Book - Successful meetings

At last! A book that breaks through and shows us in an easy-to-read manner how to put on successful meetings attendees will truly value. Watch out corporate America your meetings will never be the same again!

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Meetings and Road Trips

Managing a meeting is like setting off on a long car trip with friends or family. You need to plan your route, pay attention to the rules of the road, consider what will keep your passengers engaged and occupied, and always remember you have to get back home at the end.

Just as adults and children consider car trips to be tolerable as the only way to get to certain places, so too do business people view meetings as necessary evils.

Here are three ways to make an enormous difference in your meetings.

1. KNOW WHERE YOU'RE GOING

Most of us wouldn't start a trip through unfamiliar territory without looking at a map beforehand so we don't get lost. Preparation may be just ten minutes, but a little preparation goes a long way toward making a meeting successful. You want your time to be productive and efficient. Whether your meeting is with a five-person project team, 100 worldwide sales people, or an online multi-location group, you need to consider a few key items ahead of time.

• What is your desired outcome? If the meeting were over, and you were delighted with it, what would you have as a result? Do you want consensus on a course of action or new ideas on a recurring problem? Do you simply want updates on what everyone is doing? Once you're clear on what you want, you can state a clear Meeting Objective and share it with everyone at the meeting.

• Decide on the type of meeting. Most meetings have four possible activities: sharing information, collecting information, problem solving, and decision making. Many meetings are a mixture of these. For every agenda item, think ahead of time about what you want as an outcome. That will help you, and everyone else, know when you're on-topic and when you're not.

2. HONOR THE RULES OF THE ROAD AND MANAGE YOUR PASSENGERS

When you're in a car on a trip, the easy ways to ruin the experience are to get stopped by the police when you disobey the rules of the road or to have the passengers fighting and complaining. The same is true of meetings. Let people know what the guidelines are. Do your best to keep the dialogue moving forward. Listen to all viewpoints, but don't let one view dominate the others. Manage the time and discussion so that speakers change and participants are engaged. If you're bored, so are others. If you're tired of a particular voice, you're not alone. Use the following guidelines to keep the meeting lively.

• Be an effective chairperson. Be even-handed. Make and maintain good personal connection with your group. If you want active participation, avoid evaluating what people say until it's time to make a decision. Keep the information and dialogue flowing. And when you get to a decision point, say so publicly. State the decision (whether it's consensus or a decision to get more info or a selected course of action), then go on to the next steps on that decision or to the next topic.

• Manage airtime. Manage the meeting like a good traffic cop - give everyone his or her turn. Enforce brevity. If someone rambles on and on, paraphrase his or her point and then turn to someone else in the meeting. Draw out the quiet individuals.

• Handle conflict. The majority of conflict in meetings arises from misunderstanding between two or more people. Be sure each position is clearly articulated (without value judgments about opposing viewpoints) and understood.

3. END OF THE TRIP

There's something anti-climactic about getting home from a long car trip. The ride home seems endless when the anticipation is gone. This happens in meetings also. So end your meetings with a bang, not a whimper. Here's how:

• Finish on time. Honor the time commitment you made to participants. If you consistently end meetings later than promised, people will either make excuses not to attend your next one or find a reason to leave early.

• Identify next steps. A very frustrating aspect of meetings is the perception that nothing changes as a result of them. A way to ensure something indeed will happen is to identify and write down next steps - the agreed-upon actions to be taken after the meeting. Include what has to be done, by whom, and when. Do this on a flipchart or in some other visible way. And make sure attendees get the notes of the meeting.

• Finally, follow up on the next steps after the meeting. Let people know it matters that they were in the meeting. Check in. See how it's going. Ask if additional resources are needed. If appropriate, see if a follow-up meeting makes sense as a way to chart progress. Keep people informed.

Again, a little planning goes a long way in making meetings productive and even enjoyable. You probably already spend a lot of time now, clarifying decisions after the meeting or even trying to remember what decisions were made! Consider the cost of meetings when everyone leaves and remembers the tangents and not what actions will be taken. In this case, the meeting itself was ineffective and no one's behavior or subsequent action was changed. That's wasted time - a real dead end.

Peg Kelley, MBA, has been a professional facilitator for over 30 years. She has authored a booklet - 39 Secrets for Effective and Enjoyable Meetings - and publishes a newsletter of meeting management tips. Both are available at her website: http://www.meetingtoolsandjewels.com Kelley@facplus.com if you want to receive it.

Conducting effective meetings

An organization of any size requires meetings. Meetings help different people with different job responsibilities cooperate to complete projects and achieve objectives.

But as Peter Drucker noted, an abundance of meetings is a sign of a diseased organization. If you conduct effective meetings, they will become shorter and less frequent.

