Open Loops

Meeting Best Practices

If you are anything like me, you spend a substantial part of your day in meetings.  Between meeting with clients, subordinates, various committees, and other stakeholders, meetings can take up time, energy, and motivation.  A major time-waster is to spend time in meetings, agreeing to timelines and tasks, only to fail to meet those obligations due to poor meeting practices.  This results in time being spent in the meeting and then additional time lost due to having to go back to one’s notes, which have grown stale and vague by that time, and reconstruct deadlines and next actions.  By that time, agreements have been broken, deadlines missed, and tasks not done.  On top of that, your credibility has suffered major damage and trust in you has been lost.  You’ve become undependable to those in your group.

So, what are the best practices in being a meeting participant?  What things can we do to make us more effective before, during, and after a meeting?

Your Meeting File

During the course of a day, many of us spend a lot of time in meetings.  In some of them, we are participants and in others we are facilitators.  Some we need and want to attend.  Others, we loathe attending and consider it a major waste of time.  Whatever our role, if we are going to be there, I would hope that we would attempt to improve our performance in a meeting or to improve the group's overall  meeting performance.  One tool that helps us do that is the meeting file.

Power Note-Taking

Like Michael Hyatt, President of Thomas Nelson Publishing, I spend a lot of my time in meetings.  During these meetings a lot of information is shared, decisions are reached, tasks are generated and delegated, future meetings are scheduled, and follow-up dates are decided upon.  It's tempting to just sit and contribute, allowing the meeting secretary to record all the information, publish and distribute the minutes of the meeting, which you swear you'll review when you get back to the office.  Unfortunately, later never comes, and the minutes are in the bottom of a pile of papers before you know it.  When the next meeting is convened, you wonder, "what did we decide on that last time," or "who was supposed to do that?"