Effective meetings

Are your management meetings productive?

"Productive" does not mean:

  • Discussing a huge number of items - usually operational
  • Following traditional meeting procedures correctly
  • Forcing the pace to end a meeting on time - and regard this as an achievement
  • Making a sparse agenda available beforehand (which is usually fairly meaningless as it conveys very little information. Has it reached you only a day prior to a meeting, leaving little time for preparation?)
  • Winning a point and showing up a team member
  • Insisting on detailed minutes (which invariably are only made available a day prior to the next meeting) and arguing about irrelevant detail and corrections

Can you justify the costs of your meetings?

Most management meetings are expensive and deliver few real results. Calculate the costs. (Meeting duration x hourly rate per participant (derived from remuneration plus pro rata budget overheads re each) x number of participants x number of meetings per month x 12.)

An effective-meeting approach

ABPLAN suggests this approach for monthly strategy meetings:

  • Agenda: Use a fixed agenda. Make the company's Monthly Balanced Scorecard (BSC) your agenda for your monthly meeting, which is a strategy meeting. Review what has been achieved and what the outcomes should be at the end of the next month. Do not insert or discuss operational problems. Keep such issues for an Operational Meeting.
  • Preparation: Insist on thorough preparation. The participants would bring their branch or divisional Monthly BSCs to the meeting containing details of their aligned objectives and the results/outcomes which they obtained.
  • Tough questions and realism: The chairperson should ask tough, penetrating questions and ensure that each participant is realistic about what can be achieved, the actions that need to be taken and the anticipated consequences. Eliminate wishful thinking. Do the participants have the capabilities for executing their ideas - within budget? Do they have the resources?
  • Eliminate old-fashioned minutes. The BSC grid on Excel has a column and lines in which to note decisions taken at the meeting under "Initiatives/Action Plan/Tasks". The exception is where an important decision obviously requires that detailed notes be taken for the record and posterity e.g. policy matters. Make such notes an attachment and place references to these notes in the BSC's Measures and Tasks columns
  • Use flip charts during each meeting. Each chart is a visible memory
  • Immediately after (or during) each meeting update the Monthly BSC on Excel - and send out the BSC (instead of "minutes")
  • Follow up: The Chairperson should, where necessary, personally do a follow-up after the meeting and ensure that people are on track with their actions (Know your customers)
  • Review achievements and obstacles at each meeting - and adjust plans, if necessary
  • At the monthly meeting, develop a new organisational Strategy Map and BSC for the next month. Do so in Excel or use tables in Word. (Believe me, costly BSC software is less effective in idea generation than a flip chart.)

For operational meetings, follow the same process and use a project-style worksheet similar to that of the BSC worksheet.

Next read "dysfunctions within meetings".

Ensure that you read execution  as strategy as holding effective meetings lies at the heart of execution and of getting results.

 

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Last modified: 24-06-2009