“Doing great things takes more than a great vision and a great team. It takes great execution, down to the nuts and bolts of day-to-day organization. Meetings get a bad rap, and deservedly so – most meetings are disorganized and distracted. But they can be a critical tool for getting your team on the same page.” Justin Rosenstein, employee of Google, Facebook, and Asana (http://blog.asana.com/2013/03/the-5-secrets-to-leading-great-meetings/).
Meeting management tends to be a set of skills often overlooked and undervalued by leaders and managers. However, with just a few minutes’ forethought and preparation, we can avoid frustrating and time-wasting meetings. Productive meetings can be invigorating, motivating, and reconnecting. Follow these steps to improve attendance and attitude:
1. Selecting Participants - invite the key decision makers; do not to invite attendees who could avoid wasting time by getting a short summary after the meeting.
2. Developing Agendas – send an agenda and your meeting materials to attendees the day before. You may even send a reminder or task set the day before so that people arrive to the meeting informed and ready to go.
3. Establishing Ground Rules for meetings – below are some suggested ground rules, you may add or subtract from the list as you wish.
a. Start the meeting on time
b. Members will arrive having read the materials and prepared for discussion
c. Cell phones and other distractions are off
d. Share all relevant information
e. No idea is a bad idea
f. All ideas and opinions will be respected
g. The focus should be on goals, not solutions or personal intention. A solution is a strategy of how you meet your goals. The group will create solutions to an agreed upon mutual goal.
h. Stick to the agenda, or focus of the meeting
i. Before the meeting ends, the group will jointly design next steps that demonstrate the level of commitment necessary to succeed
4. Time Management – be on time and stick to the meeting timeframe. If the meeting requires visual aids or the use of equipment, give yourself an extra 15 minutes to set up. If the discussion looks like it will go long, reschedule that item for another time. It may be because attendees do not have enough information. Tell the attendees that you will research their questions, or give other attendees the opportunity to do the same before the next meeting.
5. Closing Meetings – send a follow-up with a summary of decisions and assignments that came from the meeting. Include any non-participants who may need to be informed.
If you are not the meeting coordinator, you can still facilitate meetings with the following steps:
· Start meetings on time. If the meeting holder is late, wait 10 minutes, and then send a polite request to reschedule.
· Request an agenda and meeting material the day before the meeting. At first, you may not get anything back. Sick 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 actions steps that you will be taking as a result of the meeting.
