The acclaimed management guru Peter Drucker (1967) famously wrote: “For one either meets or one works. One can not do both at the same time.”

Unfortunately sometimes meetings are necessary. No amount of smilies in e-mails or even video conferencing can catch all the nuances in expression and/or subtleties in body language that the human senses pick up when dealing with people in person. Sometimes you need to shake someone’s hand and look into their eyes to gauge the character of the person you’re dealing. Sometimes you need to get something across to someone that only pressing their flesh and going eyeball to eyeball can do. Sometimes you need to smell the person you’re dealing with!

So, if meetings are the waste of working time Drucker makes them out to be but they are a necessary evil, then they need to be as effective as possible in the optimum time available.

Managing Meetings – the Workshop

My training on managing meetings is, of course, a meeting in itself! How I justify it is the first important point I cover in the workshop:-

• Be clear about your objectives
  In other words, what do you want to achieve from your meeting? What are your outcomes?  Can those objectives be achieved by other means than having a meeting?

If the best way to achieve your objectives is to have a meeting, then other key points to consider include:-

• Preparation Firstly, do you have a plan to achieve your objectives? And do you have fallback strategies if your plan doesn’t work? Secondly, can you distribute information ahead of the meeting so you’re not wasting time simply conveying information that could have been done in an e-mail?
  In the workshop we will consider criteria for deciding whether a meeting is the most appropriate means for achieving your objective and what kind of pre-meeting information you should distribute. In some circumstances, depending on your objectives, it may be more appropriate to run an Open Space session, rather than a formal meeting.

• Processes
  The more effective meetings usually have some clearly-defined and easily-understood processes – from how to submit topics for the agenda to how the meeting is run in terms of comments and responses.
  In the training we will look at some of the basic processes involved in managing successful meetings.

• Personalities
  The most difficult aspect of most meetings is the personalities of the participants – eg: those who…
• won’t say anything and you never know what they really think
• won’t say anything but snipe at you and/or others behind your back
• are only interested in getting their opinions across to everybody else and dominate proceedings
• are only interested in their own agenda and are openly resistant to other suggestions
• ride roughshod over others’ feelings
• etc, etc

Fortunately many aspects of ‘personality’ are predictable and I teach strategies, based on Integrated SocioPsychology, to enhance your handling of different types of ‘character’.

• Action Plans & Accountability
  Meetings should have some kind of record – even if only some bullet points of the key issues discussed.
  Most meetings should produce some decisions as to who is going to do what and when and these assignments need documenting in a simple but clear manner.
  To conclude the workshop, I provide easy-to-use templates for such documents.

This 1-day programme is highly interactive and includes role play. It is suitable for both in-house presentation or Chambers of Commerce-type training events.

Please contact me for further details and to discuss your organisation’s needs.