Death by Meetings?
How to Run an Effective and Productive Meeting
This week on the Public Speaker I talk about how to plan and deliver effective and productive business meetings. Here’s a quick summary, but you can listen to the episode here. (It’s less than 10 minutes.)
- Know and state the purpose of your meeting. Meetings are good for coming to resolution. If you are sharing information perhaps another approach is better.
- Know and state the idea outcome. This motivates participants to achieve it.
- Include the purpose and outcome on the agenda.
- List required and optional attendees.
- For each topic list who, what, and how long. Ex. Review conference location – Paul G. 3 min
- Include breaks and social time on the agenda.
- Send out agenda at least a day in advance.
- Start and end on time, even if everyone is not there. Return from breaks on time too.
- Mange time by assigning limits to each segment and using a timer.
- Use a two-minute warning system to alert participants they are about to go over.
- After each segment get explicit, public ownership of tasks.
- Maintain a positive engaged environment by assigning a facilitator who asks questions and encourages feedback from all participants.
- Have a rule that only one person speaks at a time.
- Latecomers shouldn’t be embarrassed, but they shouldn’t be “caught-up” either.
- Be sure to greet and say good-bye to all meeting participants. It’s good manners and it’s good for networking.
- Verbally express support of good ideas.
- Insist on no blackberries, no phone conversations in room, and maybe even no laptops!
- Follow-up the meeting by distributing the notes quickly and updating project plans.
While researching for this episode I found a few, fresh, interesting ideas. I talked about them in this posting on my Art of Speaking Business Blog. Look at the bottom of the post.
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