Planning and managing meetings is a skill that does not come naturally to many managers. However, a meeting that is badly planned and run can result in a de-motivating, dull and unproductive waste of time, as opposed to the breath of fresh air that some meetings can be when run effectively.

Some of the things to look at if you want to achieve an effective meeting include:

1. Know what you want to talk about in the meeting.  Make a list of everything you want to cover, then go through that list, and remove all topics that aren’t essential, or can be dealt with in other ways.
2. Create an agenda for the meeting to keep things moving.  Give everything rough timings.  It is okay if things go over, but you need to try and keep on track as much as possible.
3. Make sure that the meeting is required - don’t have meetings for the sake of having meetings.  Look at the agenda - is the meeting really required, or can it the the issues be dealt with in other ways?
4. Make sure all the people that need to know the information discussed ion the meeting are going to attend the meeting.  There is little point in having a meeting if you then have to repeat the meeting to people who should have been there but were not.  This can also result in miscommunication and loss of detail.
5. If you find yourself having meetings where things that aren’t on the agenda get discussed a lot more than things that are on the agenda, then you need to look at the underlying cause of this.  Is there a reason why the things that are causing debate aren’t down as discussion topics on the agenda?  Did you simply not realise how important the issue was?  As the leader of the meeting, it is important that you spot such issues and make sure that they are dealt with.

These are a few things to help with your meetings.  Remember, the best managers have meetings that last just long enough to achieve every thing required, occur just often enough that everything is dealt with in a timely fashions, and accomplish more than is required.

Related posts:

1. Meetings And Agendas
2. Making A Meeting Not A Waste OF Time
3. Get the most out of your meetings

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