Mar 9, 2011
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Running an Effective Meeting
Meetings are not about you.
When organizing and running a meeting remember that it is not about telling everyone what you know or waiting to critique, comment on or approve updates from other people. You can do all that with email, phone calls and project management software.
Meetings are a team effort. They are a mini-project. You are pulling together a group of people to do something collectively that couldn’t be done individually.
- What is it that you want them to do?
- What is the goal of the meeting (why are you having it)?
- How will you accomplish the goal?
Like any good project, you should define and plan these items out well ahead of time. If you can, circulate the “why” you are having the meeting to key participants well before the meeting for their feedback.
The “how” to accomplish the goal should be spelled out in a well-crafted meeting agenda. An agenda should be more than an order of events. It is a plan that coordinates how everyone in the meeting will work together to accomplish the goal, complete with the assignment of the individuals that will make specific contributions to each goal.
Keep in mind that when you have people in a meeting you are spending a valuable resource: people’s time.
Interestingly, according to a statistic quoted by Steve Kaye (who inspired much of this post):
80% - 90% of all managers consider how someone runs a meeting as an important factor when deciding on promotions.
Anecdotally, the same can be said when running client meetings. Clients will gauge your performance on a project, in part, by how well you run meetings with them.
I certainly agree with you, Mark. I don’t want to leave important tasks on my desks just to listen to someone give me updates that doesn’t really relate to me. I mean, tasks are given to people on projects and I have my own responsibility to think about. The person who runs the meeting need to learn how to proactively engage the team as a whole and set clearly the agenda in a way that would not create more questions but rather provide solutions. And that takes practice and skill.