Social Entrepreneur Site

On the topic of Meetings. I think most would agree its difficult and rare to conduct a meeting that does not veer off coarse. Some of the challenges that face group meetings include

• Unclear direction of the meetings
• Time Management for meetings not adhered to
•  Ambiguity at the conclusion as to what the take away was
• Sometimes conflicting ideas that arise causing confusion
• Meetings not being team oriented and scattered
• No monitoring of the meetings performance or results
• Time is mismanaged on sometimes non-critical topics
• No guidelines by which to follow for meeting participants

This is not a exhaustive list, however may point out some of the typical challenging obstacles. Meetings can be extremely productive, however there must be structure introduced to handle the dynamics that come into play when you have a team of people working together. Moreover, everyone participating in the meeting should practice vigilant decision management, whereby a team focuses on its ability to evaluate its performance while working within its tasks.

Included below is a short paragraph by someone who has probably been in quite a few meetings himself, prior US Secretary of State Mr Colon Powell and how he structured his meetings to ensure maximum productivity.

Having suffered through endless, pointless, mindless time-wasters for years, I had evolved certain rules for holding meetings. First, everyone got a chance to recommend items for the agenda beforehand, but I controlled the final agenda, which I distributed before the meeting. Once a meeting started, no one was allowed to switch the agenda. Everyone knew that the meeting would last exactly one hour.

The first five minutes and the last ten minutes belonged to me. In those first five minutes, I reviewed why we were meeting and what had to be decided by the end of the session. For the next twenty minutes, participants were allowed to present their positions,uninterrupted. . After that, we had a free-for-all to strip away posturing, attack lame reasoning, gang up on outrageous views, and generally have some fun. Fifty minutes into the hour, I resumed control, and for five minutes summarized everyone's views as I understood them. Participants could take issue with my summation for one minute. In the last four to five minutes, I laid out the conclusions and decision to be presented as the consensus of the participants (Powell 1995).