From Brainstorming to Meetings II

More on getting the most out of your meetings.

In the previous article, we made a distinction between a brainstorming session and a meeting. We gave some basic framework for a brainstorming session in the first part of the article. Despite the meeting process is perasive and common, many executives take them for granted. The managers usually forget that meetings can be a terrible waste of time and resources unless they are properly planned and executed. In essence, meetings are important for communication among people in most companies and organizations.

There are different kinds of meetings, pertaining to the size of the groups, the nature of the meeting and the way how the meeting fosters consensus building and agreement among the team to important decisions. Managing a one to one meeting is different from a group of ten people with individual agendas sitting in a room and thrashing out the final decision. The nature of the meeting can be (i) communicating all the information, for example, roles and responsibilities of individual members or change in overall strategy and execution for that team or (ii) making decisions based on the knowledge of all the facts and opinions collected from various sources. It is important to ensure that your team enjoys the meeting process. Meetings can be the bane of most team members if you are a bad manager.

Keep it Short and Simple

In every meeting, the leader usually take the role of the chairman or facilitator. The chairman ensures that every item on the agenda is discussed and the meeting proceeds on time. The secretary in the meeting is another key player, for he or she is to keep track of the important points discussed in the meeting and later disseminate the minutes to the rest of the team after that. Some people like to adopt a third player to the meeting process. This person is the timekeeper, who keep tracks of the time. The timekeeper is an arbiter when a particular discussion goes out of tangent and forces the chairman to adopt measures to keep the meeting back on track.

Here are the seven rules in conducting a successful meeting for a chairman or chairperson. The key idea is to keep it short and simple.

1. Keep the meeting’s objective in mind: As the chair of the meeting, you must always remember what the meeting sets out to achieve. Suppose if the meeting is to discuss the approval of a logistics operation, you must stay on course and ensure that by the end of the meeting, your whole team knows exactly how the whole operation is executed and plan. Never end up changing the agenda of the meeting halfway. If that happens, it reflects badly on you who manages the flow of the meeting.

2. Create a well-timed and realistic agenda: At the start of the meeting, define the agenda properly and add the timing required for each agenda point. Here is an example of an operation meeting to how I usually start as the chair, “For today’s meeting, the time allocated for us is an hour. Our objective is to sort out the details on organizing the coming operation. Here is the agenda: (i) overview of our operation (ii) publicity and marketing of our operation (iii) execution of our operation (iv) finalize our roles and action points for the operation and (v) any other matters. For the first item, I will allocate five minutes and …” So, in this example, you laid out the ground rules of the meeting and it helps to give the others a perspective of what you want to achieve by the end of the meeting.

3. Be prepared in advance: Never walk in with an empty piece of paper or pen. If you have information which you need to pass onto the rest, do make copies of the proposal or information kit so that each and every member will get one.

4. Discussion-management process: You have to manage the discussion of each agenda point in a way that you do not sound autocratic and dictatorial. To ensure that happens, a good chair usually sought feedback and ideas from the other members. The key is to let everyone have a say but at the same time, controlling their flow. If you have a team member who beats around the bush and going around in circles about the same point, you need to cut the person off appropriately such that the person does not feel offended. The best sentence to say in this situation is, “I take your point but we have to move on.”

5. Stick to time: The way to do this is the following: suppose you have ten minutes for this agenda, you can use the following trick. First, you tell everyone that you want to spend three minutes to solicit everyone’s thoughts on the issue and then use the remaining seven minutes to decide on the course of action.

6. Plan, discuss and assign roles and action points: This is the hardest part of a meeting. Usually, the biggest failure of most meetings is the inability to decide and assign roles and responsibilities to the team. The secretary needs to make sure that the action point is well-documented so that the instruction is clear for the team member to execute. As the chair, you must be decisive in assigning roles and responsibilities and ensure that the secretary takes note of that action point. The arrow of responsibility has to hit the team member who will ensure that the task must be done.

7. Taking it offline: If a particular discussions went out of tangent or it is a specific detail which is crucial but will not change the overall objective of the meeting, the idea is to take it offling. Suppose two members of the meeting are the only people doing their own cross-talk, the best way to stop them from spinning the meeting out of control is to ask them to go offline and discuss the details. In the situation of making decisions, you can take it offline to solicit support and votes in pre-meeting with some members and perhaps, refine the action points in a post-meeting communication with others. Hence it is very important to note that the meeting is just an execution phase where things are decided and finalized.

The important thing in meetings is that you have to be curt and terse so that the time of the meeting is well-managed. Believe it or not, your charisma as a leader increases if you can end your meetings in a short time and ensure that the information are passed on to the team members and action points are properly allocated. A good leader can usually direct his team through efficient and productive meetings.

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