Why hold meetings

Discuss your opinion with other learners. About meetings Reasons for meetings. We need to discuss the new publishing list. I've called this meeting because we haven't had one for a while. We need to decide whether we are going to enter a new market. I would like to know where you are at with your projects. That means setting up an agenda, inviting the right people and sending follow-up emails to reiterate the key points brought up in the discussion.

A meeting without an agenda usually ends up turning into a social event with little payoff. If your meeting has a clear purpose, you should only invite the employees closest to the issue at hand. These should be the people directly responsible for the outcomes and who have a vested stake in what is being discussed. The attendees can then update the rest of their teams through email if necessary.

No one should ever walk out of a meeting wondering what the next steps are. Remember: your meeting is supposed to breed action. If people leave a meeting not knowing what to do next, then it was a waste. On some subjects, the chairman might well be the task advocate himself, especially if they do not involve conflict within the group. A subject is raised, people say what they think, and finally a decision is reached, or the discussion is terminated. There is some truth in this.

Moreover, it would be a mistake to try and tie every discussion of every item down to a single immutable format. Nevertheless, there is a logical order to a group discussion, and while there can be reasons for not following it, there is no justification for not being aware of it.

In practice, very few discussions are inhibited, and many are expedited, by a conscious adherence to the following stages, which follow exactly the same pattern as a visit to the doctor. But until the visit to the doctor, or the meeting of the European marketing committee, that is about all we really know.

The doctor will start with a case history of all the relevant background facts, and so will the committee discussion. A solid basis of shared and agreed-on facts is the best foundation to build any decision on, and a set of pertinent questions will help establish it. For example, when did French sales start to fall off? Have German sales risen exceptionally? Has France had delivery problems, or less sales effort, or weaker advertising? If the answers to all these questions, and more, are not established at the start, a lot of discussion may be wasted later.

The doctor will then conduct a physical examination to find out how the patient is now. The committee, too, will want to know how things stand at this moment. Is action being taken? Do long-term orders show the same trend? What are the latest figures? What is the current stock position?

How much money is left in the advertising budget? When the facts are established, you can move toward a diagnosis. A doctor may seem to do this quickly, but that is the result of experience and practice. He is, in fact, rapidly eliminating all the impossible or far-fetched explanations until he leaves himself with a short list.

Again, the doctor is likely to take a shortcut that a committee meeting may be wise to avoid. The doctor comes out with a single prescription, and the committee, too, may agree quickly on a single course of action. But if the course is not so clear, it is better to take this step in two stages: a construct a series of options—do not, at first, reject any suggestions outright but try to select and combine the promising elements from all of them until a number of thought-out, coherent, and sensible suggestions are on the table; and b only when you have generated these options do you start to choose among them.

Then you can discuss and decide whether to pick the course based on repackaging and point-of-sale promotion, or the one based on advertising and a price cut, or the one that bides its time and saves the money for heavier new-product promotion next year. If the item is at all complex or especially significant, it is important for the chairman not only to have the proposed course of the discussion in his own head, but also to announce it so that everyone knows.

A good idea is to write the headings on an easel pad with a felt pen. The essence of this task is to follow the structure of discussion as just described in the previous section. This, in turn, entails listening carefully and keeping the meeting pointed toward the objective. At the start of the discussion of any item, the chairman should make it clear where the meeting should try to get to by the end. Are the members hoping to make a clear decision or firm recommendation?

Is it a preliminary deliberation to give the members something to go away with and think about? Are they looking for a variety of different lines to be pursued outside the meeting?

Do they have to approve the proposal, or merely note it? The chairman should make sure that all the members understand the issue and why they are discussing it. Often it will be obvious, or else they may have been through it before.

If not, then he or someone he has briefed before the meeting should give a short introduction, with some indication of the reason the item is on the agenda; the story so far; the present position; what needs to be established, resolved, or proposed; and some indication of lines of inquiry or courses of action that have been suggested or explored, as well as arguments on both sides of the issue. He has to head discussion off sterile or irrelevant areas very quickly e. If he does not follow an argument or understand a reference, he should seek clarification from the speaker.

