Running an effective meeting requires identifying participants, assigning clear roles and responsibilities for each, establishing trust and openness, and outlining a clear understanding of who has authority to make decisions. The main thrust of determining the participants:

Who can contribute to the objective of the meeting

As you draft the list of participants, ask yourself these two questions:

1. What will this individual contribute to this meeting and
2. What will the impact be if this individual is not present?

Selecting the appropriate participants involves addressing issues of inclusion, exclusion, influence, attitude, trust and control. Here are some factors for you to consider:

• Identifying participants sounds obvious, but the wrong choices can derail a meeting. Some advance thinking can help you steer clear of the potential problems. Do you need a full committee for a particular meeting or are certain members key? Do you have the right expertise in the room for the situation at hand? Are the stakeholders affected by the actions to be taken in this meeting represented? Are there valid reasons to exclude a person or group from this meeting?
• Identifying clear roles and responsibilities for each person should be easy if you’ve chosen the participants well. Make sure roles and responsibilities are clearly understood before the meeting begins.
• Trust and openness are necessary for any productive exchange to take place in a meeting. Your track record as a facilitator - or your lace of a negative track record if this is your first meeting - is an important factor in establishing trust and openness in a meeting.
• A clear understanding of who has authority in the meeting is required for any action, resolution, or decision to occur. Getting to the right decision is useless if those who make it do not have the authority to execute it. This is information that should be clearly communicated to all participants.

A note on trust

Without trust and openness, the attendees may feel the meeting has a foregone conclusion, and nothing they say will be heard. Attendees will not feel free to introduce new ideas, participate in discussion, nor will they bother to listen to what is being presented. A lack of trust and openness will sabotage a meeting.

Where to hold the meeting

The physical - or virtual- environment of a meeting is a critical and often under-appreciated component in the success of a meeting. Whether formal or informal, in the usual workplace or off-site, environment helps to set the scene for successful interaction, focus, and pacing.

• Location sets the scene for a meeting and communicates to the participants how formal ( or casual) and how important a meeting will be. An impromptu meeting in the office is less elaborate than one off-site yet is usually more formal. A meeting in a conference center is more formal than one at a resort. You must choose a location based upon the tone and function of a meeting:
  • Idea generation may occur more readily in a relaxed, low-key setting.
  • A crisis management meeting may need to be in an organization’s headquarters in order to put decisions into effect instantly.
• Seating arrangement impact how people interact and where the energy in a meeting is concentrated. Options include circular, oval, rectangular, semicircular, and small groups around tables.
• Audio-visual and electronic aids often add clarity, break up lecture formats, or introduce material best presented visually. They are used more and more frequently as awareness about different learning styles has migrated from the schoolroom to the meeting room.
• Details as small as break arrangements can affect the productivity of a meeting. Establish protocols by announcing break arrangements. In a two-hour meeting, for example, no formal break may be scheduled, but participants may excuse themselves for restroom breaks or to refill coffee cups at any time. For all-day meetings, a morning and afternoon break are the minimum. For meetings at resort locations, working all mornings and reconvening each evening allows participants to enjoy their surroundings and take a real break in the afternoon.
• The provision of refreshments will also affect productivity and the perceptions of participants. Caffeine, water, and alcohol will produce different levels of attention in the participants. Healthy snacks and menu options for special diets (vegetarian, diabetic, low-fat, salt-free, Kosher) show consideration for the “human capital” in the meeting.
• An absence of interruptions and distractions goes a long way toward keeping the meeting on track and focused. Halfway through an afternoon meeting in a hotel is not the time to discover a disc jockey is setting up in the room one folding door panel away from your meeting. Interruptions can be minimized by having a message board outside a meeting room to prevent intrusions except in emergencies.

As you can see, there is much more involved in holding a successful meeting than just getting a bunch of people together in a room. You can read all of the posts in this series:

Part 1: Holding an Effective Meeting - the Basics
Part 2: Holding an Effective Meeting - the Content
Part 3: Holding an Effective Meeting - the Process

Running an effective meeting requires creating an effective process. There are several components of the meeting process: that will determine how the meeting is run.

1. Agenda,
2. Facilitation,
3. Presentations,
4. Approaches to decision-making,
5. Pacing and
6. Follow up

These are all components of how the work of the meeting gets done, which is, in turn, important to reaching the objective, determining the quality of the outcome, and satisfying the participants in the meeting itself. Let’s take a little more detailed look:

