For some, the mere mention of the words ‘steer co’ or ‘steering meeting’ can cause them to start profusely sweating, knowing that the project sponsor, along with an assortment of senior stakeholders, are going to scrutinise all the team’s hard work to date, as well as pull your plans to pieces!

Fear not, from my experience this is far from the case. These meetings are as important for you as a project or programme manager as they are for the attendees to ensure that the initiative is a success. In order to help you through what can be a stressful experience, especially for first time PMs, I have created the following guide.

Meeting Agenda & Content

The first question that you need to ask yourself is, ‘What is the objective/purpose of the meeting?‘. To answer this question you need to start with the end in mind. What do you want to achieve by having this conversation? It might be an endorsement of a decision, ratification of an existing plan based on an update, a request to support resolution of a key issues/blocker. As part of structuring the agenda and doing the necessary preparation work, you need to be able to concisely articulate what you and the team responsible for delivering the Project or Programme need to get out of the meeting. Once you have determined this, you can document an agenda and create the supporting artifacts to enable the desired conversation. Ironically this is the first step to you positioning or ‘steering’ the meeting prior to it occurring to ensure an actionable outcome.

The next consideration is how long is the meeting. This will be dependent on the complexity of the required discussion and the availability of key stakeholders. If stakeholders can only make a 30 minute slot and you have created enough content to cover a 45 minutes, without any time for questions and a discussion, then you’re going to need to streamline and / or summarise the key content. A rough rule of thumb, depending on your meeting objective, is to structure this around 5 slides.

1. Restate the problem statement and or purpose of the meeting – allow your stakeholders to refocus their attention. Most will have come from a previous meeting and / or may not have read the agenda and meeting invite, so help them to focus on why you have requested their time
2. Context – replay a high level historical overview and any lessons learnt captured to date. This should provide the necessary background to the discussion and might include any previous actions step by the Sponsor and the meeting attendees
3. Analysis – summarise the analysis completed to date, outline how data has been captured as well as the positives and negatives of each option reviewed
4. Recommendation – outline the recommended option, the implications for the Project (cost, time and scope) as well as the necessary support from the Sponsor and key stakeholders
5. Call To Action – this is where you close the meeting out and summarise what the next steps are

Supporting content that should also be shared either via a link or as an appendix and updated for every meeting, but may not necessarily feature in the main discussion, is:

• Status update – this should cover progress made to date, what the planned next steps are, overall RAG status of the project and if any support is required and from whom
• Financial health – the minimum requirement would be a slide or dashboard showing planned spend versus actual spend to date and a summary explanation outlining what was being done if it is not within an agreed tolerance level
• RAID – Summary of the top Risks, the categorisation of each and action taken to date; issues, action taken to date and if any assistance is needed and any changes to Assumption and Dependency logs
• Change log – this should show a list of Change Requests, the source of the request, the requests status, business value and Impact Assessment. Please note, if a Request is within the Project Manager’s agreed tolerance level to approve then this content may not be necessary. If you are going to include a Change log make sure it contains the key items that require the Sponsor approval.

A steering meeting should never be just a status update. Yes, a status update needs to be included, but if you do not want an engaged sponsor and supporting stakeholders, holding a meeting to read through a slide is the quickest way to ensure that they don’t turn up to future meetings when you do need them. If you don’t have anything significant to discuss, respect their time and share a status update via email. In the long run they’ll thank you for it.

Stakeholder Management

These ‘soft skills’ which, along with the hard skills showcased in the supporting content, are what determine how success levels of your meeting. These take a considerable period of practice and both good and bad experiences to finesse. So don’t beat yourself up if things don’t go to plan. Below is a set of high level approaches and strategies to get you off on the right foot and make your meeting a valuable experience for all.

