Hold Effective Meetings

EASILY 25 PERCENT to 50 percent of management time is spent in meetings. Meetings are an inevitable and necessary part of organizational life. They cannot be avoided, so they must be made more effective.

The three most common types of meetings that you will have are 1) information-sharing meetings; 2) problem-solving meetings; and 3) meetings to announce new products, services, or people.

Always ask why you are having this meeting in the first place. Clarity is essential. If it is possible to avoid having a meeting, then don't have a meeting at all. Meetings can be major time wasters unless they are used properly.

Meetings are expensive. A good way to determine the cost of the meeting is to multiply the hourly salaries of the people who will be in the meeting and arrive at a total cost of taking those people out of the workforce.

In many cases, a meeting will be costing the company hundreds and even thousands of dollars. If someone came to you and asked for that amount of money in cash for an expenditure of some kind, you would probably be very careful in reviewing the expenditure and approving the amount.

Treat meetings the same way.

Prepare an Agenda

If you must have a meeting, always write out an agenda. As you write out the agenda, you will find that many of the items only affect one other person, who you can quickly telephone or e-mail.

When you write out an agenda for a meeting, use the 80/20 rule. Twenty percent of the items to be discussed will account for 80 percent of the value. Make sure that the most important items are discussed first, just in case you run out of time.

To run effective meetings, always start and stop on time. Parkinson's Law says that “work expands to fill the time allotted for it.” The reverse of this law is that “work contracts to fit the time allotted for it.”

If you don't have a clear stop time for the meeting, the conversation will drift in circles and the meeting can go on and on, with little result. You will, however, be happily surprised to see how many items you can cover when you have a firm stopping time.

Be Punctual

If you say that you are going to start the meeting at 10 a.m., begin punctually at that hour. Make it clear to people that if they are not in the room, they are going to miss the meeting. Some executives lock the door of the meeting room at the prescribed start time so that no one else can get in.

A good rule is to assume that latecomers are not coming at all, and just begin the meeting without them. Even if the latecomer is your boss, take responsibility for the meeting and get started.

Only invite people whose presence is essential to the business of the meeting. Sometimes we make the mistake of inviting people so that they will feel included in the work team. This is no longer necessary. People are so busy that they will always appreciate it if you excuse them from attending a meeting to which they cannot make a valuable contribution.

Let Them Leave

Allow people to leave the meeting when they are no longer necessary. Sometimes, only one item on the agenda is relevant to a particular person. If this is the case, tend to that item immediately if you can, and then let the person leave and go back to work. This is a good use of everyone's time.

As you discuss and deal with each item on the agenda, come to a resolution. Make an action decision. Assign a work responsibility with a deadline. Wrap up each point before proceeding to the next.

Over the years, I have been to countless meetings where discussions have been held and decisions have been made. Two weeks later, we are back in another meeting and nothing has been done. Why not? It was because no resolution was reached and no action was planned. No one was assigned the specific, time-bounded responsibility for taking action on a particular task.

Be Action-Oriented

My favorite question is always, “What is our next action?” Once everyone in the meeting has discussed an item, you or someone else can ask, “What is our next action?” You can even write that question on the board so that everyone can see that the point cannot be passed until some resolution has been made and some action commitment has been agreed to.

At the end of the meeting, summarize the results of the meeting. Repeat who is going to do what, and by when, and how task completion will be measured, and then thank everybody for attending. The more you make your meetings brief, to the point, and effective, the more eagerly people will attend your meetings and make their most valuable contributions.

When I hold my weekly staff meetings, the agenda consists of the name of each person in attendance. We go around the table and have people report on what they are doing, the challenges they are facing, and what their plans are for the coming week. As one person reports, each of the others is invited to ask questions for clarification. By the end of the meeting, not only is there a high level of cooperation and positive spirit, but everyone knows what everyone else is doing.

Don't Dominate

It is quite common for the meeting leader or senior executive to dominate the discussion. A good way to prevent that from happening is to assign the chairmanship of the meeting to one of your staff members, alternating this function each week. You will be amazed at how intelligent and well prepared others will be when you tell them that they are going to be in charge of the meeting.

Then, instead of dominating the conversation, you simply participate like everyone else. You will be amazed at the difference. Remember, your ability to run effective meetings is a critical executive skill. Meetings can consume an enormous amount of management time, so you owe it to yourself and your company to become absolutely excellent at extracting the highest value from every minute spent in a meeting.