Jul
15
2009
Overcoming Meeting Madness
Do you spend your week in countless and some pointless meetings?
Would you like your organisation to adopt some guiding principles for meetings?
As I was conducting a leadership retreat last week, one of the participants complained of “meeting madness” and requested that the team adopt a code of conduct for meetings. I think this is a great idea and so I have jotted down some principles that you might adopt for your team or company.
- Define the ‘type’ of meeting – is it to brainstorm ideas, evaluate options, make a decision or plan execution?
- Specify a start and end time – meetings do not have to go for an hour, you can start a trend by having 15,20 or 30 minute meetings.
- Invite only the people who need to be there – nothing is more of a time waster than sitting in a meeting that doesn’t concern you.
- Send pre-reading by email – make sure people come prepared and on time and that way meetings are more efficient.
- Start all meeting on time - if you wait, you send the message that it’s not important to be on time.
- No using phones or laptops – the exception is the laptop for a presentation which should be limited to 10 slides max.
- Identify a Chairperson – if the team doesn’t play nice or keep to time it is important that one person has the authority to call the meeting to order.
- Send action points by e-mail after the meeting – to make sure what is agreed to gets done.
- Avoid Friday – consider making Friday a no meeting day and see if people have time to finish off the weeks work and get some work-life balance.
Do you have any more to add?
A couple of yeas ago I was rushing to meet a new client, a CEO who required some coaching; as I was running short of time I chose to miss lunch and go straight to the appointment.