Successful Meetings

Successful Meetings by Michael Beale

Meetings can be time consuming, frustrating and if you take in account the cost of your time and travel, expensive. On the other hand meetings can generate ideas, commitment, resource and build valuable relationships.

How can we make meetings more successful?

Put effort into three things:

Attitude, Outcomes and Structure

Each on it’s own can help make a meeting more productive and to some extent pull in the others; however working on all three can make meetings surprisingly effective and fun.

If all the participants have a positive attitude and are genuinely interested in their own and others success then it is likely that an atmosphere is created that will lead to successful outcomes and give the space for a structure to develop. It’s worth considering individually what would be best attitude for you to achieve the outcomes you want.

If all the participants know that if the meeting goes well they will achieve an outcome that’s important to them; they will naturally be motivated to move the various discussions forward. On an individual basis it’s always worth considering what would have to happen at a meeting to make it worth your while.

If a meeting has an agenda where every participant knows they will have a chance to be heard; that the agenda items are allocated time slots relative to their importance; with the important, contentious issues first, attendees are likely to become more positive and outcomes are likely to be further clarified and achieved.

Common reasons how meetings go wrong:

No control, structure or summaries

Too many people / the wrong people / meetings too long

Implied and or vague objectives

Hidden agendas

Ego’s getting in the way of outcomes

‘Instant’ solutions are sought without being given the time to think through the implications

Some ideas of how these can tackled and managed:

Elect a chairman and timekeeper to manage the meeting on an ongoing basis

Plot the objectives, structure and likely timeline of the meeting beforehand so that the right people can be invited for the appropriate length of time

Possible hidden agenda’s can be confronted; you can choose to leave the meeting or end it there and then

Ego’s can be acknowledged and if this doesn’t work, confronted

Options can be brainstormed with participants being asked to report back later on the implications of various course of actions.

Michael Beale 's profile on the Executive and Business Coaching Network