25 Lessons Learnt on Conducting Productive Meetings
Tanmay Vora
Updated on
- Long meetings are not neccessarily productive. Same for frequent meetings.
- Infact they are counter-productive because people get drained in a long meeting.
- A meeting without an agenda (purpose) is not meeting but just a time-pass.
- Simplicity is the key when it comes to meeting. Meetings have to be simple.
- Quick meetings that conclude with actionable items energize people to go back to their desks and swing into action.
- Meetings should do either of these – educate, share, plan, update or decide. Read this.
- Meetings are a great way to build great teams, share commitment and demonstrate leadership. Read more from Steve Roesler
- One way meetings are never effective. Interactivity is the key. Having fun is the key. No one enjoys serious-type meetings!
- Asking right questions is the tool to provoke thought process of participants.
- Face to face meetings are far more effective in terms of comfort building. That’s what Esther Derby thinks too.
- Discussions are fine but they cannot be eternal and somewhere decision needs to be made.
- If needed, discussion and decision making can be done in different meetings. People can evaluate information shared during discussion before deciding.
- Playing a contrarian in a meeting can bring out better insights when discussing.
- Silence is concurrence and people need to speak up and express. Anyone who does not contribute in a meeting is not needed there.
- Bringing laptop/mobile phones in a meeting means you have enough to distract you from the core agenda. That’s what Johanna Rothman also has in her meeting rule book.
- If all participants are not needed all the same time, a few of them can join in the meeting sometime later. Michael Wade also thinks that meetings of more than 12 people is undesirable because personal dynamics become difficult to manage.
- Not documenting minutes (bulleted list of discussed items), action items and deadlines means no one will do anything about the actions decided.
- People will only take a meeting as seriously as the host takes it.
- Meetings have to focus on positive. Negatives may be discussed but digging graves of past actions just results in toxicity.
- Shouting or getting angry in a meeting is a sign of weakness. We don’t conduct meetings so that our blood-pressure shoots up. We conduct them for making something happen.
- Meetings should only be done for things that impact all participants. Discussing one to one specific things with someone in meeting will leave others uninterested.
- Being punctual is important. Anyone who enters later than 5 minutes after scheduled time should not be allowed. In all probability, he will start in the meeting with incomplete perspective. No one has right to waste everybody else’s time.
- Meetings is all about culture – people emulate behavior of people at the top. Effective meetings by the top management will model right behavior for others and frame the meeting culture of an organization.
- Meetings need not be formal all the time. An informal chit chat with a team member over a cup of coffee to understand, educate or decide can be far more effective than 10 people sitting in conference room doing heavy discussions.
- Anything over 60 minutes is a long meeting with higher likelihood of being an unproductive meeting. Okay, lets keep it 90 minutes! 🙂
Other great references:
- Seth Godin also has some great ideas to offer in order to get serious in dealing with meeting problems. A must-read!
- Jeffrey Phillips at Thinking Faster defines Meeting 2.0
Image Courtesy: Corporate Express Meeting on Flickr
Cartoon Courtesy: www.savagechickens.com
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