Chapter 9: Meetings: Leadership and Productivity

This chapter will help leaders and other meeting planners avoid the seven deadly sins of meetings.

The Seven Deadly Sins of Meetings

1.       People don’t take meetings seriously.

2.       Meetings are too long.

3.       People wander off the topic.

4.       Nothing happens once the meeting ends.

5.       People don’t tell the truth.

6.       Meetings are always missing important information, so they postpone critical decisions.

7.       Meetings never get better.

Meetings can be small or large, internal or external, frequent or infrequent. Meeting leaders or planners need to define a clear purpose and analyze the audience to determine whether a meeting is the best forum for what they want to accomplish.

Meetings often have multiple objectives, but effective meetings, like good presentations and e-mails, usually have one main overall purpose. The purpose of an informational meeting could be as significant as introducing a new vision or as mundane as providing a progress report intended to expedite a project.

In determining the agenda topics and the meeting tasks, leaders need to estimate the time it will take to cover each topic and accomplish each objective as realistically as possible.

Selecting the right attendees is important to the success of a meeting. The attendees we invite should be the ones who can contribute to achieving our objectives.

Leaders will want to consider the best setting for the kind of meeting they plan to lead. The setting considerations should include locations, equipment, and layout of the room.

The meeting will be more productivity if the attendees know and use common problem-solving tools: Deciding on the Decision-Making Approach, Clarifying Leader and Attendees Roles and Responsibilities, Establishing Meeting Ground Rules, and Using Common Problem-Solving Approach.

Leaders will be able to stop or at least minimize most of the usual meetings problem by careful planning and by developing and enforcing ground rules. Skilled facilitators should be prepared to (1) handle some of the most common meeting problems, (2) manage meeting conflict, and (3) deal with issues arising from cultural differences.

Ensuring That Meetings Lead to Action: Assign specific tasks to specific people, Review all actions and responsibilities at the end of the meeting, Provide a meeting summary with assigned deliverable included, and Follow up on action items in a reasonable time.