Workday word–Making meetings work

Meeting discussion part 3.

We’ve covered how to plan and run meetings in earlier posts, so today let’s take a quick look at how to make meetings more effective.  Today we’re mostly covering a list of DON’T items, to highlight and how things can go offline.

Meeting participant

So you’ve got a meeting to attend.  While the stress is on the meeting organizer, you as a participant have a definite role to play.  It is up to you whether the meeting is productive or a pointless round of talk.    What do I mean by that?  Well, the participants are why the meeting is happening.  Your voice matters to the outcome.  We’ve all been to meetings where there’s THAT GUY who makes the meeting really difficult.  You know the one – the person who:

• Shows up at the meeting late and asks to have everything recapped up to the point of his arrival;
• Does no preparation for the meeting, and wants to take time in the meeting to read documents before discussing;
• Wants to review completed discussions because he “doesn’t remember how we arrived at them”;
• Starts an argument over an obscure point, but makes it into a BIG DEAL;
• Interrupts a speaker to repeat what they said or takes minutes to say “I agree.”
• Spends most of the meeting on the phone, then asks questions that show that he wasn’t paying attention or
• Says very little in the meeting, but begins griping that things are “going to hell” as soon as the meeting is over.

This behaviour makes everyone else annoyed, frustrated and prolongs the agony of being in a meeting.  But I know that you aren’t that person, and you would never do any of those things.

While there are many quotes on the uselessness of meetings (my favourite is “A committee is a group of the unwilling chosen from the unfit, to do the unnecessary”) there are several good reasons to have them.  In the next segment we’ll discuss the reasons to form a committee and how to keep it relevant.

Related posts:

I thought I'd heard it all, but...: Workday word–Running a meeting

I thought I’d heard it all, but…: Workday word – Planning a meeting