They’re fun sometimes, even productive now and again, but group meetings can also be excruciating, demoralizing, and pointless. They’re particularly tough on creative professionals entering the client’s world without the benefit of having learned the subtle rules, faux pas, and internal politics that consume some offices. Plus, you’re going into the meeting alone or perhaps with a small team; either way, there’s no one but yourself to look out for your interests.
Chances are your client isn’t thrilled about yet another meeting, either. The average chief executive officer spends about 17 hours each week in meetings, according to The Wharton Center for Applied Research. Senior executives spend an average of 23 hours a week in meetings and middle managers spend 11 hours.
Meet the Clients
A good meeting should facilitate decision making, assist people in taking responsibility, energize the participants, produce results, and contribute to building team effort within the group — all as quickly as possible. But how many meetings have you been in that have succeeded on all fronts? Here are some tips to increase the odds.
If you’re a participant in the meeting:
- Gently determine if the meeting is really necessary. According to the Wharton study, managers said only 56 percent of meetings they participated in were productive and that a phone call or a memo could have replaced more than 25 percent of all the meetings they attend. Ask yourself: Can the issues be better handled by a conference call, e-mail flurry, or online collaboration? If so, kindly suggest an alternative, and save yourself and your client some time.
- Prepare yourself for every agenda, spoken and unspoken. You know the drill; someone calls a meeting for one reason, when really the subject is something far more insidious. Prepare yourself for all possibilities so you’re not blindsided once the meeting is called to order.
- Be active and present. Easier said than done in meetings that drone on endlessly. But think of meetings as your chance to exhibit your brilliance and wit. Help keep the meeting moving by staying on task, keeping side issues on the sidelines, and taking notes for follow up conversations or actions.
If you’re asked to facilitate a meeting, you can increase the odds of success if you pay attention to three areas; content, design and process.
- Content. In politics, the adage goes, “he (or she, naturally) who frames the debate, wins.” And so it is with meetings. You can’t get to the desired outcome if the wrong items are discussed. The first step is to frame the parameters of the meeting around key issues. Sometimes you need to do a lot of work before a meeting just to figure out what the key issues are. Sometimes the work simply has to be done in the meeting itself. Just never lose site of what the “what” is of your meeting.Corny as it sounds, it may help to type up an agenda beforehand and e-mail it around or pass out hard copies. There’s something about a written agenda that keeps people on task. Unless, there’s truly a good reason for it, stay away from PowerPoint presentations; it’s overkill, and your clients may feel you’re wasting a lot of time and money on presentations rather than on their projects.
- Design. We’ve all been here before: A meeting starts well enough but then somewhere along the way, the group gets stumped or can’t seem to get a handle on the issue, even if it’s well defined. One solution is to use a variety of approaches. For example, use the traditional stand-up-and-report method for updating the whole group, use brainstorming to flush out ideas, and use problem solving techniques for particularly irascible challenges. Mix up your methods and you’ll move the meeting along, keep people in awe of your skills, and have a greater chance of solving problems.For more ideas on meeting techniques, check out these easy reads: How to Make Meetings Work: The New Interaction Method, by Michael Doyle, David Straus (Contributor); First Aid for Meetings: Quick Fixes and Major Repairs for Running Effective Meetings, by Charlie Hawkins; and Breakthrough Business Meetings: Shared Leadership in Action, by Robert E. Levasseur.
- Process. Here’s where you really have to think on your feet. Are people participating? Are you allowing room for others’ ideas? Are you aware of dysfunctional or oppositional members of the group? Are people committed to the task at hand and enthused about the way the group is working to complete the task?
A meeting is a dynamic process that can be positive or negative. You can help by checking in with “the quiet ones” during the meeting, or discussing meeting dynamics before or after the meeting with people you feel are having problems. You can improve the process by making sure that one idea is discussed at a time, and, above all, everyone is in agreement as to how decisions will be made. If you pay attention to the content and design of your meeting, you can bet you’ll have far fewer problems with process.
Bottom Line?
The bottom line is that meetings usually fail because of a lack of preparation and/or execution. This is not much of a revelation, which makes it all the more startling to understand why people so often fail to take the few easy steps needed to make meetings succeed.
Read more by Eric J. Adams.
This article was last modified on July 18, 2023
This article was first published on April 8, 2002
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