If he thinks two people are using the same word with different meanings, he should intervene e. He may also have to clarify by asking people for facts or experience that perhaps influence their view but are not known to others in the meeting.

And he should be on the lookout for points where an interim summary would be helpful. This device frequently takes only a few seconds, and acts like a life belt to some of the members who are getting out of their depth.

Sometimes a meeting will have to discuss a draft document. If there are faults in it, the members should agree on what the faults are and the chairman should delegate someone to produce a new draft later. The group should never try to redraft around the table. Perhaps one of the most common faults of chairmanship is the failure to terminate the discussion early enough. Sometimes chairmen do not realize that the meeting has effectively reached an agreement, and consequently they let the discussion go on for another few minutes, getting nowhere at all.

Even more often, they are not quick enough to close a discussion before agreement has been reached. A discussion should be closed once it has become clear that a more facts are required before further progress can be made, b discussion has revealed that the meeting needs the views of people not present, c members need more time to think about the subject and perhaps discuss it with colleagues, d events are changing and likely to alter or clarify the basis of the decision quite soon, e there is not going to be enough time at this meeting to go over the subject properly, or f it is becoming clear that two or three of the members can settle this outside the meeting without taking up the time of the rest.

The fact that the decision is difficult, likely to be disputed, or going to be unwelcome to somebody, however, is not a reason for postponement. At the end of the discussion of each agenda item, the chairman should give a brief and clear summary of what has been agreed on.

This can act as the dictation of the actual minutes. It serves not merely to put the item on record, but also to help people realize that something worthwhile has been achieved. There is only one way to ensure that a meeting starts on time, and that is to start it on time.

Latecomers who find that the meeting has begun without them soon learn the lesson. The alternative is that the prompt and punctual members will soon realize that a meeting never starts until ten minutes after the advertised time, and they will also learn the lesson. Punctuality at future meetings can be wonderfully reinforced by the practice of listing late arrivals and early departures in the minutes. Its side effect, however, is to tell everyone on the circulation list that he was late, and people do not want that sort of information about themselves published too frequently.

There is a growing volume of work on the significance of seating positions and their effect on group behavior and relationships. Not all the findings are generally agreed on. What does seem true is that:. In most meetings someone takes a long time to say very little.

As chairman, your sense of urgency should help indicate to him the need for brevity. You can also suggest that if he is going to take a long time it might be better for him to write a paper. George, do you agree that the decline is inevitable? In any properly run meeting, as simple arithmetic will show, most of the people will be silent most of the time. Silence can indicate general agreement, or no important contribution to make, or the need to wait and hear more before saying anything or too good a lunch, and none of these need worry you.

But there are two kinds of silence you must break:. The silence of diffidence. Someone may have a valuable contribution to make but be sufficiently nervous about its possible reception to keep it to himself. It is important that when you draw out such a contribution, you should express interest and pleasure though not necessarily agreement to encourage further contributions of that sort.

The silence of hostility. This is not hostility to ideas, but to you as the chairman, to the meeting, and to the process by which decisions are being reached.

This sort of total detachment from the whole proceedings is usually the symptom of some feeling of affront. If you probe it, you will usually find that there is something bursting to come out, and that it is better out than in. Junior members of the meeting may provoke the disagreement of their seniors, which is perfectly reasonable. But if the disagreement escalates to the point of suggesting that they have no right to contribute, the meeting is weakened.

So you may have to take pains to commend their contribution for its usefulness, as a pre-emptive measure. You can reinforce this action by taking a written note of a point they make always a plus for a member of a meeting and by referring to it again later in the discussion a double-plus. But, at the same time, discourage the clash of personalities. A good meeting is not a series of dialogues between individual members and the chairman. Instead, it is a crossflow of discussion and debate, with the chairman occasionally guiding, meditating, probing, stimulating, and summarizing, but mostly letting the others thrash ideas out.

However, the meeting must be a contention of ideas, not people. If two people are starting to get heated, widen the discussion by asking a question of a neutral member of the meeting, preferably a question that requires a purely factual answer.