2/28/2005
Meeting or Productivity
Reposted from MT -
How to Hold a Productive Meeting
This thought actually goes back many years to my past life working for AT&T. At one point in time, there was an executive in that organization who went into a frenzy over the ratio of counterproductive meetings to actually serving customers. It was a novel concept then, and it still is today.
So here’s a thought. If there’s a meeting and it isn’t directly with customers, sure it focuses on customers somehow. It has to be about customers. How we serve them. How we bill them. How we make them happy. How we win new ones. The locus of any meeting has to be customers.
Business meetings aren’t bloggers conferences. We don’t meet to bluesky concepts that nobody outside the room cares about. That’s what lunch is for. Or happy hour. We don’t meet to solve process flows in committee. We attack specific, measurable objectives.
If you’re going to have a meeting, there are some key components you need. Provide an agenda ahead of time. Don’t just expect people to create an agenda on the fly and then resolve anything. The most counterproductive meetings always seem to begin with “so what do we want to talk about?” If you don’t know what you want to talk about, don’t invite me to your quandry. You really don’t want to hear what I think your problem is.
Have a timekeeper. Be a timekeeper. Allocate time for items in your agenda and then move on. If you can’t solve a problem, assign it to someone, get some level of consensus that the group will come back to it, and move on. Kicking a dead horse of a problem that can’t be solved in a meeting is wasting everyone’s time. If you don’t respect people’s time, why should they respect your problem?
Start on time. Finish on time. Finishing on time is perhaps the most important value a meeting organizer can bring to the table. When I was teaching week in and week out, traveling every week to a new place and new class, I had three goals I set with each class at thee beginning of a session. These same three Ls apply to meetings.
- Learn a lot.
- Laugh a lot.
- Leave on time.
Laughter in meetings means don’t take yourself too seriously. If every meeting is deadpan, serious, crisis management, you’re not managing your tasks or meetings well. You’re getting on people’s nerves and probably driving yourself into an early grave.
Don’t try to eat an elephant in a single bite. It never works. Never. Pick manageable tasks, and structure your meeting around what can reasonably be accomplished in the limited time you have. Aim for achievable and stick to your agenda.
Rambling thoughts assembled while waiting for one of those meetings to begin.
*** mo:Blogged ***
Filed by Ken at 3:52 am under General
