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Effective Meetings

Thursday November 8, 5:30-7:30 pm, room E51-395: Anjali Sastry and Jonathan Lehrich, MIT Sloan

Led by Professor Anjali Sastry and Jonathan Lehrich, this focused, dynamic session will give you practical tools to turn the dreadful into the successful. Learn from the latest research, others' experience, and your own reflection on the structure, roles, failures, and importance of meetings. You'll come away with a checklist for meeting planning and follow-up, techniques for keeping people on track, and key roles you can play to make the meeting work.

Effective Meetings will be offered on Thursday, November 8th, 5:30-7:30 pm, in E51-395, as part of the praxis@MIT Sloan initiative. This course was extremely popular last year and space will be limited, so sign up now. Don't let your next meeting waste your time...

register today

Resources from Fall 2006 session

Effective meetings: Notes, reflections, and follow-on comments

We enjoyed the session, and found many themes resonating with the goals and orientation that we are addressing with the Practicing Management effort. We thought we'd add a few thoughts and resources here. We've listed highlights from your "Notes to Self" and uploaded our notes from the dicsussion on what to do before and after meetings.

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 the only one. Don't be the only one rolling the ball uphill; enlist your fellow participants on the road to good meetings.

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

Follow-up readings

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.

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