Benefits:

• People will actually want to attend…and contribute their ideas and wisdom
• More productive meetings–greater results in less time
• Rich discussions, leading to creative ideas and better solutions
• Clear decisions and commitments to action
• People more inclined to follow through on their commitments
  

Be clear on why you are calling the meeting.

This is an excellent test as to whether you need to call a meeting at all. If the main purpose is the dreaded “information exchange or update,” find another way to do this. Worthwhile purposes include soliciting input on an issue, making a collective decision, or moving a project forward.

Honor and respect the investment of people’s time.

When you call a meeting, you are making a “business” investment. Do everything you can as the meeting convener to maximize this use of your attendees’ time and energy. For each invitee, why are you inviting them? What do they bring of value? What will they take away? And don’t take it personally if they ask these same questions of you.

Prepare and send out an agenda.

Most people appreciate receiving a heads-up about an upcoming meeting. Your agenda should include start time, duration, location, purpose of the meeting, and the sequence of the agenda items. Include any pre-reading you want them to do but keep it brief. Pose any questions you want them to think about prior to the meeting.

Ensure the Chairperson concentrates on process, not content.

The Chairperson sees that the agenda is followed and steps in if the discussion bogs down, goes off on a distracting tangent or becomes stuck in conflict. For this reason, the Chair does not have the luxury of contributing much to the content of the discussion. So, if you are the boss and you want to participate actively, consider asking someone else to be Chair. If you do, for goodness sakes, let him/her actually run the meeting!

Keep the discussion moving, on time and on agenda.

The biggest complaints about meetings is that they move too slowly, bounce all over the place, and no decisions are made. Start and end on time! Pay close attention to the pace of your meeting. If you get behind in the agenda, stop and consult with the group about what to do: Move on to the next item? Drop some later items? Extend the meeting time?

Summarize decisions and action items.

A businesslike way to wrap up your meetings is to ask the group two questions. (1) What did we decide? (2) Who will do what by when? This ensures that everyone leaves on the same page. It clarifies the outcomes and it locks in, in front of everybody, what each person has committed to do, going forward.

Follow up on commitments made in the meeting.

If a course of action has been decided on and/or individuals make commitments to the group to do certain tasks by a specified time, you need to check up to see that these are done. You can follow up with people between meetings and/or you can build in a “report on progress” item on next meeting’s agenda.