In my experience in most Hi-Tech and Technology-driven organizations too much time is spent in meetings. Managers complain that they don’t have time for working.
I want to walk you through ways you can run more effective meetings in your organization. You will also learn how to focus your meeting so that they can be more productive. This needs to be done in a number of ways.
We want to focus the meeting on a number of levels
- Relevant participants
- Meeting goal
- Relevance of discussion
- Action items
- Meeting summary
Relevant Participants
When we call a meeting it can save time to prepare the agenda ahead of time and send to relevant participants. It’s important to try and limit the participants to those that really need to be there. If a good meeting summary or Minutes of Meeting (MOM) is created then these can be sent to other people that do not necessarily need to be present but would benefit from reading the Minutes.
Meeting Goal
Before the meeting
You want to call a meeting. Why? Let’s assume the meeting and following actions arising out of the meeting are a success. Envision that successful outcome. So before calling the meeting this is part of the planning process. It will also help you in identifying who you believe must participate and others that can optionally join. Send out the goal and agenda (sub-goals) in an email. You may want to look up SMART Goals – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely and define the Meeting goal and Agenda according to this.
During the meeting
The meeting goal should be clear to all in the meeting. Take five to ten minutes to discuss this as you begin the meeting also setting expectations, stating the goal and getting input to see everyone is on the same page. It is good practice to also include what in your opinion is a successful outcome of the meeting. Bestselling authors on self-management: David Allen in Getting Things Done talks about envisioning a successful outcome and Stephen Covey in Seven habits of highly effective people says “Begin with the end in mind”
Relevance of discussion
This is a critical stage of the meeting. It’s important to facilitate and also focus on every meeting. Continue to keep the focus on the agenda. If there is a topic that is taking too long you may want to stop the conversation and define an action to move this forward. You want to be focused on the agenda and not bring in new topics – this is not a problem-solving forum. Notice if what is being said is understood and if you can move on to the next point. This means focusing the participants as they speak and sometimes stopping them to say ” Valuable input! Let’s discuss ….” thereby moving the meeting forward.
Action Items
Action items should be clear with a date and responsibility. There should be enough time to define action items (if not during each agenda point), so at least ten to fifteen minutes of an hour meeting should be allotted to this. The action items are defined in the meeting summary.
Meeting Summary
Someone should be responsible for writing up the meeting summary which I also call Minutes of Meeting (MOM).
The meeting summary should include:
- Name of the meeting (Header)
- Date (Header)
- Attendees (directly after Header)
- Absent (list of people that should have attended but were absent)
- Executive Summary
This contains a meeting summary with the main points and is valuable and time-saving for top-level executives and others that did not attend but that should be informed. It contains the meeting goal and the main outcome of the meeting with any main points summarized.
- Details
This is a point by point form of the minutes of the meeting. Try to write clear summarized points. Preferably each point should be no more than one sentence.
- Action Items
Name of person responsible, action and date due.
The meeting summary should include Confidential noting if relevant. It is sent by email to attendees of the meeting and other relevant parties. Try and also keep the sending of the summary to a minimum. Everyone receives too many emails. Email subject should be meaningful. If the summary is in an attached file you may want to include the Executive summary and Action Items as part of the email body content. This saves time in opening the file.
As an end note try to keep meetings to a minimum – people need time for working. When you decide that a meeting is in order, try to keep the meeting to 50 minutes. People need time to get to the next meeting and its helpful as a time gap to do short tasks before the next thing in the day.
Samantha Amit – Leadership Coach and Mindfulness Practitioner
Samantha helps managers be more present, more confident and to focus on what and who is important, to excel and thrive at work and life.
Inspiring managers to grow and together make a global impact.
Transforming people and companies for the future.
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