Have you ever said you were happy to get out of the meeting to go do real work? I have, and the reality is meeting’s don’t need to be that way if people would follow a few simple rules.
- Have a definitive purpose, and ensure people know the purpose of the meeting.
- No Agenda, No Meeting. I know of a couple consulting firms
where internal policy is if there is no agenda sent out prior to the
meeting…it’s cancelled. I think that’s a great policy, but it
needs to be taken further. The Agenda should help drive the
meeting – so I suggest the Intel method for meeting Agenda’s.
– Identify each topic with a goal (inform/discuss/decide/review/brainstorm), a timeline, and if necessary a how a decision will be made (autocratic, democratic, consensus, autocratic with discussion). Identify the most critical decisions. - Identify the right stakeholders, and invite only those who need to attend.
- Time is money, so be aware of the cost of poorly run meetings. Google has a simple program that calculates the average salary of all the attendees, multiplies it by the number of attendee’s and then displays the cost as it increases each minute during the meeting.
For more on effective meetings:
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