How to run effective meetings

How to Run Effective Meetings

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What is an “effective meeting?”

Definition of Effective: successful in producing a desired or intended result; fulfilling a specified function in fact.

• Know who is necessary for attendance and who isn’t.  You may change the meeting time or location for the people that are necessary for the best outcome.
• Invite the right people to the meeting. They are the right person, if they are necessary to add to the meeting or necessary to take away something from the meeting.
• Make sure that you don't have all “yes people” in the room. Challenges are good for critical thinking.
• If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.

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The “how to”

Create an agenda and send it out in advance of the meeting

• Avoid impromptu meetings – they are many times not productive due to information shortage and lack of preparation required.
• Our staff is asked to answer like this, “I can give you 10 mins now or 30-45 minutes next week.” This takes emotion out of the meeting and sets time to prepare and make the most out of it.
• An agenda will keep you and the meeting on task. It will also honor those in the meeting.
• If conversation falls off agenda, stop the conversation and suggest moving to a separate meeting. Be 'ok' with changing direction in meeting, if it starts going off course. Someone has to lead, if it’s your meeting, it’s your responsibility.

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Agenda should include the following:

• Title
• Attendance
• Purpose statement or goal – “why are we here?”
• Topic headers for each topic that needs to be discussed
• Assign who is responsible for next steps and when it’s needed (timeline of responsibility) - notate this for future reference.
• Share your notes with responsibilities and deadlines to each person that attended the meeting.
• Follow up on the timeline afterward (inspect what you expect)
• Encourage and help with next steps, if needed to meet timeline goals

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