Strategies to Make Every Meeting Productive

Brief 

Make meetings effective by honoring people’s time, inviting only those who need to be there, outlining a clear intent and purpose and clarifying who makes decisions, as well as how and when those occur and a method for updating everyone, write Karin Hurt and David Dye. “We’ve seen thousands of managers struggle and get frustrated because they didn’t ensure this kind of clarity at the end of every meeting,” they write.

Insight

Horrible meetings are a cliché of the business world and with good reason. Too many meetings are a waste of time and don’t accomplish anything.

Minutes creep along while the meeting leader fritters away everyone’s time, people have meaningless conversations that don’t solve problems, and everyone is frustrated that they could be doing something more productive with their time. If the meeting happens online, people multitask (or wish they could).

When you don’t run meetings well, not only do your results suffer, so does your credibility.But bad meetings, while a cliché, aren’t inevitable. In fact, we maintain that people don’t hate meetings. They hate bad meetings – those soul-sucking wastes of time. There are six ways you can ensure your meetings are effective and energizing:

1. Don’t Waste Their Time
2. Know Your Outcomes
3. Get the Right People in the “Room”
4. Clarify Intent
5. Clarify Who Owns the Decision
6. Turn Meetings into Results

Six Advanced Techniques to Lead Meetings That Get Results and People Want to Attend

1. Don’t Waste Their Time

Let’s begin with one of the biggest reasons people hate meetings. They abuse our most precious resource: time.Effective leaders treat everyone’s time as a precious resource. Starting and ending on time is a basic meeting skill – when you carelessly let meetings run long or start late, or have a meeting you never should have called, you disrespect your people.