Firstly you need to make sure who is attending the meeting. For a successful meeting you will need a:

• Sponsor – accountable for the overall success of the initiative and is able to champion the project’s cause with senior stakeholders if required
• Financial representative – a stakeholder who has the authority to talk to financial matters and can address/provide guidance on any issues around budgeting
• Customer representative – if discussing an intra-organisation product or project, this will be someone from Operations, if an external Product this could be the Product Owners or Manager
• Support functions – HR, IT, Marketing, Design, Compliance and legal authorities

As you have probably guessed the first three roles are key for every meeting. Depending on the nature of the discussion, the representatives under the banner of support functions will need to be invited on a case by case basis but should be included in any status updates and or meeting minutes, if they are not able to attend. This will be down to you to as the Project Manager to determine if lack of representation at a meeting is a blocker to progress. If so, work with the remaining stakeholders to determine what can be done to resolve or mitigate this issue.

Warming up

Prior to any key meeting, engage key stakeholders and share a sneak preview of the discussion to use firstly as a litmus test to capture any feedback and or concerns as well as determine if the message that you are trying to convey is understood. Remember ‘the art of communication, is the response that you receive’ (for more on this see Active listening). I am yet to meet a Sponsor who enjoys a surprise in the middle of a meeting and they will be even less forgiving if they happen to be the last to know a key piece of information. Even if you are only able to grab five minutes with them prior to the meeting, do so. If you are not able to do this with everyone attending, see if you can split the responsibility with the colleagues that you have shared this information with. This will give you an idea of what ‘push back’ you are likely to encounter and be able to prepare responses to these in advance.

Personality types

Depending on who is involved with the meeting you will have to learn to get a feel for key stakeholders’ personalities and adjust your style and content accordingly. Things to consider are:

• How do they like information presented to them? Do they like diagrams or concise, bullet points? A key way to get a feel for what works is try and see if they have created a presentation previously or if there are examples that they particularly like. You can then take the core approaches of these and use it to inform your approach.
• Key phrases or terminology that triggers a positive or negative response – I have had stakeholders who in the past I know the use of a certain phrases will cause their hackles to raise. If that is the case, remove them from your presentation and make a concerted effort to remove it from your vocabulary, at least in their presence.
• Attention to detail – some stakeholders will want to go through every calculation and value as well as scrutinise every typo and use of bad grammar. Others will not care. Of these two, I guarantee that you will encounter someone who fits the first description at some point. My advice is to get someone to proof read your content as a quality check and as part of ‘warming up’ exercise go through any key bits of detail with this stakeholder in advance. Based on my experience, these people are generally trying to drive high standards, even if they are demonstrating it in way that can seem anally retentive. Hence, embrace the challenge and see it as an opportunity to silence them. The best way to do this is demonstrate that you can answer their questions and provide them the necessary detail. Though please note that by addressing these detailed questions you should do so with content which you can store in the appendices and reference in the core of your presentation. For more on this topic see handling awkward questions below.

Environmental factors

The other thing to be mindful of when preparing content is to determine what are the norms and practises of the organisation of the client/sponsor things to consider is if content needs to follow any specific branding guidelines and or formatting standards. Also depending on the customer they may be more formal and like slides issued in advance. If you are not sure what the cultural norms and etiquette of the client organisation, ask someone who has done it previously and if there isn’t any one, contact the customer directly and outline the intended approach.

Meeting invites

On every meeting the following three things should be stated and can be remembered by the acronym PEPs, which stand for:

• Purpose: state the purpose of the meeting
• Expectations: state what to expect (e.g. this is a presentation to facilitate a discussion on issue x, or this is a workshop to identify how we can address issue y etc.)
• Prerequisites: outline for those attending if they need to do anything to prepare for the meeting. This is a key piece of information if you are planning to hold a workshop.

Handling awkward questions

Trust as a professional is one of the key assets that you need to develop with all your stakeholders, especially those who are part of your steering meeting. The best way to do this is through transparency and a regular cadence of value. You are also likely to encounter a question that you haven’t prepared for. No one likes not being able to answer a question. However, people like it even less when you provide them an answer and it turns out to be incorrect. It erodes trust which is the key currency that will enable you to deliver the project successfully. Saying ‘I don’t know’ is not a cardinal sin but remember it is not what you say but how you say it. If you encounter a question that you can’t answer, firstly use active listening techniques to play back the questions that you have heard, this will allow you to collect your thoughts but will also allow the stakeholder who has asked the question to confirm your understanding or rephrase the original question in a different way. If you still are unable to answer, acknowledge that you can’t answer it and politely state that you will take an action to find the answer and get back to them.

