Successful Meeting Management

Successful meetings start with clearly defined subjects to address.

Set a maximum of three subjects at each sitting, as everyone should be taking actions away with them and these need to be manageable.

Clarify your aims for these items 

and consider what would be involved in strategically planning for their adoption, adaption, aggregation and/or alignment. Templates in the Guide linked below will assist this process.

Give everyone an opportunity to speak, inviting thoughts to be expressed on a round-table basis at key points in the discussion. This keeps the flow of conversation moving and provides interest for the group. 

Use visual documents, exercise tools, templates and informative resources to keep focus and attention on the matters at hand. Click on the link below for a range of juicy aids!

Successful meetings create the foundation for exciting and productive forms of innovation to build across the company. 

Timekeeping

This is critical - you do not want your meetings to turn into unproductive stretches, nor do you want one or two people soaking up the talk-time.

Ideally, your meeting will span no more than 90 minutes on the Agenda - that's 30 minutes per topic - adding Q&A for clarity and for different viewpoints to be aired and discussed. Go through agenda topics concisely, see who wishes to take action at the outset, and save deeper explorations for Q&A or private session where applicable.

Have a buzzer and timer available to assign up to 3 minutes for each speaker at any one time. The Chairperson should interject with a question for the group based on what has been said by the timed-out speaker to demonstrate due attention and respect.

Any other business is a call for written submissions which may briefly be outlined 

but is not an invitation to discuss extra items at this meeting. For this reason, in the interests of maintaining momentum, it is better to call Any Other Business after the set agenda topics have been announced but before entering the discussions on them.

You could put it something like this;

"Good morning, everyone. Today we'll be looking at [Subject 1] and getting your thoughts on that, then we will discuss the [Subject 2] before the next stakeholder meeting, and finally we will be introducing [Subject 3] next month and have to decide on appropriate actions to implement it successfully. So before we start, is there any other business that we will need to look at in the immediate term?"

This early invitation allows focus to be maintained at the end when actions have been allocated to attendees.

For a complete strategy guide to behind-the-scenes preparation for great meetings, follow the link to the full document here.