Management Skills:Running Effective Meetings

Running Effective Meetings

If there is a unifying concept in business, it is that "meetings are a bloody waste of time." The antipathy to meetings is universal, crossing boundaries of industry, rank, and income. A dispassionate observer of business customs might be moved to conclude that the prevalence of such a despised practice is an attempt to create unity through shared misery.

This is the myth. The reality is different. People do not hate meetings, they hate aspects of meetings such as the wait for latecomers, personal attacks, irrelevancies, bombast, and the too-frequent sense that nothing was achieved. Remove or minimize these irritants, and people will enjoy your meetings because they enjoy shared accomplishment.

One of your goals as a project manager should be to conduct meetings that your people will await with expectation, join with enthusiasm, and leave with satisfaction.

You will conduct three types of meetings: presentations to disseminate information; information-gathering meetings, which seek answers to specific questions; and problem-solving meetings, which attempt to solve a problem or address an opportunity. Of these three types, problem-solving meetings are the most complex to run because they require attendees to present opinions and defend positions. In other words, they must deal with egos and personal issues, which presentations and information-gathering meetings can usually sidestep.

Closed vs. Open Meetings

Problem-solving meetings can be either closed or open. In a closed meeting, the leader presents the problem or opportunity, gives alternatives and their advantages and disadvantages, and makes a recommendation. The job of the attendees is to pick one of the solutions. Sometimes, the recommendation is a so-called straw man that the attendees are expected to challenge and reconstruct.

In an open meeting, the leader presents the problem or opportunity and  leaves it to the attendees to define the alternatives and craft a solution.

Holding open meetings, with their apparent virtues of democracy, participation, and creativity, has become the correct thing to do. However, the often-reviled closed approach is, in fact, more effective in solving most of the problems you will encounter on a project. Open problem solving is suited for larger issues, such as corporate mission or strategy, or for problems that appear unique and intractable. Closed problem solving is better for operational problems where there are a few well-understood alternatives. There is little point in "getting creative" over technical or business issues that have been solved by thousands of others before you. While it is possible that an amazingly innovative solution to a conventional problem will emerge from a brainstorming session, it is more likely that the attendees will indulge in acrimonious debates in support of their own favored conventional approaches.

Perhaps the most popular form of open problem-solving meeting is brainstorming, which few meeting leaders understand, and which most treat as an informal bull session. Brainstorming sessions are not unstructured, and leading them is not easy. Anyone who tries to lead a brainstorming session without proper training or preparation will have people wondering why they are wasting their time. If such meetings are part of your company's culture, make sure that you or anyone else who will lead them is properly trained in facilitation.

Before you agree to lead or participate in an open problemsolving meeting, ask yourself the following: "Has this problem been dealt with before?" "Are there reasonably well-defined solutions to the problem?" "Could I come up with a satisfactory answer by meeting with one or two people privately?" If the answer to all three questions is yes, you don't need a meeting. Above all, do not let team members (yours or the client's) avoid their responsibilities for solving problems by suggesting, "Let's get together to brainstorm a creative solution.''

Four Steps to Planning a Successful Meeting

1. Define your outcome. What do you want the meeting to achieve, and what will constitute success? If you cannot state clearly why you are there, nobody else will be able to. When people do not understand the purpose of a meeting, they do not quietly await clarity, they impose their own purposes. As the volume, speed, pitch, and emotional levels increase, you end up with the acrimony that gives meetings a bad name.

The outcome of a meeting should be properly framed. That is, it should be specific, be measurable, be achievable, respect values, and be timely. See "Outcome Framing."

2. Select your attendees. Who needs to be there? Make sure that you invite only those who, by virtue of their knowledge or position, can contribute to the outcome. You will be tempted-and sometimes pressured-to expand the number of people, partly to ensure greater coverage of the issue and partly to avoid injured feelings or political reverberations. Resist the temptation. Invite the 20 percent of the people who can handle 80 percent of the issues, then fill in the missing 20 percent later. If you think you may need detailed information or a quick decision from people who are not major participants, have them on standby, but respect their time. If you invite them, you will waste not only their time but everyone else's by having to review the issues for their benefit.

3. Plan the agenda. Meetings in which the leader starts by requesting agenda items from the audience are doomed to failure. Start the meeting with a clear agenda, which you may hand out or write on a board or flip chart. The agenda is open for discussion, and some people may request that items be added, but it is rare that attendees reject an agenda.