Meeting deviating from the Agenda

There is a possibility that the meeting could deviate away from the agenda. If you are using the 5 slide structure that I outlined above this could occur from the Analysis slide onward. If you have followed my suggestions around warming up key stakeholders, this should help mitigate this risk, as you should have already captured their concerns and feedback and be ready to address these. Though sometimes unforeseen events occur at short notice which will cause stakeholders to deviate from the discussion, or go off on tangents. Your job in this situation is to deploy active listening techniques and determine if the discussion that is being held, though unforeseen, can benefit the issues that you are trying to get addressed. If you are not sure that this is the case and this conversation has gone on for more than 5 minutes. Politely interject and replay back your understanding to those having the discussion, once they have confirmed that your understanding is correct, clarify how this relates to and restate the purpose of the meeting. If they acknowledge that it doesn’t, suggest that you’ll set up a separate discussion to facilitate that point at a later time which should enable you to get back on track.

Post meeting

Ideally within 24 hours, capture a summary of the meeting whilst it is fresh in your memory; this only needs to be a couple of sentences long. Also, capture the actions from the meeting and issue this along with links to the content that was presented to all on the steering group. You can also take this opportunity to outline when the next scheduled meeting is likely to be.

Nerves

A friend of mine, who is an ex bouncer, recently regaled me with a story in which at a nightclub that he had been working at, had descended into a mass brawl. Bottles and chairs were being thrown, people physically scrapping left, right, and centre; obviously not a normal night and one which for the majority of us would be extremely stressful. Obviously he and his colleagues had to step in and resolve it. Though before doing so, he scanned the room. This allowed him to assess what was happening but more importantly identify the biggest risk to him and his colleagues, as well as anyone else who happened to be at the wrong place, at the wrong time. For him, this was a person at a bar who was sat laughing and smiling. For this person the evening’s events and ensuring chaos wasn’t in the least bit stressful but actually pleasurable. That, for my friend, was the biggest threat in the room. Namely because he knew from experience, that the moment that you are comfortable in a setting it means that you have experienced it multiple times and are ready to react. The key takeaway from this is not for you to go join fight club, I’ve endured enough injuries as a result of being on a rugby pitch at the weekend to know that a black eye on a Monday morning is never a good look. What this does tell you is that, with experience, being in a situation this will translate to familiarity enabling you to cope.

I appreciate that if you are someone who is currently petrified of presenting, the idea of putting yourself under this level of stress so that at some point in the future you’ll be able to cope, may not be that comforting. However, the quicker that you engage with this the sooner you will be to addressing your nerves. Though I strongly recommend to look at developing strategies in order to help you cope. For those interested in learning how you can trick your body into positively using this nervous energy, an example of which is Amy Cuddy’s TED talk discussing how you can positively tap into your body language. Other approaches include using prompt cards as an aide memoir and performing your presentation to a peer or trusted colleague who can provide feedback. The other option is to use your smartphone to record yourself presenting, which you can then review.

Summary

To ensure that you ‘steer’ your steering meeting the key take-away’s from this article are, to define the objective of the meeting; structure your agenda and presentation to elicit approval for a recommendation or decision; identify and warm up key stakeholders; get a colleague or friend to ‘sense check’ your presentation for grammar and typos and practice your active listening skills to help clarify any awkward questions and give you time to think. These skills will help you navigate your first steering meeting. There are other soft skills that you can develop which I haven’t outlined above though would strongly recommend observing other’s presentations in order to help you find your style. Though do remember that getting comfortable in front of an audience is a skill just like any other, it just takes time and practice.