Did you ever lead meetings in your career, prior to your decision to enter the independent consultant’s profession? If not, you will need to get used to leading them, and even if you are experienced in running successful meetings, things will be a little different in your new role.
For one thing, your income and reputation will be directly tied to the productivity of your meetings and to their outcomes. That means you must ensure that all your meetings add value to your consulting services.
Successful Meetings: More Than an Agenda
While the task of controlling a meeting and getting the most from participants is important for success, solid preparation is what makes the real difference.
Unfortunately, preparation is also the element most frequently overlooked, even by veterans with hundreds of business and project meetings under their belts.
Solid preparation means a lot more than having a planned agenda of topics to cover. In this post, you’ll find a list of four prerequisites for successful meetings, which (although challenging in an environment where your clients will typically lead proceedings) you should try to ensure are covered off each and every time.
Why Meeting Skills Matter More for Consultants
Here’s something that took me a while to fully appreciate when I first started consulting. In a corporate role, a mediocre meeting is just… a mediocre meeting. Everyone grumbles about wasted time, gets back to their desks, and carries on. The cost is diffuse, absorbed by the organisation.
But when you’re the consultant in the room, a poorly run meeting reflects directly on you. Even if you didn’t call it, even if you’re not technically chairing it, clients will associate the quality of those sessions with the quality of your work. I’ve seen consultants lose credibility not because their analysis was weak, but because meetings kept running over, decisions kept getting deferred, and the whole engagement started to feel like it was spinning its wheels.
The thing is, most consultants default to being passive in meetings they don’t control. They show up, contribute when asked, take notes, and leave. That’s understandable—you’re a guest, in a sense. But if you want to run a successful meeting as a consultant, or even just participate in one effectively, you need to be more proactive about the conditions that make success possible.
The 4 Independent Consultant’s Meeting Prerequisites
1. Challenge the value
Calling a meeting is often an automatic response to the need for decisions to be made or information to be exchanged. However, less time-consuming ways of achieving the same objectives are often possible, and might well be more effective. Before agreeing to a meeting, seek to determine if there is a better way to achieve your aims or those of your client.
This can feel awkward, I know. A client says “let’s schedule a meeting to discuss X” and your instinct is to say yes immediately. But honestly, some of the best consulting relationships I’ve had were ones where I’d occasionally push back with something like “could we handle this with a quick email exchange instead?” Clients respect that. It shows you value their time, not just your billable hours.
2. Try to limit attendance
The more participants are present in a meeting, the greater is the challenge in meeting its objectives. Try to make sure that the only people participating in any meeting are those who must be present to make a decision or who have something material to contribute. Anybody else should be able to manage with a copy of the meeting notes and action points.
I worked with a manufacturing client once who had a culture of inviting anyone even tangentially related to a topic. We’d have fourteen people in a room to discuss a decision that really only involved three. The meetings would drag on, tangents would multiply, and the people who actually needed to decide things would barely get a word in. Eventually I started suggesting we split sessions into a “decision meeting” with a small group and a “briefing session” afterwards for everyone else. Made an enormous difference.
3. Minimise activities during meetings
Many meeting hours are wasted when tasks are executed in the conference room unnecessarily. These are typically activities that individuals could have completed ahead of the meeting. Try to work with your client to complete these jobs in advance, keeping meeting time free for the things which must be attended to as a group.
You’ve probably sat through this: someone shares their screen and spends twenty minutes walking through a spreadsheet that everyone could have reviewed beforehand. Or worse, people are reading a document for the first time while sitting in the meeting. That’s not collaboration—that’s an expensive group reading session.
4. Make sure critical data is in hand
Meetings often take place with insufficient information, leading to deferred decisions or assignments and the need for further follow-up meetings. This can be avoided if participants are tasked with gathering all the necessary information and if you follow-up with them before the meeting starts to ensure they have what’s required. If any information is not ready, postponing the meeting will be better than discovering the data shortage in mid-session.
This last point might be the most important of the four prerequisites for a successful meeting as a consultant. Nothing kills momentum like getting halfway through a discussion only to realise nobody brought the figures you need to make the decision you’re there to make. I’ve learned to send a checklist to key participants a day or two before any significant meeting—not an agenda, but a simple list of “please confirm you have X, Y, and Z ready.” It feels a bit schoolteacher-ish, but it works.
Set Yourself Up For Successful Meetings
The four prerequisites that I point out in this post are important for any meeting, but they are not necessarily the only ones that exist. Others will depend upon the purpose of the meeting.
In general, I believe it wise to try to keep meetings to a minimum, since even a one-hour session can amount to a lot of man-hours, which in turn amounts to a lot of expense.
Of course, when your clients are adamant that a meeting is required, it’s not wise to object, and in many cases, it will be the right way to meet an objective. Just don’t short-change your clients by limiting preparation to the publishing of an agenda. The most successful and productive meetings are usually those for which preparation-time exceeds the hours burned in the conference room.
One final thought: the 4 prerequisites for a successful meeting as a consultant aren’t just about making individual meetings better. They’re about establishing yourself as someone who takes seriously the cost of people’s time. That reputation compounds. Clients start trusting you with more significant decisions, precisely because they’ve seen how carefully you treat the smaller ones.