Not Another Meeting!
A common complaint among my clients is meetings—too many meetings, meetings that last too long, meetings that accomplish nothing, too much bickering in meetings, no actions take after the meeting—the list of meeting criticisms is long.
With today’s increasingly team-oriented structure in most organizations, it’s not possible to avoid meetings. Many decisions are group decisions, and important information is often best-shared face-to-face. Misunderstandings can arise easily without a meeting of the minds to talk issues through and come to consensus.
So meetings are often necessary and important. When they are badly run, they have little productive outcome, cause resentment among those who attended, and leave participants with a bad taste for meetings. How many meetings have you left, thinking, “I could have been doing so many other things while I wasted time in this meeting!” Do people ever have that impression of the meetings you conduct? Running a meeting effectively can help make or break your leadership. If you keep a few simple guidelines in mind you can vastly improve the meetings you are involved in.
Guidelines for Good Meetings
Even if your meetings are small and mostly informal, they should still be organized. Consider the following “rules” to improve your meetings.
1. Be very clear about the reason for the meeting. What decisions must be made? What information must be dispensed? What projects do you expect updates on? If you have no clear need to have a meeting, cancel it.
2. Prepare an agenda. This is one of the most important things you can do to lead more effective meetings, even for a small meeting. Send out a tentative agenda to meeting attendees ahead of time so they will come prepared to do their part. You may want to offer them the opportunity to suggest agenda items.
3. Prioritize your agenda and deal with the most crucial items first.
4. Stick to your meeting times. Begin no more than two minutes after your start time. If you also set an ending time, this will encourage you to make the most of your limited time. End when you say you will end, so you are respectful of people’s time. If you didn’t get everything covered, carry these items over to the next meeting and place them first on the agenda.
5. Do not let people ramble in the meeting. If participants are getting off track, remind them assertively and politely to get back to the issue.
6. Similarly, do not let people engage in battle. If it becomes clear that two participants are at odds, assign them to discuss their differences privately with each other, with or without your presence. Move on to the next item.
7. Follow-up. Other than an agenda, the most important thing you can do for productive meetings is to have an assigned recorder make notes of decisions made and action assigned. Distribute this record to attendees and anyone else who should know. It is essential that you follow up later with anyone who agreed in the meeting to complete an action item. Meet with them individually or ask them in the next meeting to update the group on their progress in regard to that action.
If you are involved in the meeting but not in charge of it, suggest some of these ideas to your colleague or even your boss in a way that clearly conveys you want to be helpful, not critical.
Remember
• Know what you intend to accomplish, and use an agenda.
• Keep the meeting as short and focused as possible.
• Distribute a summary of decisions made and actions assigned.
• Keep people moving by following up with them to be sure they are completing action items by the due date.
Source: www.what-are-good-leadership-skills.com, ©Emily A. Sterrett, Ph.D. Reprinted with permission.
photo credit: Phil Sexton via photopin cc
