How many hours a week do you spend in meetings? Some people spend 20-30 hours a week, some even up to 40 hours/wk. Meetings take time and time is money. There are meetings that waste time and meetings that inspire people.
So, how can we make meetings not only more efficient but more effective?
A meeting is a process of communication that leads to result that begins before group assembles and commends after group dispenses. I now facilitate leadership and organizational effectiveness sessions for groups. Here are 7 inside tips (contact me if you are interested in more):
1) You have a responsibility and right to good meetings. If you a run meeting, you have a responsibility to make the meeting successful. Make sure you hear ideas that others would not have heard. Try to build off of others, use the “yes and” approach.
2) Effective meetings: An efficient meeting starts and ends on time and follows an agenda, but we never even know if real “work” got done. An effective meeting does something for organizations and balances being creative and having structure.
3) Roles: Understand the roles that you like to play and others like to play in a meeting. Roles in groups are really important: there is often a joker, cynic, dreamer, provocateur, delegator, leader, evocateur. My personal favorite: the evocateur, that is the person who is listening to the group!
4) Presencing: Be present. This is more than a physical location, a group must be mindful to what is being sensed in a meeting. Structure agendas where groups work 2 by 2’s, engage people, make them move around.
5) Update meeting agendas: Realize what the key topics are during the meeting. Create a schedule and adjust the agenda by topic rather than just having a round robin of updates.
6) Save the meeting: You can save a meeting even if you are not in charge. How? Acknowledge an issue, ask questions, summarize points, refocus an agenda, regulate to get dissention and agreement.
7) Evaluate: Do an evaluation at the end, a check-out or pluses and deltas. What went well? What could have gone better? Add the date and look at this before the next meeting.
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