Are Your Meetings MINM or JAM?
When people come to your meetings, do they say "this is a meeting I
never miss" ( MINM) or do they say "this is just another meeting." (JAM)
Unproductive meetings gobble up an estimated 20% of corporate
payrolls, throwing away $420 billion a year. American business
people engage in an estimated 11 million meetings every workday.
The average American executive spends 17 hours a week in meetings
and more than 6 hours preparing. At an average salary of $45,000,
more than $18,000 per executive is spent in meetings.
Before you call another meeting, ask yourself:
- what's the outcome I want from this meeting? The more people know what "deliverables" should
come from the meeting, the more focus you can bring to the conversations.
- is there a more effective way of getting the results without a meeting?
- who REALLY needs to be involved?
- when is the optimum time to have it and what time limit shall I set?
Sounds silly, but agendas make a huge difference. And forget
'old business". Who ever got excited about starting a meeting
with "old business"! If it has relevancy to current
situations, it is not "old"-it is pressing business.The
skills of running an effective meeting can easily be learned.
These skills involve gatekeeping (i.e. making sure that one person
does not monopolize the meeting), summarizing the points, calling
for a decisions, establishing protocols, and keeping discussion
on track.
However, there are times when one needs someone else to conduct
a meeting. The more emotion that is connected to a meeting, the
more complex the issues, the more it behooves you to consider
using a facilitator. A wise facilitator creates a setting that
makes it "safe" for people to speak their truth. A
facilitator creates a process around whatever is the desired
outcome of the meeting and can hold people to the task.
When I have been brought in to facilitate, I make it a practice
of interviewing the participants beforehand and creating a composite
of the various "common threads" of concern. In this
fashion, no one person is singled out and the meeting can get
down to the important elements. Likewise, as an external facilitator,
I have no political agenda or job security hanging in the balance.
Thus, it frees me to focus totally on helping the participants
reach their outcome. Time is the most precious commodity we have.
Time-wasting meetings constitute the greatest theft of all. Conduct
them well and judiciously and you'll hear people say, "We've
got to START meeting like this!".
Eileen McDargh, CSP, CPAE, is an international speaker,
author, and seminar leader. Her book "Work for a Living
and Still Be Free to Live" is also the title of one of
her most popular and upbeat programs on Work/Life Balance.
For more information on Eileen and her presentations, please
call 949-496-8640 or visit her web site at http://www.eileenmcdargh.com.
