You Can Be a Leader: Leadership Principles to Achieve Excellence

Chapter Fifteen Time and Meetings

Time is always one our scarcest resources. We are all painfully aware meetings are one of the greatest time thieves. So how should you plan and run an efficient meeting? Preparation, preparation, and more preparation.

Before planning a meeting, think over a few questions: What do you need to solve? What information do you need to gather? What information do you want to emblazon into everyone's brain by the end of the meeting? In addition ask yourself: What is your goal or the end state of your meeting? Identifying these objectives when you start planning a meeting will help you organize the meeting and cover all of the important topics and issues. If applicable, read the notes and the action item list from the last meeting to refresh your memory on the open issues. Request an update from the responsible individuals on their open action items prior to the meeting. This all helps you develop an efficient agenda or sequence of events.

Know who you need to invite to the meeting and anyone else who plans on attending. This way you won't waste time and resources by having unnecessary attendees at your meeting (and billing to your project number). Once you identify your topics and attendees, relook at what you want to accomplish at your meeting. Make sure you haven't forgotten anything in your agenda.

If you have other meeting members presenting during your upcoming meeting, assign them a time limit for their portion of the meeting and have them send you their material ahead of time. You can review the information, and then sequence their portion into a logical time slot for your meeting.

Once you have an agenda finalized, set a realistic time limit for your meeting. Think about the topics you must cover in-depth vs. what topics you can efficiently cover in a short amount of time. Also, analyze how much budget you have for your meeting. You may have a large number of employees attending who will bill their time against your project.

When you have your agenda finalized, put the list in a slide at the very beginning of your presentation. By doing this your meeting attendees will know to hold their questions and comments until the appropriate time.

A day or two prior to the meeting, send out a read ahead packet or your slides by email or save them to a share point. This allows the meeting attendees to prepare and maybe ask questions ahead of time. These early questions may help you identify any holes in your presentation or briefing slides. You now have time to update your slides prior to the meeting.

Target the meeting's information to your audience appropriately, so you can avoid irrelevant topics. Don't forget how expensive meetings become when they drag on too long. Sticking to the topic with clarity and brevity will keep your meeting on track, and the attendees engaged. Go deeper in-depth on topics only when it is required by the project.

When is a good time to hold a meeting? It depends. Most likely this is the answer you didn't want to hear, but scheduling a meeting is very situational dependent. First identify who needs to attend the meeting or if you will conduct the meeting via teleconference. Then, determine if it is a necessary expense for people to travel to the meeting site or if they can attend via teleconference/video conference. There are numerous affordable virtual meeting software programs available for video conferences that can save your company travel expense costs. You need to decide what is most effective for your meeting. Often the sidebars that occur during breaks and after the meeting are more important than the meeting itself. It is also easy to understate the value of personal contacts made at meetings.

Check the schedule of your critical attendees to see if anyone is on a business trip or vacation. Determine if you can find a suitable replacement for the attendees who cannot attend.

Consider time zones or even the International Date Line if your meeting is a nationwide or international teleconference. In many of these situations, an attendee may need to be available outside of normal work hours. In this case, you will need to pick a time that best suits the work times of each time zone involved. You need to ensure all of the required personnel can attend the meeting, and if possible, avoid scheduling somebody halfway across the world to work at 2:00 a.m. Half of the battle of any meeting is getting the people who need to talk to each other in the same room at the same time.