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Successful Meeting Planning – Organize, Prepare, Execute
“Alright, everyone, grab a coffee and head to the conference room,” you say brightly, trying to manage enough excitement in your demeanor to herd the sheep into what they’ve routinely come to believe is probably another tedious and meaningless waste of time and productivity. Ugh….
Why do people typically dread attending meetings? Maybe there are too many unfocused discussions, or extraneous action plans, or a lack of engagement or inspiration. Perhaps they don’t believe the team is getting anything out of these meetings but endless droning and mind-numbing monotony. With so many unnecessary or unproductive meetings in the schedule, how can anyone accomplish their tasks? According to an MCI Conferencing White Paper titled Meetings in America, “Most professionals attend a total of 61.8 meetings per month.”
Getting More From Meeting
In a previous article I described how meetings can be managed in order to be more productive and valuable. As an executive coach I am frequently asked how, as individuals, we can be more personally effective in meetings and get more out of them.
Tim is working towards equity partnership in a city law firm, “I struggle to make myself heard in meetings with senior partners. They are dominant and loud. I don’t want to talk for the sake of it yet I am considered to be too quiet. How can I make an impact?”
Guidelines to Accomplish Successful Meetings
Although meeting styles and structures vary from virtual meetings to face-to-face ones, they are nevertheless crucial in order to transmit information and facilitate a collaborative team environment. With strong and successful meetings, teams can use all the skills available to them to create a project that realizes its full potential.
In order to get the most out of a meeting, the following steps are important:
Step #1: Make a realistic agenda for the meeting
Another Meeting!
Well…another wasted meeting. I know when time has been wasted when I leave a meeting not knowing what was accomplished or knowing what wasn’t accomplished. The culprit this time is one of my favorites: The side issue. This time, a senior manager spent one third of the allotted meeting time, discussing an issue with a few meeting attendees, that had nothing to do with the purpose or objectives of the meeting. This left much less time available to discuss what the meeting as originally called for and left other attendees sitting around, wasting their time.
This is one of the management issues I see on a daily basis, and it costs the company money! Imagine if the same senior manager found you sitting at your desk doing nothing for 30 minutes. Think they would be happy? No, but spending the same amount of time in a side tracked meeting seems to be acceptable. Meetings are important and are a great way to collaborate and solve issues, but only if they are managed correctly.
How Can You Manage Your Meetings Professionally
Meetings have become a part and parcel of the success of any business or organization. Meetings are needed for different things such as: employee discussion, sales discussions and other business related discussions. For this purpose organizing and managing a meeting professionally has become very important. There are many steps involved in planning conference meetings. The steps involved in planning conference meetings are tedious and one should have the proper skills and education to handle the entire planning process. To manage your meetings professionally you have to consider the following areas:
The goals and the objective of the meeting should be clearly defined. If the goals and objectives are not clearly defined then mistakes can take place. You might end up discussing something not important. The meeting will become boring as people will not concentrate until they know why the meeting has been organized.