• The agenda sets the stage for the meeting: It lists the items the meeting will address and often the time frame for each agenda item. It also lists the participants and the leaders - with their responsibilities.
• Facilitation often involves taking on the role of facilitator yourself ( if you are the meeting planner) or delegating it to a colleague, subordinate, or resident expert in the topic being addressed. A facilitator is not a leader imposing a solution or pre-determined decision on a group.
• Presentations, if there are any, are a way to provide information, impart institutional knowledge, or alternatives to be considered. They can be one person talking, a team lecture, a set of PowerPoint slides, or a audio/ video or Internet production.
• Methods used for solving problems and making decisions (for meetings other than straight presentations of information) will determine both the quality of the solution or decision and the participants’ satisfaction with the process.
  • For example, approaches to decision-making will affect whether or not a meeting in which decisions have to be made has win-win outcomes.
  • Some decision-making methods, such as voting, have win-lose outcomes;
  • others, such as the well-known “free-for-all”, have lose-lose outcomes.
  • Consensus, achieved through collaboration and problem solving, is the win-win approach. Consensus is the judgment arrived at by most of those concerned, which requires group critical reasoning and may involve negotiation.
• Pacing, or keeping a meeting on track, demonstrates respect for the participants and maintains the energy in a meeting. One component of trust is ending the meeting at the announced time.
• A meeting without follow up is a meeting wasted. Identifying and assigning action steps is only as good as the follow up to ensure the action steps taken.

A Note on Institutional Knowledge

Institutional knowledge is the cumulative, retrievable, and collective knowledge and experience possessed by the members of an organization. This knowledge has to do with the history of a business or organization, it’s processes, products/services, business practices, markets, and competitors. Organizations run the risk of losing their institutional knowledge when that information resides in the brain of only one employee. All of that knowledge and experience will be lost when that individual leaves the organization.

One final tip: To make your presentation most effective, remember to tailor it to your audience’s needs. For example, a presentation for the marketing team for a new prescription drug need a different presentation than do the pharmaceutical chemists that developed it.

The content of a meeting should reflect the purpose of holding the meeting in the first place. If there is no content to share or discuss, there is no meeting, just a gathering of people and some wasted time.

The objective

The expectation of the facilitator and the participants should be known before a meeting is scheduled. The planning process that we discussed previously (Effective Meeting Basics - Part 1) will lay out the objective of the meeting, whether it is educational, to solve a problem, or to gather input/feedback on an existing process. The answer to the question, “Why are we assembled here?” must be clearly stated and communicated to the participants, preferably in advance.

The expectation

The result, or return on the investment of time, of the meeting must be something attainable. If it is a training session, the return is a minimum amount of knowledge about the topic. If you are looking to solve a problem, you should come up with a solution, or list of possible solutions. If the meeting is to provide input or feedback, there should be a way to communicate the summary of findings to participants and show its value.

The information

The knowledge that the meeting imparts must be accurate and available to the participants. This information may be used as a reference or foundation for any decisions to be made or actions taken because of the meeting.

The Next Actions

Each meeting should end with a list of action steps to be implemented afterwards, who these actions are assigned to, and their due dates. In addition, the facilitator should communicate a follow-up schedule for each Next Action.

Providing the objective, expectation, and information required for a meeting to all participants in advance of a meeting is a best practice to follow for all meeting planners. This pre-conference information gives the participants the time and the opportunity to:

• think about the issues that pertain to the meeting;
• read, contextualize and assimilate the information;
• make preparations of their own for furthering the goals of the meeting.

The more that information is shared before a meeting, the greater the likelihood of having a successful meeting. The next post in this series will explore the process involved in planning a meeting.

This article series builds on a recent post at Productivity in Context - Getting the Most Out of a Meeting.

Meetings do not happen by accident

Whether you are planning a regularly scheduled staff meeting, a faculty retreat, a product launch planning session, or even a sales conference, every meeting requires careful advance preparation. An effective meeting has an intentional outcome that leaves the participants satisfied with the process that led to that outcome. This series of posts will teach you the basic steps needed to plan and execute a successful meeting.

The basic components of a successful meeting

Three things are needed, at the very least, for a successful meeting - a facilitator, a group of attendees, and a reason to gather.

In order to have a successful meeting, it is important for the facilitator to consider the following list of components:

1. A meeting needs to have an objective that defines the purpose of the meeting.
2. Each participant should understand or have an expectation of what will occur by the end of the meeting.
3. A meeting should provide some benefit for the investment of time to attend.
4. The facilitator needs to create a list of attendees.
5. The physical space for the meeting should be appropriate to the format and facilitate two-way participation.
6. A clear definition of the roles and responsibilities of the participants.
7. An agenda and prepared materials.
8. Define the content of the meeting, and the process to deliver it.
9. Proper presentation skills to inform, influence, or motivate the attendees.
10. An atmosphere of trust and security.
11. Win-win approaches to decision-making.
12. Access to a time-keeper to keep the agenda on track.
13. A method to track and assign Next Actions.
14. A method to follow-up on these assignments and communicate progress reports.

The attendees also need to have a basic understanding of what it is that they are expected to bring to the meeting in terms of information or equipment.

Putting it all together

The reason for having a meeting needs to be compelling. The participants must be able to see that their investment in time to attend the meeting will have a return that exceeds the opportunity cost of attending.

The next post in this series will address the content of the meeting and how to construct it.