Meet market, making meetings work

What are your strategies for making meetings more effective? 

Your Rant: I hate meetings. Let me say that again. I HATE MEETINGS. Can you suggest any strategies to avoid them so I’ll have more time to get my work done?

911 Repair,

Scientists used to believe that homing pigeons used the sun to find their way from one place to another. Recently a study used Global Positioning Satellites to test this theory. Surprisingly, the researchers found the that birds didn’t use the sun, they followed roads and highways home.

Just as those birds used simple tools to get where they needed to go, you can use your meetings to end up where you need to go too. I’m not saying that all of your meetings will suddenly become productive, but you might be surprised how the following strategies can make many of them more so. For more strategies, check out “Death by Meeting” by Patrick Lensconi (Jossey-Bass, 2004).

Start with lightning round notes. Lensconi suggests that you begin your meeting with a series of reports on the major projects, each report should last no more than a minute. Keep it short and bring everyone up to speed on the major issues being faced and the current complicating factors.

Review key metrics. I’m a big believer in always being able to measure your key goals. How else will you be able to tell if you are making progress or lagging behind? Some metrics are hard to come by. But it’s well worth it for the group to come up with a handful of them that the entire group can use to monitor performance. Examples include tracking the employee turnover rate, inventory, comparisons to competitors, etc.

Establish tactical agenda items. Use the lightning round notes and metrics to establish priorities for the group to discuss in greater detail. It’s important to distinguish between stuff that is merely urgent and the issues that are truly important. It’s tempting to be drawn into the flavor of the week but the most effective meetings always focus on the most important issues.

Emerging issues. Every meeting needs to establish a place on the agenda for emerging issues. All participants should have a chance to raise issues that they think are important. Think of this as your early warning system to identify issues and concerns early.

Decisions or discussion? The best meetings I’ve ever attended are the ones that are action focused. The worst devolve into long discussions about stuff that isn’t important to the success of the group. That’s why it’s important to identify the issues that require action first, and to create opportunities for people to discuss issues only after key decisions have already been made.

I believe it’s important for people to come together to share notes, brainstorm and agree on a shared vision; especially considering how much of our communication today is limited to one and two sentence emails. Use these tips in your meetings and people will start homing in on great ideas and greater productivity.

911 Pulse:

Which movie title sums up meetings in your company?

• “The Right Stuff”, 4.5%
• “Risky Business”, 8.2%
• “From Dusk Till Dawn”, 20%
• “I Walked With the Zombie”, 67.1%

User strategy:

I’ve been planning and running all kinds of internal meetings for 25 years or so. meetings are made or broken on what I call preventions: a clear purpose to have the meeting, have the right people at the meeting, an advance agenda and decision process so folks know what to expect, all the players know their roles (meeting manager-not the boss, note-taker, subject matter experts, stake-holders, and an engaged boss/decision maker), reasonable ground rules, and a time keeper. give me those and i can deliver results.