10 Characteristics of Effective Meetings

Diana Gabriel has used her years of experience and insight to pull together 10 ‘fundamental concepts that characterise effective meetings’. We have included this item in the clinic because we think Diana’s ten points are one of the best short summaries of meeting sense that we have seen to date.
Basically, our only caveat would be the inclusion of the modifier: ‘commitment to’ in item 6.

1. Start with the definition.  A meeting is a business activity where select people gather to perform work that requires a team effort.
2. A meeting, like any business event, succeeds when it is preceded by planning, characterized by focus, governed by structure, and controlled by a budget.
3. Short meetings free people to work on the essential activities that represent the core of their jobs. In contrast, long meetings prevent people from working on critical tasks such as planning, communicating, and learning.
4. Three things guarantee an unproductive meeting: poor planning, lack of appropriate process, and hostile culture. Effective leaders attend to all of these to create an effective meeting.
5. Effective meetings require sharing control and making commitments.
6. The ultimate goals of every meeting are agreements, decisions, or solutions. Meetings held for other reasons seldom produce anything of value.
7. Unprepared participants will spend their time in the meeting preparing for the meeting.
8. It is better to spend a little time preparing for solutions than to spend a lot of time fixing problems.
9. Meetings are an investment of resources and time that should earn a profit.
10. A meeting can be led from any chair in the room. And if it’s your meeting, you want it to be your chair.

In addition, it is interesting to reflect on how many of these characteristics of effective meetings relate to preparation.

 

• Firstly, use ground rules to establish agreed standards of behaviour to support effective meetings
• Secondly, explore maturity models to understand and plot your progress to meeting effectiveness
• Thirdly, use participative tools to support greater meeting effectiveness

 

Track your progress to ensure the efficacy of this strategy.