How to run a successful meeting

In the course of your working life, you'll attend approximately, oh, seven million meetings.  Most of them will appear to be a big waste of time.  For once, when you take control of the mike (podium, LCD projector), don't you want your meeting to stand out as one everyone agrees was a valuable and productive meeting?

The key to running successful meetings is really easy and breaks down, like every good mantra, into three easy steps:  Prepare, conduct, follow up.  The problem is that most people only focus on the "conduct" part of the meeting.

Prepare for the meeting:

It simply amazes me how little preparation goes into most meetings.  This is why so many meetings are considered a waste of time - the thinking about the purpose, scope and outcome of the meeting was not done effectively and not communicated to the attendees.  It's like deja vu all over again.

To prepare for a meeting, you must define the purpose and the potential outcome of the meeting.  Is the meeting being called to make a decision, gather more information, give status to someone or some team?  Define clearly what you hope to gain from holding the meeting and the outcome.

Second, carefully consider who needs to be there.  Rather than invite everyone in your Corporate Contacts list, determine who is going to be interested and able to contribute to your meeting.  The smaller the meeting, the more oxygen for each person to contribute.

Third, build and distribute an agenda.  You're a productive person, right?  And you want others to be productive too?  Define the steps or milestones in your meeting.  An agenda with time frames gives the other attendees cues as to which topics are more important or potentially more controversial.  It also allows you to take control of the meeting by pointing out the time allotments and necessary other topics.  The agenda allows you to say in a meeting - hey I did some planning and this is my meeting - here's what we need to accomplish.  By distributing the agenda beforehand, you are educating the folks who'll attend, and giving them a chance to comment or edit the agenda.

Conduct the Meeting

Actually, frankly, most people stink at this too.  Conducting a meeting does not mean letting everyone say whatever they want, whenever they want to.  A well conducted meeting stays on topic, with one speaker and one idea at a time.  That does not mean everyone agrees!  Everyone should get a turn to speak who has something to say, and all points should be considered.  But not all points are equally valid and many speakers and topics will wander from the purpose and outcome of the meeting.  Control the meeting by encouraging discussion and encouraging active listening, but keep the focus on the topics and outcomes you've set.  A weak meeting manager will allow the discussion to wander frequently and that wastes everyone's time. 

Remind the attendees up front what the purpose and goal of the meeting is, and use the agenda to set milestones.  If the topic is difficult or very controversial, bring in a disinterested colleague to help facilitate the meeting.

After the Meeting

This is where meetings really get the bad rap.  Many people leave meetings with no clear decisions or action items, so they believe their time in a meeting was wasted.  To improve this step of the meeting, document and agree what the next steps or actions are as a result of the meeting.  Get agreement on who owns those tasks before the meeting breaks up.  Once you are back at your desk, write a short memo to your files and to the meeting attendees which recaps the purpose and outcome of the meeting and the decisions or next actions and who owns them coming out of the meeting.

This action suggests that you mean for your meetings to be taken seriously as part of the business process, and that tasks and actions will be assigned and followed up out of the meeting.  The intent and focus you present will help people understand that you take meetings seriously and expect them to be productive.

You don't have to run roughshod over people or turn to hierarchical tactics to run an effective meeting.  Put a little more effort into planning your meeting, demonstrate that you can effectively control the meeting and ensure a specific set of actions as follow-up. Run a few meetings like this, and you'll have them eating from the palm of your hand. 

Comments

[Peter]

Great post on meetings. Wish more people would follow some of those ideas. While it's great sometimes just to have a casual meeting, often we need to get something done and spend a lot of time re-hashing items or trying to explain them to people who don't need to know/understand. I especially like the reminder on the action items at the end. We have quite a few meetings where people just leave without knowing what to do next.