Define the Purpose of the Meeting
The starting point of meeting effectiveness is clarity of purpose. What is the reason for the meeting in the first place? Think it through in advance and ask why the meeting is being held at all. Guard against the tendency of slipping into the habit of holding meetings just for the sake of them.
Questions to Ask
There are some questions that you can ask to clarify the purpose of the meeting.
First, is the meeting necessary? Is there some other way that you can accomplish the objective? Is there another way to hold this meeting or to solve this problem? If your purpose is information sharing, can you pass information on by phone, e-mail, or through a website?
Remember, if it is not necessary to meet, it is necessary not to meet—because the meeting ends up being a major time waster. Whenever time is wasted, morale and performance suffer.
What would be the worst possible outcome if no meeting were held at all? If you find that nothing much would happen, or that business could be taken care of in other ways, then you should discipline yourself to not hold the meeting.
Second, who must attend the meeting? Who is absolutely essential to this meeting and, of course, who is not essential and should not be there? It is a big mistake to invite people who do not need to be at the meeting because they won’t be able to contribute or take away any value.
Crystallize the Reason
Third, what is the purpose of the meeting? The measure of clarity of purpose is that you can define on paper the purpose of the meeting in twenty-five words or less. If you are unable to do this, it could very well be that you don’t really know what the purpose is yourself.
Ask yourself the question, “If this meeting worked out perfectly, what would be the result? What would happen? What would people do afterward?”
When you are crystal clear about the goals and objectives for the meeting, when you can define the purpose of the meeting and why you are holding it, it becomes much easier for you to plan the meeting, the agenda, and the particulars that you want to cover.
Trying to Solve the Wrong Problem
In some cases, even when you have defined the goals and objectives for the meeting, you discover later that the meeting did not yield effective results. One reason is that you may have misidentified a problem that you wanted to resolve.
For example, in our sales consulting work, the purpose of many meetings is to resolve a familiar problem: Our sales are too low.
We will ask, “What else is the problem?”
The answer may be, “We are not attracting enough new customers.”
If this is the correct answer, the solution would be to change or improve the advertising and promotional activities to increase customer acquisition.
We then ask, “What else is the problem?”
The next answer may be that “our competitors’ sales are too high in comparison with ours.”
If this is the true definition of the problem, the solution may be to change our product offerings, offer products or services that are new or different, aim our sales efforts at different customers, lower our prices, or offer something new and different that sets us apart from our competitors.
Our meetings are successful because we drill down to the real problems that need to be resolved, not the surface problems that are easy to see.