There’s very little that’s worse than sitting through a bad meeting. Unfortunately, it’s a problem that’s plagued many student governments.
Running a productive meeting is a skill. Once you learn it, your meetings will accomplish more, they’ll be better attended, and your members will feel like part of a community.
Here are seven ground rules for running a productive meeting.
Rule #1: Before organizing a meeting, make sure you need one.
The worst meetings are the ones that seem pointless. Respect your attendees’ time by only holding meetings that are necessary.
Meetings are a good place to make group decisions, develop the plan for an event, or delegate responsibilities to a group. Alternately, if the only thing you need to do is to give updates on ongoing projects, that makes for a boring and unnecessary meeting. If all you need to do is disseminate information, then email is a far better way to do so.
Rule #2: Preparing for a meeting takes at least as long as the meeting itself.
Once you have decided that you need a meeting, you have to prepare for it. This includes:
- Defining the goals
- Preparing an agenda
- Developing a list of attendees
- Identifying people to facilitate the different sections of the meeting
- Preparing the facilitators and attendees
- Anticipating pitfalls
- Planning an opportunity to debrief afterward with meeting leadership
- Is the location easily accessible? Is the time convenient? Can we avoid conflicts with classes, other meetings, etc.?
- Is the room the right size for the group? (It’s always better to have lots of people in a smaller room, than very few people in a large room.)
- Are the chairs set up such that it’s easy to see and hear each other?
- Is there a chalkboard or whiteboard for brainstorming?
- Is there a sign-up sheet?
- Are there materials for people to take?
- Are there refreshments or a plan for post-meeting socializing?
- What is the scheduled duration of the meeting?
- Lack of participation
- Solutions:
- Prep people to participate prior to the meeting
- Frame discussions clearly
- Use “criteria” to focus the conversation
- Solutions:
- A few people are dominating the discussion
- Solutions:
- Talk with dominant talkers before or during the meeting
- Be prepared to call on others
- Solutions:
- Spending too much time on one issue
- Solutions:
- Agree on time limits at the outset of the meeting
- Use straw polls to gauge the sense of the group and facilitate a decision
- Prevent too much discussion if the group is largely at a consensus
- Solutions:
- Creating a false sense of power or false decisions (for example: brainstorms that aren’t actually necessary, pretending to “make a decision” that’s actually already been made)
- Solution:
- If a decision has already been made, don’t act as though it hasn’t. Lay out the decision and give context for why it was made.
- Solution:
- Dealing with things in a meeting that should be dealt with individually (personal gripes, etc)
- Solution:
- Save these issues for individual conversations
- Solution:
- Was the agenda appropriate?
- Were the people who attended the ones who should have attended?
- Were the facilitators well prepared?
- Were the participants well prepared?
- How were the logistics?
- What is the appropriate follow-up for each person in the group?
- What should we do differently next time to improve the meeting?