Successful Meetings Is The Responsibility Of All

Through all the meetings I had in my life (the voluntary and the professional), all meetings shared key points that made it either successful and constructive, or a complete disaster and waste of time!

These key points can be summarized into:

• Meeting is conducted to achieve certain target , a solution to a problem, Keep the focus on that goal
  Time is valuable, and the participants will be very annoyed when they see their effort and time is wasted on a subject different from the one they originally agreed to sacrifice their time for. if the meeting was anything except resolving the original subject, it is a failure.
• all participants should be sincere to achieve the target of the meeting
  Because we are humans:
  • we will still use meetings as war-ground to prove intelligence superiority over others, by interruptions, mockery and shouting (in extreme situations). This will not be disruptive to the meeting only, but also will be for the team as a whole! most likely you will loose quite people hate “arguing”, who might have a very smart opinion and potentials. And then you will have the side effects of bad relations within the team; nothing have worse influence than that.
    The coordinator role here is to prevent such situations by eliminating any reason the participants may use to act so selfish; not encouraging them, not letting them sneak with the interruption, etc. this goes beyond the meeting as well by raising the team spirit within the team members
  • Another less serious example of unfaithfulness is the will to support wrong opinion because it’s easier, or less tiring. Again, the coordinator should be careful, and try to make the individuals targets of the team members pour in the projects target (or at least the meeting target), this also needs a lot of effort and team building actions (and that’s another story).
• Interruptions are evil and should be eliminated
  To know how bad interruption is, imagine your self talking in a meeting, all passionate and ongoing…suddenly a guy thinks you are talking nonsense, or that he is smarter than  you are, and interrupts you…aaa’a!!…see how bad it is!! it wastes time, energy, and produces anger and disrespect. 
• so is prattling!
  The more the prattle, the less the focus… the less the focus, the more the meeting loses the target. prattling can be as distructive as the interruptions, make participants less interested and even angry, hence failing meeting.
• Don’t offend others by any means. 
   if you do so, a wall will be built instantly between the meeting and the guy offended; he will not be able to listen to any sound logic (by nature), and will prove anything to be wrong. as long as you are discussing ideas, people will feel safe, when you bring it to their essence, they will be too protective. be cautions choosing the right words.
• Silent people can be a hidden treasure 
   The meeting is not meant to choose country presidents, it’s meant to elicit sound logic and constructive opinions, even if it comes from that silent little participant at the corner. if you are in charge, give him a chance, let him speak his ideas out, it might surprise you how good it can be, And if it is, you have raised his self-esteem to be more participating in the future and more successful team.

 

You can see from the points listed that it’s not only the coordinators responsibility to make the meeting successful, but the participants as well, after all they are the meeting!

There are lot’s of such points, but those are the one’s that come to my mind. If you have more to add, your comments below are most welcomed.