There are three items that must accompany each agenda: introductions, objectives, and other issues. The purpose of introductions is not only so that the attendees will know one another, it is to provide the rationale for each person's presence. For example, if you are in a steering committee meeting and Fred is filling in for Mary, who could not attend, introduce Fred and explain why he is there. Otherwise everyone, including those who know him, will wonder why. One effect of good introductions is that when people have questions, they will know whom to ask.

The objectives of the meeting are as important for the attendees as for the leader. Everyone must know what is necessary for success and must be committed to working for it. Furthermore, with agreement on the objectives, you have a powerful tool for controlling the meeting when it goes off course. Therefore, your second agenda item is to present the objective and to get agreement. This can be one of the most productive parts of the meeting. If the attendees agree on the objectives, the meeting will be far easier to control. If they do not, you have uncovered a more fundamental problem than the one you hoped to discuss.

A planned discussion period at the end simply lets people know that there will be time for them to present any other issues that are relevant. In practice, most of the discussion will have taken place before the end of the meeting, but the presence of "other issues" on the agenda reassures the participants that there will be an opportunity for a complete discussion.

When you are planning an agenda, time it. If the meeting includes some presentations, make sure that the presenters know what their time limits are and that you will enforce them. You need to know, throughout the meeting, whether or not you are on time.

4. Identify potential problems. Where is the meeting likely to founder? Are there contentious issues that will spark prolonged debate? Are there personalities that will clash or people who will try to dominate the meeting? If you can identify these problems in advance, you can minimize the chance that you will be blindsided in the meeting itself.

There are a range of approaches for dealing with problem issues or personalities, such as avoiding the problem by omitting it, arranging a truce in private, or confronting people in the open. The method you use will depend upon your organization and your personal approach, but the first step is always to identify where the problems will arise.

Nine Steps to Running a Successful Meeting

1. Stay on track. When you are leading a meeting, your most powerful tool is the set of objectives. When someone wanders off the topic, you have the right and the obligation to say, "How does this relate to our objectives?" Most people will apologize or at least stop, and your audience will appreciate not being dragged off course. Staying on track is critical in a problem-solving meeting when some participants begin to assign blame. You can point out that the purpose of the meeting is to find a remedy, not to identify the guilty.

2. Be flexible. Sometimes, someone will say, "This is off the subject, but I think it's important." If the point seems important to you, ask whether you should change the objectives or schedule a separate meeting for the new issue, and get concurrence from the audience. Do not automatically reject any new directions that arise during a meeting. After all, something may have happened that changes the issue entirely.

3. Control the physical. Unless you are the undisputed leader of the group, stand up during the meeting. The moment you sit down, you have become just one more attendee, and when you yield the floor to someone else, you yield control. It is fine to allow participants to come to the front of the room to make their points, but remain standing, and be prepared to intervene if the topic strays from the objectives.

Pick a place near the whiteboard or flip chart that is the focal point of the room and stay there. Remember that whoever controls the pen controls the meeting.

4. Identify the mood. Be aware of the mood of the participants. Are they involved or bored? Friendly or hostile? Responsive or flat? If your meeting is a presentation, you may be too occupied to conduct mood checks, so ask a colleague to monitor the group and signal you to speed up, slow down, or adjust your approach.

5. Vary the pace. Handle each agenda item differently. If you are gathering information, then in some cases, ask for input generally from the room. In others, go around the room soliciting comments from each person. In others, break the audience into small subgroups to consider an issue and come up with an approach. If each such segment of your meeting is no more than fifteen minutes long, there will be no time for audience boredom or antipathy.

6. Respect time. Respecting time means three things: Start on time, end on time, and handle each agenda item on time. If you have spent forty-five minutes of a one-hour meeting on the first three agenda items with four more to go, your audience will be focusing on the clock, not the content of the meeting.

Some companies seem to take pride in never starting a meeting on time. Fight back. Begin your meetings when you said you would unless there is not a reasonable quorum present, in which case, allow a three-minute grace period, then cancel the meeting. If you delay the start of a meeting, you reward the latecomers and penalize the conscientious.

7. Ruthlessly stamp out personal attacks. Do not permit anyone, yourself included, to personally attack anyone else, present or not, directly or indirectly. Adjourn the meeting if necessary.

8. Be careful of humor. It is tempting to try to lighten up a meeting with humor, but much of what is funny victimizes someone. If your comic comments could make people uncomfortable, delete them. What you lose in laughter you will gain in respect.

9. Identify success. At the end of the meeting, review the objectives, summarize your progress, and thank people for their participation. Let them leave with a sense of accomplishment.