Visuals

One of my sons seems to do a little better when we provide him with a visual cue, rather than just barking commands at him. After this revelation, I learned from my sister, an early childhood professional, that it's understood that all kids do better when they have both visual and oral directions, schedules, etc. So why don't we do this for adults, too? I started thinking of some ways to better manage a meeting with visuals. Have a timer on the table that can help move the agenda along when the meeting has a certain amount of time alloted to each agenda item. Consider adding photos or pictures or some other visual appeal to a meeting agenda or materials. Give people a smiley face to hold up when they agree with what another meeting attendee is saying. The ideas are endless for visual cues.

Rosters and meeting minutes and more

I had lunch with a good friend and colleague today. We discussed the need, or perhaps lack thereof, for so much formality associated with meetings. We were primarily discussing formality as in forms, documents, rosters, meeting minutes and more. When do we need a committee roster, typed minutes for the meeting, charters and the like? I'm not sure, but I err on the side of formality for groups such as nonprofit boards, government entities, planning bodies, etc. This kind of formality seems appropriate when the result of the meeting has accountability back to a funder or policymaker. I'm not so keen on all of the formality when it comes to committees or work groups that just need to get the work done and not be bogged down with paperwork and detailed word-for-word rehashing of conversations being translated into "minutes". And if you're going to require all of this document formality, you need to have someone to do that work.

Gripe of the Day

A past colleague of mine had the brilliant idea to begin each meeting with a Gripe of the Day. It replaced the cheery icebreaker, but in a productive way. Each person at the meeting had to state their gripe of the day, and once that was completed the group had a sense of moving on. So once you got your chosen gripe out of the way, you were more likely to get down to business and leave your other gripes behind for the duration of the meeting.

Start on time, please.

Please start your meeting on time. I went to a meeting this morning. It was my first time with this group. I thought I had arrived at the wrong time, because there wasn't hardly anyone there yet. The room wasn't yet set up for the meeting either. But I was there on time, and nearly no one else was. I found out from my neighbor at the meeting that the meetings never start on time, and everybody knows that, so no one arrives on time. So much about meetings are about respect. And I think it shows respect to start your meeting on time.

Mute the conference call

Most of the posts thus far have dealt with in-person meetings. But we all often do meet by conference call these days. And a meeting by phone appears to bring a whole new set of challenges to the art of meeting. First and foremost, I think a conference call that has any kind of presentation element, followed by a question and answer period, has to be automatically muted. I know this must be expensive, but cost must be weighed against the waste of resources associated with a call that is disrupted by background noise, or better yet, the clueless, annoying person who thinks they are muted when they are not (imagine dog barking, intra-office gossip, keyboard clacking, etc.).

Meeting Ticker

A friend and colleague, Stacey, suggested I check out this Meeting Ticker website. In her words it is an awareness tool, perhaps designed to scare (or shame) us into running effective meetings.
Being in the sexual health field, I don't know that I believe in the scare tactics or shame and blame game, but I really like the idea of this website forcing us to think about how we are spending our staff time in meetings. For example, sitting around talking about your organization's money troubles without dedicated focus to addressing those challenges is wasteful.

http://tobytripp.github.com/meeting-ticker/

Meeting juju

I think I've referred to "juju" in some of my previous posts. I was having coffee with a friend and colleague yesterday and we were discussing the need to work through some of what I call bad juju in meetings. She thought it best when people can just lay it all on the table, and work through whatever interpersonal challenges or power struggles might be causing the meeting struggles. I contend that a Lay It All on the Table strategy requires a fair amount of self awareness from the meeting participants. And if that self awareness doesn't exist, you can't work through the juju.