How to Host a Successful Meeting

          Have you ever attended or hosted a meeting, only to be disgusted with your fellow attendees' behavior or the complete waste of time?  Wait!  Before you schedule your next meeting as a host or attendee against your better judgement, consider the following.
          Meetings should only be held in two situations:  collaboration or conversation.  Any other circumstances can be taken care of with a memo or a short power point.  If you must hold a meeting, follow these four steps and attendance and attitude will improve:

1. Send an agenda and your meeting materials the day before.  You may even send a task or reminder set the day before so that people arrive to the meeting informed and ready to go.
2. Be on time and stick to the meeting time frame.  If the discussion looks like it will go long, reschedule that item for another time.  This is being respectful of other peoples' time, which will be much appreciated.
3. Invite the right people.  Check your attendee list, are you missing any key decision makers?  Do you have any extra attendees who don't need to participate in the discussion, only be informed of the results?
4. Send a follow-up with a summary of decisions and assignments that came from the meeting.

If you are not the meeting coordinator, but you often find yourself attending useless meetings, try these steps to manage your meeting holder:

• Start meetings on time.  If the meeting holder is late, wait 10 minutes, then send a polite request to reschedule.
• Request an agenda and meeting materials the day before the meeting.  At first, you may not get anything back.  Stick with it, if the host knows that you are going to request information beforehand, eventually they will catch on and send it with the invite.
• Keep the meeting time limited.  If a particular topic goes long, suggest moving it to another time.  If the meetings you attend often extend past their time limit, politely excuse yourself from the meeting and offer to contact someone to get the information you will miss.  Sometimes just making this gesture will wrap up a meeting that's dragging.
• Send a follow-up email outlining the decisions and action steps that you will be taking as a result of the meeting.

There are just some people out there who are habitually bad meeting participants.  The best you can do is follow the above steps and keep your cool.

A free resource to help plan, organize, and collaborate your meetings is MeetingKing.  It's an online tool to create agendas, store and share documents, track tasks, and keep a record of past meetings.