Keys to Unlocking Productive Meetings

By: Rorie Wilson

Every once in a while, we have to take time to review the fundamentals. For golfers, it might mean taking a couple hours to head to the range and reassess your setup including ball position and your grip. All the fancy adjustments to your swing plane, weight distribution and the like become secondary to getting yourself setup properly in the first place. In business, the review process often means looking at how major decisions are made and how key activities are performed on a daily basis. In business, the equivalent to the golfer's setup becomes the business meeting.

Unfortunately for many organizations, the value of meetings has been reduced to nothing more than social time with associates. In some places, the term "meeting" may generate grumbles or even snickers by those that have not seen any good come of the last number of meetings.

Over the past several decades, more than a few have felt this way. Meetings have been described as:

If your workplace meetings are ineffective or inefficient, this may become the single most important area of focus as you launch forward into this new century. Effective meetings become vehicles to successfully initiate and carry through decisions and change in your workplace.

When working with senior managers in a meeting setting, I will sometimes draw attention to the aggregate cost per hour to have all of us in a room for a particular issue. Salary and benefits alone for a handful of key people can easily run $300-500 per hour, and this doesn't include the opportunity cost of these decision makers taken out of duty for an hour or two. Understanding this cost often helps to focus. And there are additional tools and practices that can increase the quality of decisions and actions while maximizing productivity and efficiency.

The key objectives of successful meetings are threefold:

• To maximize the potential of the individual at meetings
• To include participants in planning, decision making and problem solving
• To conclude meetings with clear next steps

Unfortunately, many meetings start with little direction, take too long and finish without any clear understanding of what must happen next. This needs to change in order for meetings to become powerful events.

You can help transform any inefficient, out of control meetings into valuable sessions with a little pre-planning and the use of a few simple tools. Follow this guideline and see immediate results and energy at meetings.

Before the Meeting

1. Identify the purpose and desired outcome for the meeting

What is the purpose of the meeting? Is a meeting necessary, or would another form of communication work? What exactly do we with to achieve by getting people together?

2. Determine Attendees, Date, Time, Location and Duration

Who should be involved. When and where is the meeting to be held? How long should it be to achieve the desired outcome?

3. Create an Agenda and distribute it in advance of the meeting to all invited attendees

At the Beginning of the Meeting

4. Establish some basic ground rules for conducting the meeting

5. Assign meeting roles

At the beginning of each meeting, make sure there is one person who is leading the meeting (A facilitator), one person monitoring the time and keeping things moving along (timekeeper) and one person who documents key discussions and decisions (scribe).

During the Meeting

6. Follow the agenda

Use the agenda to guide the meeting and stay on time. If an issue becomes a hot one and there is no time to deal with it in the agenda, consider taking outside the meeting in the form of a task force to report out at the next meeting.

7. Document action items

This is perhaps the most important par of the meeting. Have the person taking meeting minutes document all action items that stem from the meeting. When you hear a "I'll have to ." or "Let's call so and so .", that is an action item. For each action item, write down the action, who is responsible and the date at which it is due. At the next meeting, reviewing the action items becomes the first agenda item.

At the End of the Meeting

8. Conclude the meeting with a meeting evaluation.

A simple meeting checklist should be completed after each formal meeting. It becomes the guide for improving the next meeting of that particular group. Ask attendees: Did the meeting start on time? Was an agenda furnished in advance of the meeting? Was the agenda used to guide the process? Add some of your own. Identify what went well and what didn't, and focus on improvement in future meetings.

9. Photocopy the action items and distribute them to attendees.

Sound like extra work? It is, but only for a short period of time. Within three or four meetings, you will realize noticeable improvements in the number and quality of decisions and actions from your meetings. After a dozen meetings, these effective practices will start to become a natural way of doing business. And that is a lot less work than turning your inconsistent hack into a fluid, repeatable golf swing.