Here are a few guidelines for conducting effective meetings:

Getting serious about your meeting problem

Getting serious about your meeting problem

Do you have one? Some folks are going to eight hours of meeting a day. At Ford, they used to have meetings to prepare for meetings, just to be sure everyone had their story straight.

If you're serious about solving your meeting problem, getting things done and saving time, try this for one week. If it doesn't work, I'll be happy to give you a full refund.

...more

Book The Manager's Guide to Effective Meetings

by Barbara J. Streibel

In our increasingly collaborative work environment, the ability to manage results-driven meetings has become a critical career asset. Let The Manager's Guide to Effective Meetings provide you with a step-by-step template for energizing your next meeting, and transforming it from a roomful of clock-watching individuals into a collaboration of involved and enthusiastic partners.

(more ...)

Three kinds of meetings

Meetings are marketing in real time with real people. (A conference is not a meeting. A conference is a chance for a circle of people to interact).

There are only three kinds of classic meetings:

more...

Book: Meetings excellence

: 33 Tools to Lead Meetings That Get Results

by Glenn M. Parker and Robert Hoffman

From the reviews:

Meeting Excellence is a comprehensive resource that provides a wide range of ready-to-use tools that have been developed and tested by a meeting initiative within Novartis Pharmaceuticals. It is based on years of research observing team meetings, examining existing meeting documents, and conducting a number of intensive individual interviews in the U.S. and Europe. This important book offers the information and tools needed to prepare, facilitate, and follow up on all your meetings.

... more

Make your meetings work

Do you cringe at the memories of the meetings you have sat through?

So many meetings are unproductive, boring, and inefficient, that comedians thrive on jokes about them.

Classic ...

How many managers does it take to change a light bulb?
1) A roomful - they have to hold a meeting to discuss all the ramifications of the change.
2) None, they like to keep employees in the dark.
3) "This topic was resumed from last week's discussion, but is incomplete pending resolution of some action items. It will be continued next week. Meanwhile ..."
4) "We've formed a task-force to study the problem of why light bulbs burn out, and to figure out what, exactly, we as supervisors can do to make the bulbs work smarter, not harder."

Nevertheless it's not a joke when you are sitting through the frustration ...,
when you know that you are wasting time and money in meetings that aren't productive
when you cannot achieve anything because of the undisciplined "waffle" and going around and around in circles discussing.
.......
This eBook will show you how to save both time and money

"Make your Meetings work" the eBook ... gives you the secrets of organising your meetings so that they are more efficient and more effective.

This eBook gives you strategies that can make your meetings productive, saving you time and money - yours and the company's.

More information on Make your meetings work

Improve Your Meetings

Deborah Mackin, author of the new Team Building Tool Kit, talks about the statistics of a typical meeting and shares easy tools for making high performance, highly productive team meetings.

Meetings 101

If you want to have more effective meetings, first you have to learn the basics. Here are some simple, easy-to-follow and proven guidelines that should be followed each and every time your group meets.
Print this page. Hang it on your meeting room wall. Write the guidelines on a poster. Memorize them by heart. Do whatever it's going to take to improve your meetings!

Guidelines you and your group can follow before, during and after your meeting

Read on ...

The Manager's Guide to Effective Meetings

by Barbara J. Streibel

In our increasingly collaborative work environment, the ability to manage results-driven meetings has become a critical career asset. Let The Manager's Guide to Effective Meetings provide you with a step-by-step template for energizing your next meeting, and transforming it from a roomful of clock-watching individuals into a collaboration of involved and enthusiastic partners. (more ...)

Buy the book from Amazon or, if you are a Pivotal Gold Member, request your free copy. Not a member? Join here

Meeting Success Tip

You can make use of confrontation. Turn it around. Approach it without apologies, avoid emotional involvement and use facts. Then turn it into a joint problem solving exercise.

More on meeting success.

Don't allow phones in a meeting room

[From Robyn Pearce]

A very large international IT company asked for a course on 'How to run effective meetings'. It was the weirdest session I've ever run; a brilliant example of how not to run meetings. The trouble was, the CEO had a different work ethic to the rest of the company.

She'd been sent to Australia from the States to do the job, and had no family in the country. Her work was her life and she expected her managers to behave in the same way.

The session was a bun fight! People came and went like yoyos, phones rang constantly, and although everyone had chosen to come, the activities of a number of the group were so (unintentionally) disruptive that it minimised the learning
of the rest.

Article continues

Meeting Success Tip

If you want everyone's opinion, take note of those who have said nothing. When everyone is quiet, ask those people for their ideas.

Learn from our free set of tips on Using an agenda for meeting success. Ask for them now.