Effective meetings - Fall 2006 session

Effective meetings: Notes, reflections, and follow-on comments to Fall 2006 session

We enjoyed the session, and found many themes resonating with the goals and orientation that we are addressing with the Practicing Management effort. There's much you can to do improve the meetings you run - and attend! - if you draw on the practice of preparing-acting-reflecting on every meeting. To follow up on some specific things, we thought we'd add a few thoughts and resources here. We've listed highlights from your "Notes to Self" and uploaded SloanPM:our notes from the discussion on what to do before and after meetings. Also check out the powerpoints that we showed--including some more detail on some of the key ideas. And don't forget the opportunity to Create Your Own Checklist of actions before and after a meeting.

Notes to Self

Many of you came away from the seminar with similar notes:

• send an agenda in advance (24-72 hours before the meeting)
• publish notes after the meeting
• follow up on action items
• get feedback on the meeting.

Yet alongside these commonalities some highlights stick out, including:

• "Write an e-mail to convince the group to have a brainstorming session."
• "Designate annotator ... and maybe an advocate to make sure everyone does the proper homework."
• "Break down assignments into workable tasks."
• "Create agenda that is doable."
• "Make sure I'm prepared (100%)."
• "If the meeting's going too long, have people stand until it's done."

What's interesting too is how strongly you're committing yourselves to making the meeting effective. The only caveat: make sure you're not alone. Don't be the only one rolling the ball uphill; enlist your fellow participants on the road to good meetings.

Transitions within a meeting

Many of you asked what you can do in the midst of a meeting that's going badly. One useful piece of advice: have a few stock phrases ready to go that can advance the meeting or sidestep a problem area. Here are some thoughts and suggestions on such transitions, culled from a book.

Follow-up readings

Meeting Analysis: Findings from research and practice A paper from the Proceedings of the 34th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2001

The Seven Sins of Deadly Meetings a 1996 article from Fast Company
And seven steps to salvation. Tools, techniques, and technologies to make your meetings less painful, more productive - even heavenly.

3M meetings network a commercial site with resources, readings, etc

Why staff meetings don't work

For the following readings, go to this MIT Libraries site and search using the citation information below.
How to Make Every Meeting Matter May 1, 2003, by Tom Krattenmaker, Harvard Management Communication Letter
In today's workplace, time is in short supply. Unfortunately, meetings aren't. Here are some strategies for making good meetings better and for killing the time sinks.
How to run a meeting. By: Jay, Antony. Harvard Business Review, Mar/Apr76, Vol. 54 Issue 2, p43-57
Why is it that any single meeting may be a waste of time, an irritant, or a barrier to the achievement of an organization's objectives? The answer lies in the fact, as the author says, that "all sorts of human crosscurrents can sweep the discussion off course, and errors of psychology and technique on the chairman's part can defeat its purposes." This article offers guidelines on how to right things that go wrong in meetings. The discussion covers the functions of a meeting, the distinctions in size and type of meetings, ways to define the objectives, making preparations, the chairman's role, and ways to conduct a meeting that will achieve its objectives.

Advertisement for the session

Jonathan Lehrich
Associate Director
MIT Leadership Center
30 Wadsworth Street, E53-418
Cambridge, MA 02142
(617) 253-6011
jlehrich@mit.edu

M. Anjali Sastry
Senior Lecturer, MIT Sloan School of Management
E53-329, 30 Wadsworth Street
Cambridge MA 02142
617.253.0965