How to Make Your Meetings Meaningful?

This week, I spent 70% of my time in different meetings - in-house, business, social and professional. My friends ask me how can I manage my time to attend all meetings. Actually I don't attend all meetings. I know, I can not. I always choose the meetings to attend. I have some criteria attending meetings. If I get invitations for meetings without agenda and I am not even briefed about the meeting, I am not much interested.

In meetings you may have two roles - host or participant. Either you are host or the participant, in meetings you have to be innovative and capable to promptly analyze the issues. Otherwise, meetings will slowly kill your valuable time. I can't sit and just kill my time in long and pointless meetings. I think people should be concise and precise because people always have many other better things they could be doing with their time otherwise. I hate the meetings even with the agenda, when the agenda is long and people speak in length just trying to make their presence noticed. Meetings, like all other serious matters, require a certain sense of urgency and always move forward drawing the decisions and understandings.

I hate the meetings when people just sit around tired, drinking coffee after coffee and trying to keep going on one issue and always spending quite a lot time around that. Either you are host or the participant, you should try to be precise and try to put your decisive opinion forward. Don't try to confuse the participants. Just don't drag the meeting longer. Give the solution, not the problem.

In meetings, we find only 2-3 people talking all the time and most of others either making notes or running the meeting. Whatever you do, your endeavor should be at all time geared towards logically concluding the matter on the floor. Only the one way talking is very unproductive and quality of meeting will be of very low mark. As I mentioned above, you should have a clear agenda, may be that is just in your mind. But you should be well prepared with objectives, expected outputs. Disseminate the agenda details and meeting formats to all participants in as short a time as possible. Spend first few minutes to create the meeting environment as warm, open and friendly as possible. Introduce the participants and exchange the business cards. Try to mix up the participants with each other. After that, don't waste your time and time of others. Go straight into the agenda follow the schedule and follow the time.

When you're at a meeting, monitor your behavior and try to be an unbiased observer - of yourself and of others. Controlling your emotion and emotions of the participates during meeting is very important to make the meetings successful. Demonstrate your intelligence and prove that you are real. During meetings, keep note of the discussions and decisions, share the meeting output with all and get comments, inputs from all. Always thank the participants individually for their time and valuable inputs.

Always make your meetings meaningful.

For learning how to get results from meeting, I would recommend a practical book Meeting Excellence: 33 Tools to Lead Meetings That Get Results.

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