What can Mare of Easttown teach us about closing a meeting?
At KJ Consulting Group, we’re all about coaching teams to work better together. One piece of our formula — whether we’re training a room full of educators, working with a hiring committee, or coaching leaders — is that we are ALL constantly learning. Today’s blog invites you to consider the ways you are closing your team meetings and invite you, in the spirit of learning, to make a few adjustments.
If you know me, you know I love movies and TV shows that make me think, challenge the world as I see it, and reflect about how I might apply a new perspective to my own life. One recent show that I became obsessed with was Mare of Easttown, starring an amazing cast including Kate Winslet. The show involved a central mystery, but it had a more lasting impact because of the exploration of the characters’ difficult family dynamics and long-lasting grief. The show didn’t stop at the climax — when we discovered who the killer was — but instead included a few final scenes of falling action and a resolution. The arc of the show and those final scenes have stuck with me, as my brain ponders Mare and her family’s journeys, my key takeaways from the show, and how I might apply them to my own life.
Thinking about the show and its resolution prompted me to consider the arc of a standard team meeting. Most of us are pretty familiar with icebreakers to START meetings (we recently wrote about it here), but a carefully crafted meeting CLOSING can ensure participants leave with a stronger sense of what they’ve learned and a commitment to making change moving forward.
We can draw a comparison between shows like Mare and collaborative meetings. As humans we like to draw conclusions and apply them to our own lives. However, to get to the application (or “now what?”) phase, we need to give ourselves time for reflection. How many times have you been in a meeting that never gets to the end? How often have you left a meeting without a clear idea of what to do next? We tend to get stuck in the heart of the content to ensure we meet objectives, when we need to save time for an intentional close, even if we don’t get through all of the content. Even when things aren’t going completely on schedule, saving time for a closing reflection will allow our teams to apply their learning, either as a shift in perspective or to plan action steps for their future work.
Closings are an important part of all trainings we lead, so that the content we share and the dialogue we engage in during a session are not lost. I urge you to consider how closings might add value to your team meetings in a similar way. Whether you have 5 minutes or 20, saving intentional time in an agenda to allow participants to extract key learning points from the experience builds a culture of ongoing learning. Coming soon — a few of our favorite closing activities that only take a few minutes, while allowing for valuable reflection. Try one out, and let us know what closings you frequently use!
