Have you ever attended a meeting and wondered why? Worse, have you ever attended a regular weekly meeting and wondered why every week?
I have.
 When I was a young manager, in my previous career, there used to be a ‘Section Heads’ meeting every week. They were time consuming (they’d take an entire morning), expensive (imagine how much a three-hour meeting involving up to 12 managers actually costs – and then add a bit on for all the overtime used ‘catching up’), and boring.
Mostly, they were ineffective. One of the reasons they were ineffective is that a lot of time was spent on a ‘weekly update’ from each section head, with each section head seemingly trying to find lots to say in order to prove how busy they’d been compared to their colleagues.
Six Golden Rules: Here are six golden rules that will help you make meetings more effective than our Section Heads used to be: - Have an agenda and clear goal.
- Only involve those necessary for you to achieve that goal.
- Start on time.
- Have a facilitator/chair who can keep the meeting on track.
- Agree what’s been agreed and what is going to be done next, and by whom.
- Finish on time.
How We Help: Apart from The Ineffective Meeting, mentioned above, there are some great training materials in Trainers’ Library that will help your participants run and participate in more effective meetings, including:
Meetings: A practical module, where participants consider a real meeting they need to organise or attend and how it could be made time efficient.
I hope you find some of these help you to help your participants run and participate in more effective meetings than the ones I used to! |