Meetings\r\nare vital in business, but they can also become time-consuming showstoppers when they cease to be productive. If\r\nyou start to get the feeling that your meetings are ineffective, here are 10\r\nhelpful strategies to employ.
1: Make meetings the exception and not the rule
If you\r\ndon’t have a reason to meet, don’t.
Instant\r\nmessaging, social media posting boards, and other online collaboration tools\r\ncan be effective means of getting people together on issues and resolutions\r\nwithout having to call a meeting.
If your meeting is about a complex issue, or you are working with a group where there are many known incompatibilities, it is best to hold a preemptive meeting first. By meeting separately with smaller contingents of the overall group, you’ll be aware of all the issues that could be brought up in the larger forum.
Once you know the issues, you have an opportunity to defuse them and to achieve consensus in advance of the main meeting. Almost always, this assures that your larger meeting will flow better and faster.
Pre-publication of meeting agenda items and goals helps everyone focus in advance on what the meeting needs to accomplish.
There are\r\ntimes when staff is weary, overworked, and hardly in a mood for a meeting. When\r\nthis is the case, order in pizza and go over meeting issues in a relaxed\r\natmosphere. This is especially helpful for lunch meetings that occur when\r\nschedules are tight, and there isn’t another time to meet.
By informing meeting attendees in\r\nadvance that the meeting will not run beyond its scheduled time, you can often\r\nenergize the group to get through all of the issues in the allotted\r\ntimeframe. This tactic works best when the room is booked by another group right\r\nafter your meeting.
I’m not a fan of long meetings, so I was surprised to learn there are actually “meeting mongers” — those are people who enjoy meeting just to meet. It is easy to spot them in meetings: They bring up side issues to the agenda so conversations can be prolonged, and they leave disappointed when the meeting ends.
If you lead a meeting with meeting mongers, it is important to keep these folks focused on the agenda, so you don’t lose control of the room.
People who\r\nstep in to prolong discussions because they sense the meeting is not going\r\nwhere they want it to can be tougher than the meeting mongers. They systematically\r\ntry to derail the meeting by taking the floor and discussing fine points of the\r\nissues so they can postpone a decision that is unpopular to them.
As soon\r\nas you see filibustering, step in immediately to stop it — the other attendees\r\nwill appreciate it. You should interrupt the person filibustering, tell them\r\nthe matter can be addressed “offline,” and get the meeting back on\r\ntrack.
If\r\ntempers flare and the meeting exchanges get hot, it is the perfect time to call\r\nthe meeting off with a request to reconvene at a later time. This allows\r\neveryone to cool off, collect themselves, and perhaps meet independently before\r\nthe next meeting to iron out the troubling issues.
Some\r\nmeetings become so dysfunctional that even the thought of reconvening later is unrealistic. In this case, the best\r\nthing to do is to call together upper management of both sides to ensure that\r\nyou have consensus in goals and executive endorsement before scheduling another meeting.
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Mary E. Shacklett is president of Transworld Data, a technology research and market development firm. Prior to founding the company, Mary was Senior Vice President of Marketing and Technology at TCCU, Inc., a financial services firm; Vice President of Product Research and Software Development for Summit Information Systems, a computer software company; and Vice President of Strategic Planning and Technology at FSI International, a multinational manufacturing company in the semiconductor industry. Mary is a keynote speaker and has more than 1,000 articles, research studies, and technology publications in print.
