Leadership
We've Got To Stop Meeting Like This
By Roxanne Emmerich, CSP, CMC

Been lonely? Tired of working alone? Do you hate making decisions? No problem. Hold a meeting. You can eat donuts, draw flow charts, feel important - all on company time. It's the practical alternative to work.

We've all attended meetings during which great things happened in an efficient time frame. Then again, we've all attended the "meeting from hell," at which we planned to spend 20 minutes and instead spent 4 hours listening to unrelated conversation, redundant soap boxes and infighting and walked out with no conclusions, feeling wasted.

Many managers spend more than 30 percent of their time in meetings. The average meeting costs an organization $5,000 or more.

Productive meetings are necessary and easy once everyone learns the system. Just as a hospital has systems for treating patients, there are necessary systems for effectively running meetings.

Step One: Planning
Agendas are the road map to the productivity of the meeting. Most meetings don't have any agenda and those that do have only a listing of topics to be discussed. To get the most out of your agendas, make your agenda follow these guidelines:

• Make your agenda actionable: List desired outcomes on your agenda instead of listing that you will discuss filling a marketing position, be more specific. List that you are going to develop the criteria for the position. When you list that you will be discussing as opposed to specifically listing an actionable verb, you will probably end up only talking and not doing.

• Make your agenda time specific: So that participants may attend only the portion of the meeting that involves them, list when each agenda item will begin and end.

• Include an end time: Make sure that you list the ending time and stick to it.

Step Two: Starting the Meeting 
We get out of life what we expect. The same applies to meetings. If we communicate at the beginning that the meeting will be run efficiently and to solve problems, that's what we'll get.

Lay down ground rules at the start. Consider offering these and ask for others:

• Only one person speaks at a time.

• Stay on track.

• Offer solutions, don't blame.

• Give everyone the opportunity to speak their opinion before allowing someone a second opportunity to talk.

• Be creative.

• Have fun. Humor stimulates creativity.

Next, assign roles. Before you transact any business, assign the following roles:

• Leader:  The leader has three major functions: encouraging participation, dealing with counterproductive behavior, and keeping the group on track.

• Chart person:  If you feel your meetings last entirely too long, try having a chart person. This person should stand and record significant information on a chart or board.

• Timekeeper:   The timekeeper is responsible for keeping the group on target within the time frames you have laid out. This person should provide occasional reminders of the time remaining for each agenda item.

• Recorder:   The recorder documents all of the information so all attendees or people who are affected by the meeting will be singing from the same song sheet This is not the same as taking minutes because the recorder lists what task is to be done, who is responsible, and the time frame.

Step Three: Running the meeting
There needs to be attention paid to the people skills in running a meeting. You must:

• Encourage Participation. For participants to buy into the group's decisions, you need to know how people are feeling before they leave the room. We've all seen the meeting participant who nodded or remained quiet during the meeting and who we assumed concurred, only to find him or her walking down the hallway after the meeting sabotaging the ideas and undermining the group's decisions.

• Deal with counterproductive behavior. If someone breaks one of the ground rules, just refer him or her to the rules in a non-threatening manner.

• When its time to conclude the meeting, don't just stop. Make sure that you review what you have decided. Use a standard form to review the actionable steps, persons accountable, time line, and system for communication follow-up.

If you haven't tried these concepts before, you will be ecstatic with the improvements you can make in your first attempt. Then again, you may miss the donuts .