Tag Archive for: meetings

Team Meetings – How to Transform Your Team Meetings

By Duncan Brodie

You might have heard the term "death by meetings". While it is true that meetings can be a huge drain on resources, they do have the potential to contribute to great results. So how can you transform your team meetings?

Get the team setting the agenda

As the leader of the team, there will always be things that you have in mind for the meetings. Trouble is in my experience, when all of the agenda and meeting content comes from the leader, there tends to be huge levels of passiveness and disengagement. If you want to have better meetings, get the bulk of the agenda coming from the team.

Keep them short

I have during my career in accountancy spent huge amounts of time in meetings. What I discovered is that the shorter the meetings are, the more effective they are. This is partly because people are more focussed. It is also due to the fact that most of us have a very short attention span. One thing that is particularly helpful in keeping meetings short and focussed is to do them by conference call or webinar rather than in person.

Give people a chance to speak

If you are leading the meeting, you should be speaking less and listening more. You also should aim to take care to ensure that all of the meeting attendees get a chance to speak. There will always be a few who, if you allow them, will dominate meetings and not always with great contributions.

Facilitate well

As a leader of a meeting, you are as much a facilitator as a person who is chairing. Facilitating essentially is about ensuring that the ideas are collected, built on and an agreed point is reached. Think of yourself as the conductor rather than the musician and you will go a long way towards effectively facilitating meetings.

Only record key actions

There are a few meetings that will require formal minuting. Most don't and simply require a record of the key actions and who is taking them forward.

Make sure you follow up on actions

It's vital that you have an effective process for following up on actions agreed at previous meetings. Why? The simple answer is that if you don't, people will see them as unimportant and not follow through. Without follow through, nothing happens.

The Bottom Line

Meetings can be a catalyst to great results or just a drain on resources. So what do you need to start to do differently to get better results from meetings?

Now I invite you to sign up for my free Weekly Leadership and Management Success Tips at http://www.goalsandachievements.co.uk/?pid=26

Duncan Brodie of Goals and Achievements (G&A) works with accountants, health professionals, teams and organisations to develop their management and leadership capability. With 25 years business experience in a range of sectors, he understands first hand the real challenges of managing and leading in the demanding business world.

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Using motions to keep meetings focussed

Use motions as a discipline to keep the chairman and the participants in the meeting focussed. If discussion has to be limited to the motion under consideration then it should stay focussed, and this is a great vehicle for the chairman to use, and for other participants to use to remind people who digress from the subject under discussion.

If they have a different suggestion for implementation, and it is too far from the motion under discussion for an amendment, suggest it be discussed as a different motion either at this meeting or at a more appropriate time.

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Friday freebie – Making meetings work

This weeks free set of tips is ...

How to make the meetings you attend more effective and efficient.

Are you tired of meetings that spend hours of time and money but achieve no outcomes? Annoyed by lack of direction and beating around the bush?

As a participant, you have the power to turn meetings around, and get some effectiveness and efficiency..

If you would like to receive these tips, as always, just let me know...

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Good content/Bad presentation?

From a Commentary post at Meetingsnet ...

Don't Let a Speaker's Style Defeat Substance

A keynote speaker at Meeting Professionals International's MeetDifferent 2010 has been generating sparks from bloggers who followed the conference, not because of his message, but for the way he delivered it.

The speaker was branding specialist Marty Neumeier, who preached a philosophy of radical simplicity for organizations in search of products that are both good and different. The message was strong, but for much of the audience, Neumeier's style was his undoing.

Read the rest of the post ... and what do you think... should a speaker be hired if his/her material is outstanding, but presentation woeful?

10 worst things to do in a meeting

From B Hobson at the Customer Collective....

Why is it so hard?  We know these things ... don't we?

Meetings are often hailed as the No. 1 time-waster in corporate America, and -- unless food is served to offset the boredom -- the most tortuous part of the work day.
Who among us hasn't cringed as the office windbag launched into a self-aggrandizing discourse that was completely off-point? Pitied a meek co-worker who got trounced by the office bully? Or marveled at a colleague's ability to string together an array of buzzwords that mean absolutely nothing?
Yet no matter how mind-numbing things get, don't be lulled into thinking that meetings aren't important. The fact is, they can make -- or break -- your career. Here are 10 things you should never do in a meeting:

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Running Effective Meetings

 

While meetings are wonderful tools for generating ideas, expanding on thoughts and managing group activity, this face-to-face contact with team members and colleagues can easily fail without adequate preparation and leadership.  Article continues

Meetings 101

If you want to have more effective meetings, first you have to learn the basics. Here are some simple, easy-to-follow and proven guidelines that should be followed each and every time your group meets.

Print this page. Hang it on your meeting room wall. Write the guidelines on a poster. Memorize them by heart. Do whatever it's going to take to improve your meetings!

Guidelines you and your group can follow before, during and after your meeting

( more ...)

Running Effective Meetings

 

While meetings are wonderful tools for generating ideas, expanding on thoughts and managing group activity, this face-to-face contact with team members and colleagues can easily fail without adequate preparation and leadership.  Article continues

Meeting planning – the pitfalls

George Carlin, the legendary comedian who passed away last night at the age of 71 became famous for a routine called, "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television." But making lists of dirty words wasn't all this legendary comedian did. Most of his humor and insights were actually clean. And some of them offer sage advice for planning meetings. Here's a few:

Read on ...