the action items, or my role today is to make sure we finish at 15 minutes. And so what that will mean is that as we keep a track of the time, I might have two agenda items, or four agenda items equal maybe equal wait, maybe not making sure that we are just keeping awareness of that time.

So again, with valuing our humans, we’re making sure that our container is just keeping going reaching that desired outcome, the rules who the rules now I remember back to corporate land, again, I keep saying corporate land, because unfortunately, there are so many habits and practices that you see in that space that I wish we could. And we can and I’m working on it squish being actively engaged in a conversation means putting your phone down and focusing on the humans in the room. Recently, I’ve been back a little bit in corporate land, I can see those patterns and habits. And so one thing that I have put on my I know I’d agendas is no phones, put your phones down. Today, you’re here present, we have 15 minutes to check in on this project. This is the agenda so your focus needs to be present and here. Because it’s a distraction, not only to you, you’re looking and I understand that we’ve got 100 million trillion things going on. But you’re over there. And so on the Zoom, I’m seeing that you’re looking at the phone, so then I’m now focused on you’re looking at the phone. So just one of those things, what are the rules that are really important to you? And your humans in your business that, you know, it’s the guidelines for our meeting? How do we arrive? What is the rules around this space that you’re in? Do we want to encourage our community or not humans to have their cameras on or as part of your, you know, accessibility or near inclusivity? I can’t say that word. You know, what I mean is that that’s an option for humans to make sure they feel the most comfortable that they can. So keeping that in mind, making sure that all of our humans are aware of what it is and how they are encouraged to show up and be present in the meeting, which means that they know that they can feel comfortable in that space already. Another one is the meeting being recorded or not say if it’s a team connection, where we’re asking our humans to be vulnerable around how they’re feeling today, or what’s impacting them to do X, Y and Z. Actually having that session recorded may not be appropriate and also are we actually gonna go back and watch it. That’s another thing as well. So keeping in mind when you are looking to create these meeting agendas, and what the rules are communicating those beforehand so our humans can feel really safe to join us in this session, focused on our intention, focus towards what were going to our desired outcomes and knowing what their role is. So it’s really really nice and clear. I love having information like this beforehand, because I can come prepared. I know exactly what to expect the experience to be when I’m in that space.

Finally, time now I’ve spoken about that already. Maybe I should have flipped it down to here. But anyway, let’s touch on it again, how long and what’s our expected timeframe for this meeting? Now, if we are able to contain this and focus the conversation, now, this can take practice, especially if you like to talk and you’re curious, and we want the conversation to flow, it may be that we discover our say, monthly real diving deep strategy session or our connection session where that client work, we’re trying to pack it into an hour, maybe that’s not enough time. So we’ll actually allow a couple of hours with a break in between, or a little stretch and dance because I don’t know if you know, as well, you noticed, I can see when I’m on a longer call, when people start to switch off, I’m like, Okay, let’s get up. Let’s shake it out, shake it out to the to do get yourself moving. And I know as soon as I’ve done that, I can come back in and refocus and recenter and connect back in with the conversations. So again, being clear, how when did it start? When does it end? Do we have break times pre allocated or not? What again, going back to the rules, is it okay for people to disconnect for a moment? If they they need to go and do whatever it might be that they need to do? What is it that the you know, again, that expectations, intention, desired outcome, agenda, roles, rules and time. IDOARRt. Take a moment today to reflect on some of your recent meetings with your team or your clients. If you had implemented a structure such as this, how would those connection points have been experienced? Would it have been an enhanced experience something that you walk away feeling really excited? Or would it have been the same? Do you naturally already have these things in place, you may just not have put some actual structure documented around it, I have created in clickup, for my own personal use a template, or this meeting style. If this is something you’re interested in, let me know pop a message over on to the Instagram, @theartisanssolutions, happy to share with you my my template because this is something that I’m really super passionate about at the moment, to be able to share this with the world and help business owners teams wherever you are in the world. And to really have an opportunity to support you and your team and your clients to have a better experience when you are connecting together a focused experience that you’re reaching those desired outcomes in a more enjoyable way. That’s it for today. Have a fabulous rest of your day and enjoy creating space and time freedom. Bye now.

Well, there we go. Thank you so much for joining me today. It’s been such a pleasure having you on board. Have we connected on social jazz? If not, please come on over. Say hi, I’m on all the platforms at the artisan solutions. So I’d really look forward to seeing you over there. And if you enjoy today’s episode, don’t forget to tag me and I’d love it if you could leave a review. And of course, share this with others so others can come and join us next time. All right, that everyone have a fabulous rest of the week and until next time, see you then.