As the hour wore on, Geoff began to wonder why this meeting, too, had gone so wrong. Here they were, plowing over well-plowed ground yet again. With just ten minutes left in the hour, they still hadn't started talking about the Release Team's findings. Frustration was rising. Geoff wondered if perhaps this team just couldn't work together.
Have you ever been here?
To help your team achieve its potential, make meeting agendas crisp and focused. A solid, agreed-upon agenda gives your team a better chance to prepare, to stay on track and to maintain focus. Here are eight tips for improving agendas and how you manage them.
- Circulate a draft agenda in advance
- Draft an agenda and circulate it in advance. Because you probably aren't omniscient, ask attendees for their contributions. This builds ownership of the agenda by the team. Allocate time for each item. If you don't, how will you know if you're running late? Include a Draft "Not-Agenda" — topics that are off limits for this meeting.
- First agenda item: review the agenda
- Reviewing the agenda smokes out confusion, and helps solidify consensus about the agenda. With everyone on board, it's easier to manage digressions.
- Allocate time for puzzles
- Usually, we're reluctant to admit that we don't know everything. Time for puzzles gives people permission to surface confusions early, and helps avoid major problems later.
- Limit in-meeting handouts
- Circulating handouts during meetings wastes time. Often we have too much to read, and too little chance to digest it. Limit each handout to one side of one page. Circulate longer reports in advance by email.
- No routine announcements
- To help your team
achieve its potential,
make meeting agendas
crisp and focused - Shift routine FYI's, such as status reports, to prior-to-the-meeting email. Reserve meeting time for delicate or complex announcements, and for issues that require discussion.
- Designate Someone as a Digression Detector
- The Designated Digression Detector (DDD) signals a possible digression in a fun or humorous way — a bicycle horn, a New Year's noisemaker, whatever. On the signal, the meeting stops to decide if a digression has occurred, and whether to adjust the agenda, or make a note for a future meeting, or adjourn until further information is available.
- Look in the rear-view mirror
- Circulate the as-executed agenda as part of the minutes. By comparing the as-executed agenda to the pre-meeting agenda, you might be able to find ways to improve your agenda-creation process.
- Learn from digressions
- Use the notes of the DDD to develop future draft agendas. If an item repeatedly appears in the Digressions List, consider doing something proactive — apparently the team really wants to discuss the topic. That's valuable information, even if a discussion of the topic itself isn't really appropriate.
For more on agendas, see "An Agenda for Agendas," Point Lookout for May 25, 2005; and "Have a Program, Not Just an Agenda," Point Lookout for May 9, 2007. Top Next Issue
Do you spend your days scurrying from meeting to meeting? Do you ever wonder if all these meetings are really necessary? (They aren't) Or whether there isn't some better way to get this work done? (There is) Read 101 Tips for Effective Meetings to learn how to make meetings much more productive and less stressful — and a lot more rare. Order Now!
There are lots of good references on running meetings and forming agendas, especially Michael Doyle and David Straus, How to Make Meetings Work: The new interaction method, Berkley Books, 1993. Order from Amazon.com.
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See also Personal, Team, and Organizational Effectiveness and Effective Meetings for more related articles.
Forthcoming issues of Point Lookout
- Coming March 20: Top Ten Ways to Make Meetings More Effective
- Meetings are just about everybody's least favorite part of working in organizations. We can do much better if only we take a few simple steps to improve them. The big one: publish the agenda in advance. Here are nine other steps to improve meetings. Available here and by RSS on March 20.
- And on March 27: Allocating Action Items
- From time to time in meetings we discover tasks that need doing. We call them "action items." And we use our list of open action items as a guide for tracking the work of the group. How we decide who gets what action item can sometimes affect our success. Available here and by RSS on March 27.
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