I’ve recently been rolling out a new meeting template for the companies I advise (that needed it)
This CAR meeting template is designed to ensure the meeting is short and to the point, drives conversation and highlights areas requiring further conversation.
It’s split into 3 parts and managed by a meeting lead who should also be taking notes, keeping time and ensuring that ppl focus.
Managing the meeting –
Before the meeting each attendee should be aware of the meeting parts and how and what to present in each part, they should also be made aware of how the meeting will be conducted and what and how they are expected to participate. The meeting should be recorded/ transcribed if possible and meeting notes should be archived
During the meeting the meeting lead should take notes and ensure that each person speaks for no more than 5 minutes. During those 5 minute all participants should be listening and taking notes of areas they can help or feedback on. As the speaker finishes participants should ask questions and give feedback and suggestions, this should last no more than an addition 5 minutes, after which time the meeting lead should ensure that a separate deeper follow-on meeting is organised. Feedback should be concise and have some kind of clear action attached.
At the end of the meeting the meeting lead should summarise any actions that were agreed, highlight any follow-on meetings (and their participants) that should take place. And write up and share any meeting notes.
The three sections and the details are as follows –
Challenges – in this section focus on issues that you have encountered, specifically highlight the ones where you need help and are stuck, spend time to give detail of what the challenge is and what might be affecting the challenge.
Participant feedback should focus on either offering new way to look and solve the issue or offers to help in specific ways.
This section of the meeting is crucial and should drive conversation to help with identifying and solving problems (challenges)
Achievements/ aspirations – this section should focus on successes that are worth highlighting to the team to know about, such as a new feature release. additionally this section should focus on aspirations – what is the plan this week, what will you focus on this week. – this section of the meeting can be more report/announcement focused. Participants only need to feedback if there are concerns.
Results – this part of the meeting focuses on measurables, and quantifiable, it can be more report/announcement focused. Participants only need to feedback if there are concerns. The goal here is to highlight change in key metrics an individual is responsible for, so that any patterns are quickly highlighted. It should take the form of announcing a numeric result in comparison to previous time frames, e.g. this week sales reached 50, compared with 45 from the week before and 55 the same week last year. This means we are 30% towards our quarterly target – its important that results are contextualised for them to be useful.