Many people have posted on this topic. But the basic rules of running, and attending, decent meetings are broken everyday.
Here's a little refresher:
1. Fix a time period. Do it out of respect for your and everyone else's time, and to ensure you don't get lost in mindless details because there is no feeling of urgency to ensure all the ground you need to cover gets covered.
2. Stick to it. A few minutes before the end, do two things:
a) Decide on a follow-up meeting for certain specific unresolved issues. Schedule it.
b) Wrap it up by outlining the decisions that were taken, next steps, and who is responsible for them.
3. Come with an agenda. Even if it's not your meeting-- if the meeting organizer doesn't have one, you'll look good and it will be more productive and focused, and she will be grateful. Better yet, type one up and send it around to attendees before the meeting.
4. Moderate the discussion.
Stick to your agenda, and make sure everyone else does, too. Cover the most important points first, and unless you're missing a crucial piece of information, don't move on until the previous point is settled and next steps are clear. Don't let the chatty colleague do the moderating or she will go on 16 tangents and you will be there thrice as long. If a tangent starts hijacking your meeting, firmly and politely state that the topic could justify another get-together but shouldn't be discussed here, and come back to the points on your agenda. Let those going on the tangent follow-up if they want to. They probably won't, because it was a tangent-- if it had been important it would have been on your agenda.
5. Thank everyone for attending. A meeting is only useful if the decision-makers that need to be there actually show up, so make sure they will want to show up the next time you ask them to.
If you want or need to make some friendly, collegial conversation, do it as you're walking back to your desk, so it will be kept relatively short. You can't really conduct an in-depth private conversation in the hallway, but it's easy to get trapped with a too-friendly colleague in an empty meeting room.
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I think there are some great tips here, but they are very hard to implement - especially when the decision makers and those who call the meetings are way above you on the social ladder. Our publishers like to insist that the editorial team attend meeting where they essentially talk to each other. Other meetings that I feel I could actually contribute to, I end up left out of. And our meetings not only do not have an agenda .. we often do not know what they are about at all until we are in them. It's hard to come with a concept if you didn't know you would be asked! Tips?
ReplyDeleteDarn-- I thought i'd responded to this ages ago, but I see it either never posted or I never pressed 'post.' Oops. Better late than never:
ReplyDeleteMelissa, thanks for this. These 'rules' work best in a work environment like mine, which tries hard to be transparent and nonhierarchical, and that rewards employees taking initiative. Sounds like yours is pretty different.
Can you diplomatically ask your manager if you can skip the superfluous meetings? Would it be possible to ask to be included in the ones you felt you could have contributed to? And when you get a meeting invite with no agenda and no clues, maybe you can ask the organizer for more details, 'so you can come prepared.' Then, if she tells you, draft an agenda and send it around. Hopefully it will either push her to be on top of her game, or make you look good so you can move on to a better environment.
Hope that was helpful. Happy to try to offer suggestions on specific scenarios if you just want to bounce ideas off me!