Effective business meetings will allow you to optimize your productivity and that of your colleagues and improve the quality and timing of the group’s decisions.
Following basic meeting rules will significantly improve meeting performance, yes, performance. Focus, candor, respect, discipline, and communications are the key ingredients.
Let’s review these seven rules:
1. Schedule meetings only if you must
Do you really need a meeting?
If calling, messaging, or emailing can work, even in a group format, do it instead and forgo the meeting.
If your meeting goal is not best handled via an electronic collaboration means, then read on.
2. Identify a targeted outcome and share it
Don’t schedule your meetings without target goals. Meetings are not the place for surprises.
Include your meeting target outcomes in your meeting calendar invitations. You know how new ideas come to mind when you know you are working on a topic. Listing your target outcome on your invitations will work much in the same way, pre-engaging all your attendees and therefore multiplying that benefit.
3. Plan and use only the allotted time to reach your goal
Plan your meeting time agenda.
Allocate time for your goal statement, brainstorming, making decisions, defining takeaways, and assigning the next steps.
Calculate the total time that you need. Add 10% for flexibility if needed, but not 50% or 100%.
And, during the meeting, ensure that you move the group from one phase to the next, as planned.
4. Schedule only parties that will contribute
You know you don’t like attending meetings that have little to do with you while you have relevant work waiting for you at your desk. It makes sense. Your customers and colleagues feel the same way. Don’t be the reason they can’t attend to their work, if they don’t need to be in your meeting. Only schedule relevant parties. Those should be easy to identify during your planning.
5. Start And finish on time
Business meetings should be as short as possible and start and finish as scheduled. There is nothing magical about thirty or sixty-minute tranches. Why not 25 minutes? And, respecting the scheduled time is a basic professional courtesy.
Don’t discuss unnecessary or unrelated issues during your meetings. If separate topics justify a meeting, it will be a different one.
6. Communicating during the meeting
When you speak, share all relevant information and state your views. Don’t hide information.
Brainstorming is powerful. Seek opposing opinions where applicable.
If you don’t understand something, ask. Encourage all parties to ask questions when they don’t understand as well. All attendees should know that their opinions matter or they would not be in attendance.
When you ask questions, be genuine.
Choose respectful candor. Direct communication is the shortest distance between two viewpoints. Respect ensures the communication remains focused on core issues.
Focus on interests, not positions. Ensure that all conversations focus on advancing the meeting target outcome. By focusing on the common goal, participants will more easily align their thinking to the issues rather than to the positions.
7. Close
As you evaluate options, test assumptions before assigning the next steps.
At the end of the meeting, agree on the next steps, delivery material, ownership of follow-up tasks, and timeline.
After the meeting, follow up when you said that you would, and make decisions when you said that you would.