subject: Effective Meetings - 2 Indispensable Steps To Achieving Your Goal [print this page] Overview: Overview:
A lot of people dislike meetings. They will either keep away from them or continuously materialise behind time. Here we turn to these 2 items.
Escaping meetings:
Let us examine meetings awhile from the point of view of the individual taking part. If I hear the expression 'avoid' I can't help thinking about tax. It is completely OK to avoid it but against the law to evade paying it. It's the same thing for meetings. Naturally, you ought to be getting yourself organised in a time efficient fashion and we know that meetings impinge on this useful resource. Nevertheless, if you are supposed to turn up at a meeting, attempting to get out of it is not so great. This would be less of a concern for meetings of the Board but has a great potential for misuse in regular business meetings.
There are a few methods that might lessen your input and keep all the people happy.
Speak with the chairperson to check if you can withdraw once your role has been performed. Bear in mind that plenty of meetings are 'team' based and it is bad form to just keep going in for your segment and then withdrawing-- unless you can provide a good justification.
It might be possible to contact the chairperson, or a different principal member, outside of the meeting, regarding your actions to arrive at appropriate decisions. This is probably more suitable for a relatively small meeting which might then be escaped.
Under the appropriate situation, perhaps, a representative could attend primed with the correct information or a statement to present at the meeting.
In all of the above situations it could be beneficial to secure a little support for your nonattendance from your manager.
Repeated culprits:
Many people appear to hate meetings, so much, that they continuously either don't turn up or are regularly late. It doesn't seem to matter to them if they happen to be effective meetings or not. This is not an easy situation to stop or correct. You could persuade the culprit to show up by providing an incentive. You could hold on to some item of information that you will hand over at the meeting or tell them that you will try to approach them concerning a certain topic at some time in the meeting. This tactic may work, however, only as a one-off solution.
If a meeting has been controlled by a Project Manager, or a separate chairperson, regularly poorly, individuals are more unwilling to showing up. This is when lucid objectives and policies from the beginning can create dividends.
Speaking to them confidentially might be the manner in which to go. If this is unsuccessful, a talk to their manager might prove beneficial. Remember, that if you set up meetings you should make it clear, as part of your meeting policy, that lateness and non participation affects the whole team. It's possible that such individuals may want better time management training for effective meetings.
