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Running Effective Meetings

Meetings are wonderful tools for generating ideas, expanding on thoughts and managing group activity. But this face-to-face contact with team members and colleagues can easily fail without adequate preparation and leadership.

The Importance of Preparation

To ensure everyone involved has the opportunity to provide their input, start your meeting off on the right foot by designating a meeting time that allows all participants the time needed to adequately prepare.

Once a meeting time and place has been chosen, make yourself available for questions that may arise as participants prepare for the meeting. If you are the meeting leader, make a meeting agenda, complete with detailed notes.

In these notes, outline the goal and proposed structure of the meeting, and share this with the participants. This will allow all involved to prepare and to come to the meeting ready to work together to meet the goal(s) at hand.

The success of the meeting depends largely on the skills displayed by the meeting leader. To ensure the meeting is successful, the leader should:

• Issue an agenda
• Start the discussion and encourage active participation
• Work to keep the meeting at a comfortable pace – not moving too fast or too slow
• Summarize the discussion and the recommendations at the end of each logical section
• Ensure all participants receive minutes promptly

While these tips will help ensure your meeting is productive and well-received, there are other important areas that need to be touched on to make sure your meeting and negotiation skills are fine-tuned.

Managing a Meeting

Choosing the right participants is key to the success of any meeting. Make sure all participants can contribute and choose good decision-makers and problem-solvers. Try to keep the number of participants to a maximum of 12, preferably fewer. Make sure the people with the necessary information for the items listed in the meeting agenda are the ones that are invited.

Tip: Stop for a minute to consider the hourly cost to your organization of the people attending your meeting. You'll realise that calling a meeting is expensive, so it's important to ensure that every person attending and every minute of your meeting adds value. So don't invite people who won't participate but will simply report back to their boss or team (sending a copy of the minutes will be a more effective way of achieving this). Equally, don't use meetings to tell people things that could be communicated just as effectively by email or memo.

If you are the leader, work diligently to ensure everyone’s thoughts and ideas are heard by guiding the meeting so that there is a free flow of debate with no individual dominating and no extensive discussions between two people. As time dwindles for each item on the distributed agenda, you may find it useful to stop the discussion, then quickly summarize the debate on that agenda item and move on the next item on the agenda.

When an agenda item is resolved or action is agreed upon, make it clear who in the meeting will be responsible for this. In an effort to bypass confusion and misunderstandings, summarize the action to be taken and include this in the meeting’s minutes.

Time Keeping

Meetings are notorious for eating up people's time. Here are some ways of ensuring that time is not wasted in meetings:

• Start on time.
• Don't recap what you've covered if someone comes in late: doing so sends the message that it is OK to be late for meetings, and it wastes everyone else's valuable time.
• State a finish time for the meeting and don't over-run.
• To help stick to the stated finish time, arrange your agenda in order of importance so that if you have to omit or rush items at the end to make the finish time, you don't omit or skimp on important items.
• Finish the meeting before the stated finish time if you have achieved everything you need to.

Issuing Minutes

Minutes record the decisions of the meeting and the actions agreed. They provide a record of the meeting and, importantly, they provide a review document for use at the next meeting so that progress can be measured – this makes them a useful disciplining technique as individuals' performance and non-performance of agreed actions is given high visibility.

The style of the minutes issued depends on the circumstances – in situations of critical importance and where the record is important, then you may need to take detailed minutes. Where this is not the case, then minutes can be simple lists of decisions made and of actions to be taken (with the responsible person identified). Generally, they should be as short as possible as long as all key information is shown – this makes them quick and easy to prepare and digest.

It is always impressive if the leader of a meeting issues minutes within 24 hours of the end of the meeting – it's even better if they are issued on the same day.

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