This is the starting point of holding effective meetings. Always prepare a written agenda and provide a copy for each participant. One of the biggest mistakes in any meeting, formal or informal, no matter how short, is to start off without an agenda.
When I was younger, I would meet with my boss on a regular basis, usually daily. But I found that if we were not very careful, we could talk for as long as an hour and not have reached closure on anything. This state of affairs was dissatisfying to both of us.
Without any training or preparation, one day I wrote out a list of the things that I wanted to discuss with him and brought an extra photocopy of my handwritten list to the meeting. As soon as I showed my boss the list, he brightened up.
In no time at all, we were able to go down the list, discuss each point, and reach a decision on what was going to be done or not done. We quite quickly cut our meeting time from sixty to twenty minutes, and we got much more accomplished.
From then on, my boss was always open to meeting with me because he knew that our time together would be highly productive. As a result, I was given more and more responsibilities and eventually was moved onto the fast track in my company.
Always start with a written agenda, even if you just put it together a couple of minutes before the event.
The agenda should begin with a one-sentence description of the purpose or objective of the meeting. If you cannot boil it down to a single sentence, it probably means that the purpose of the meeting is too vague. It is going to be an ineffective meeting and a waste of time for most, if not all, of the participants.
But when you write out the agenda—starting with a purpose statement—it forces you to think through what you are doing and why you are doing it. It gives you greater clarity regarding how each of the items on the agenda can be best dealt with.
Organize the topics in order of importance, by priority. Ask yourself, “If we were interrupted after we had only discussed one thing on this list, what one item would be the most important?”
By starting with the most important items, you are ensuring that they will be covered and the least important items will be set aside for another day if the meeting is forced to end before you get through the entire agenda.
When possible, distribute the agenda twenty-four to forty-eight hours in advance, either by hard copy or by e-mail. This allows people to prepare and to think through the issues. They can come to the meeting ready to make a valuable contribution that, in turn, increases your return on investment of time. The more important the meeting, the more important the agenda and its advance distribution.
Restrict attendance to the minimum number of essential people. When I was a young executive, I felt that it was only fair to invite everybody to the regular staff meetings so that all could participate and feel they were a part of the team. What I found after a while was that a lot of them didn’t really want to come to the meeting, and that my exercise in democracy was an exercise in frustration.
From then on, I restricted attendance to only those people who were necessary to deal with the items on the agenda. Everyone else was free to participate or not participate.
Ask yourself: Who really needs to be at this meeting? Who can contribute and needs to participate in the decision making or problem solving? Who requires this information, and is there a better way to get it to them?