Effective Meetings—In Brief
Many managers have complained to me that they go into meetings with the best intentions to make them concise and “impactful” but somewhere the control of the meeting is wrested from them and it is only in the autopsy that they can identify what happened.
If this has happened to you, know that it is all in the ground rules. One of the things which every sales organization should have up on the wall or over the doorway or wherever their memorizers are put:
“You can’t get mad at someone for doing something you didn’t say they couldn’t do.”
In a nutshell, there were no established, agreed upon rules to the meeting you were holding. Here are some ground rules someone shared with me that I like for any internal meeting (these are the ones that tend to get away from you easiest) at your organization.
1. New information only. Lots of times we want to put our two cents in to restate something that someone else has said because we think we can put it more clearly. The net effect tends to be circuitous conversations where someone else feels compelled to restate the objection for the same cause -- clarity.
2. No personal attacks. Meetings are never the right place to settle scores or even to “zing” someone who has opened him/herself to direct criticism. There is no faster way to undo organizational trust than to have old mistakes replayed to paint someone’s new idea as unworthy because of “the source.”
3. Silence is consent. It may seem like this one would extend your meetings interminably because participants would feel like this is the one and only opportunity to have input. But, what it does in practice is “close the compartments” (picture the doors between compartments of a submarine) on each meeting that you hold and keep one meeting from bleeding itinerary points into the next.
These rules have the added benefit of being content neutral, i.e. it doesn’t matter what type of meeting you are having. Just make sure that the rules are clearly communicated and understood in advance by everyone involved and bought into by the highest level of your organization represented in any meeting.